SUBMITTED BY MARIAH MUHAMMAD
Becker’s Hospital Review asked C-suite executives from hospitals and health systems, along with academic medical centers and universities across the U.S. to share how AI will reshape their workforce within the next 2 years. The 50 executives featured in this article are all speaking at the Becker’s Healthcare 14th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, from November 2-5, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
Question: How will AI reshape your workforce within the next 2 years?
Wyatt Brieser. CEO of Hammond-Henry Hospital (Geneseo, Ill.): At Hammond-Henry, our vision for AI is multifold and rooted in supporting our people. Our employees are our most valuable investment, and we see AI as a tool to reduce pain points by improving efficiency and enabling staff to work at the top of their licensed capacity — removing non-value-added tasks and allowing greater focus on patient care. We also believe AI has the potential to make healthcare careers more sustainable and attractive, which could strengthen our ability to recruit and retain high-quality professionals.
Beyond workforce impact, we are hopeful AI will enhance clinical and operational performance while maintaining the human connection that defines care in rural communities. Financially, we anticipate opportunities to reduce overhead, limit reliance on costly contract labor and third-party services, and improve overall sustainability.
Ultimately, our goal is to leverage AI in a thoughtful, responsible way that supports our teams, strengthens patient care, and helps ensure long-term viability for community-based healthcare organizations.
Jonathan Ma. Executive Vice President, CFO and Treasurer at Sutter Health (Sacramento, Calif.): For us, the question isn’t how AI changes our workforce, but how we use it to better support and sustain the people who deliver care every day. Our continuing focus is on reducing administrative burden, accelerating clinical decision-making and improving access for patients. We’re intentionally deploying AI in ways that give time back to clinicians and staff — whether through decision support, virtual care tools or workflow automation — so they can focus on the human aspects of care that matter most. At the same time, we’re investing in training and upskilling to help our teams feel confident working alongside these technologies and can help shape how they’re used. Ultimately, we see AI as a tool to strengthen our workforce — enhancing capacity, reducing friction and reinforcing our commitment to a more human-centered, sustainable model of care.
Maneesh Goyal. COO of Mayo Clinic Platform (Rochester, Minn.): Artificial intelligence is already transforming healthcare. Healthcare teams across Mayo Clinic are developing and using AI-driven tools that accelerate new knowledge, solutions and technologies. We are seeing this in areas like patient care, early disease detection and AI-enabled research:
- Mayo Clinic’s department of radiation oncology developed the PSA Control Tower, a monitoring tool designed to support clinicians in keeping a close watch over patients after prostate cancer treatment.
- A Mayo Clinic-developed AI model can help specialists detect pancreatic cancer on routine abdominal CT scans up to three years before clinical diagnosis.
- Mayo Clinic Platform is enabling AI-driven clinical research through its infrastructure and real-world clinical data capabilities.
Over the next two years, we will likely see AI increasingly used to support healthcare professionals with clinical and operational workflows. AI is not replacing healthcare professionals; it augments their capabilities. When implemented responsibly and thoughtfully, AI supports the workforce, enhances patient care, and accelerates research—allowing us to deliver better outcomes at greater scale.
Digital solutions and AI have enormous potential to transform healthcare, but there are barriers to widespread adoption. To help address this, Mayo Clinic launched Mayo Clinic Platform Insights, a program designed to help healthcare organizations navigate the rapidly evolving world of digital health and AI.
The successful integration of AI into healthcare requires ongoing collaboration between key stakeholders. That’s why Mayo Clinic Platform partners with providers, biopharma companies, medical device companies, and health tech startups to drive innovation around diagnosis, treatment, and operational improvement.
Steven N. Kalkanis, MD. CEO of Henry Ford Medical Group; CEO of Henry Ford Hospital; Executive Vice President of Henry Ford Health (Detroit): Over the next two years, artificial intelligence will redefine and optimize the capabilities of our workforce, allowing each team member to work at the level of their highest potential. At Henry Ford Health, dozens of coordinated AI initiatives are already embedded across clinical and operational workflows, including ambient listening documentation and Epic-integrated decision support, which are effectively returning time to clinicians. Radiology AI is shortening time to diagnosis on critical findings, and AI-enabled revenue cycle work is measurably reducing administrative burden.
Our next phase of AI integration moves us from retrospective review to real-time intervention — intraoperative decision support, even more predictive models in clinical and operational spaces, and AI-enabled precision medicine that shifts care upstream. The philosophy is that we aren’t just using another set of supportive tools, we are using technology to make technology more invisible. We focus on patients, not data entry; we focus on insights, not queries; we focus on the actual communication, not the vehicle.
The most challenging question for our physicians and clinical care teams centers on the most effective way to engage with patients who have consulted an AI engine for a diagnosis and treatment protocol prior to their appointment. That asymmetry is widening, not narrowing, and the institutions that thrive will be the ones that build around the AI-empowered patient rather than against them. This reframes the workforce question entirely, placing the focus back on patient care and outcomes. Ultimately, we believe AI’s biggest impact may be how many patients continue to seek the human-based specialty care we provide and what they expect in these encounters after “educating” themselves beforehand.
Our answer to that question is grounded in where we presently and purposefully sit. Henry Ford has created a structure few academic systems can replicate: reaching the unreachable patient. Daily, we deliver care to a population that destination medicine has historically underserved. AI is the first technology in a generation with the potential to close that gap rather than widen it. Our measure of success will be influenced heavily on whether AI lets us detect disease earlier, deliver specialty-grade care across the communities we serve and continue to be a world center for distant, complex referrals so all can benefit from improved outcomes that would not have existed in a pre-AI health system. We are already doing this and momentum is building.
We consider this a standard worth setting and the one we intend to continue.
Luis E. Taveras, PhD. Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer of Jefferson Health (Philadelphia): Over the next two years, AI will reshape Jefferson’s workforce by augmenting how our colleagues work, not by replacing them. Jefferson’s AI strategy is intentionally focused on improving clinical and operational efficiency so our teams can spend more time on high?value, human?centered work — such as patient care, decision?making, and innovation.
At Jefferson, we view AI as Augmented Intelligence. AI solutions are being designed to work alongside our workforce, serving as digital collaborators that handle routine, repetitive, or time?consuming tasks. This allows our clinicians, staff, and leaders to focus on activities that require judgment, empathy, expertise, and personal connection.
As part of this approach, AI agents will be deployed as digital support tools, enhancing workflows, consistency, and operational efficiency, while remaining governed responsibly and transparently. These AI agents will support teams by enhancing productivity, improving turnaround times, reducing administrative burden, and increasing consistency and quality across operations — all while being governed responsibly and transparently.
Angelo Milazzo, MD. Chief Medical Officer of Duke Health Integrated Practice (Durham, N.C.): While there will no doubt be significant task automation across healthcare teams, we’re beginning to see the opportunities for task augmentation and support. That may be where the greatest opportunity lies if one aim is to improve the satisfaction of clinicians and other individuals delivering care services (and the outcomes and experiences of care enjoyed by our patients) by strengthening and supporting clinical decision making. For example, while we’ve used ambient listening technology to build clinical documentation, a more intriguing functionality is the use of this technology to connect the transcribed material to insights related to diagnosis and treatment. By surfacing clinically useful information from the large amount of data collected in a typical patient encounter, while simultaneously streamlining the almost purely administrative work of documentation, we can refocus the work of our clinical practice experts.
Stephanie Prechowski, MSN, RN. Associate COO of Emergency, Psychiatry, and Surgical Services at Michigan Medicine (Ann Arbor): Over the next two years, AI won’t replace our workforce, but it will reshape how it shows up by taking on cognitive and administrative work, like scheduling, throughput, and discharge planning. The shift is less about headcount and more about capability, which means leaders and frontline teams will need to make sense of the insights, move faster, and build real trust in the data. As more becomes automated, the human elements, including judgment, empathy, communication, and what I think of as felt trust, will matter most. AI will create an opportunity to make the day-to-day work feel more manageable and predictable, and we should see a decrease in burnout and an increase in team engagement, as a result. Organizations that get this right won’t just implement AI; they will redefine how work happens by keeping people at the center and removing what gets in their way.
Brad Bivens. CFO of Parkside Psychiatric Hospital & Clinic (Tulsa, Okla.): We’re being intentional about how we bring AI into the workforce. Instead of hiring into every vacancy, we’ve started evaluating roles as they open up to see if the work can be automated or streamlined with AI first. In areas like revenue cycle follow up, denials, and portions of coding, we’re seeing real opportunities to replace a large portion of manual work with lower cost AI tools.
That doesn’t mean eliminating people, it means being smarter about where we truly need them. The goal is to let AI handle the repetitive, high volume tasks while our team focuses on work that requires judgment, problem solving, and interaction with patients and payers.
Over the next couple of years, I expect fewer task based roles and more positions centered around managing workflows, interpreting data, and making decisions. It also forces us to clean up our processes because AI will not fix a broken workflow.
If done right, this approach helps us control cost, reduce turnover pressure, and build a more stable and capable workforce without just adding more headcount.
Peter D. Banko. President and CEO of Baystate Health (Springfield, Mass.): Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as the first capital substitute for labor in our industry’s history. Over the next 24 months, Baystate is heavily investing in AI-driven financial, operational and clinical tools. We see it reshaping the workforce in health plan member- and patient-driven interactions, access scheduling, capacity management, staffing, coding, revenue cycle, data and analytics and IT. We are viewing AI as one solution for overcoming workforce shortages and increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our current team members (rather than replacing specific jobs and roles).
Arthur Gianelli. President and Chief Transformation Officer of One Brooklyn Health (N.Y.): If we are not careful, the next two years will bring an AI productivity divide, and safety-net health systems can’t afford to land on the wrong side of it. Staff augmentation – not replacement – will dominate for now, with the biggest changes being seen in clinical documentation, revenue cycle, and care coordination. For example, One Brooklyn Health has invested in ambient clinical scribing, though we are experiencing challenges in nudging our physicians to integrate this technology into their workflows. OBH has engaged a third-party vendor partner to manage much of its revenue cycle, precisely because it is critical for our system to be able to access the latest AI tools to address prior authorizations, coding improvements, and denial management. OBH will soon select a partner to develop its access center, leveraging AI to answer preliminary patient questions and schedule appointments for patients in our EMR.
This all being said, I truly believe that nursing may see the greatest structural change due to the introduction of AI: OBH has partnered with a vendor to adopt a virtual nursing platform, with AI monitoring patients for fall and pressure injury risk. The platform will eventually permit virtual nurse rounding, remote admission and discharge processing, and patient education about their conditions and their medications. Roles will reshape more than disappear, and new functions will surface. So the real risk in the near term isn’t job loss — it’s a widening two-tier system where well-resourced organizations compound gains while safety-net providers fall behind, which is why OBH has incorporated the use of AI in its strategic plan. The mandate for transformation leaders is clear: treat AI as a transformation initiative, not a technology purchase, and boldly and creatively deploy AI to improve patient care and make operations considerably more efficient.
Mark Sevco. President of Allegheny Health Network (Pittsburgh): Artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally transform how we deliver care — not by replacing the human connection at the heart of medicine, but by empowering our clinicians with smarter tools, faster insights, and more time for patients. At Allegheny Health Network, we see AI as a force multiplier for our Living Health Model accelerating precision diagnostics, enabling earlier detection of disease and more personalized treatment pathways that improve outcomes across our communities. At Highmark and AHN we are making significant investments in ambient audio (Abridge) and ambient video (CareAi) backed by the power and analytics to customize care paths within Epic. The future of AI in healthcare will be defined not just by what the technology can do, but by the trust we build with patients and how we customize care and measure our success one patient at a time.
Rod Neill. COO of Bon Secours Mercy Health Medical Group (Cincinnati): AI will continue to allow us to automate routine administrative tasks. This will free up time to spend on more valuable work, like direct patient care. AI use cases can take the form of ambient documentation that reconnects the clinician and patient in the exam room and builds trust and relationship. It can take the form of coding and assigning the right code to ensure proper and compliant billing and confirm appropriate reimbursement. AI can be used in schedule and template design to allow patients and consumers ease in navigation of our complex systems and improve and make it simpler for them to access appropriate care. AI may reduce or eliminate some jobs but allows an opportunity to upskill individuals to take on roles that provide greater value and allow them to flourish and feel valued.
Roberta Tinch. President of Inova Mount Vernon Hospital (Va.): AI has become an invaluable tool and source of support for our workforce. The tools and capabilities offered by key vendors in the healthcare space can be leveraged across multiple areas, including supply chain, billing, bedside caregiver support, and the overall team member experience. Specifically, AI enables smarter use of data to optimize how we deploy resources and provides greater visibility for decision-makers into supply utilization. Our clinical EMR provider continues to innovate in documentation tools and is creating meaningful connections across clinical areas.
Of particular excitement is the internal innovation focused on making data easier for team members to find and use. We will be able to quickly search policies, procedures, care pathways, and other critical data, significantly improving access to information.
Faster access to clinical protocols supports effective knowledge transfer and rapid dissemination of best practices, ultimately benefiting our patients. As with many innovations and technologies we use in our personal lives, once team members become accustomed to these tools, they will recognize how seamless work can be. This efficiency allows time and focus to be redirected toward the activities that matter most — delivering high-quality, compassionate patient care.
Timothy Layman, DNP, RN. President and Chief Administrative Officer of St. Mary’s Hospital, Hospital Sisters Health System (Decatur, Ill.): AI will play a central role in advancing HSHS St. Mary’s Hospital’s vision of becoming both a surgical destination facility and a smart hospital by automating routine tasks and elevating the work of our clinical teams. Physicians and nurses will be augmented by AI tools that reduce documentation burden, streamline perioperative workflows, and enhance clinical decision-making, allowing more time for direct patient care and surgical excellence. This will enable St. Mary’s to increase surgical throughput, improve operating room efficiency, and manage growing volumes without needing to scale staffing at the same rate. At the same time, we should anticipate the greatest disruption in administrative and transactional areas — such as scheduling, coding, and prior authorizations — where roles will evolve toward oversight, exception management, and patient navigation.
To support this transformation, we will need to invest in new capabilities, including clinical informatics, AI governance, and workflow optimization, aligning with a broader shift toward a digitally enabled care model. Workforce structures will become more flexible, with smarter staffing models and data-driven deployment of resources across surgical services and inpatient care. Importantly, this evolution supports — not replaces — our workforce, positioning staff to operate at the top of their license while improving both patient outcomes and experience. As demand for care continues to rise, St. Mary’s can leverage AI to redefine roles, enhance efficiency and solidify its position as a high-performing, technology-forward surgical hospital.
John M. Fogarty. President of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital–Needham (Mass.): The advent of AI will shape our workforce in a variety of ways over the next two years. Perhaps the nearest term of these impacts is in the area of clinician engagement and hopefully a reduction in provider burnout. Use of AI tools in generating notes and more sophisticated access to data are hoped to substantially reduce the excessive burdens that clinicians face today with excessive documentation. In hospital operating departments, predictive AI tools that can assist in identifying potential staffing needs weeks in advance are already in use at some US health systems and can pre-empt gaps in staffing and offer improvements in workflow for both patients and staff. These tools hold significant promise. Lastly, the use of AI tools in creating a more focused and timely approach to talent acquisition has great potential to stabilize the disruption many healthcare providers have faced in the wake of the pandemic through better identification of the best and most appropriate talent for our hospitals and healthcare organizations.
Daniel T. Pickett III. President and CEO of Albany Med Health System (Albany, N.Y.): AI will reshape our workforce, but I do not see it replacing the people who make healthcare work. At Albany Med Health System, our 16,000 colleagues live and work in the communities we serve, and they are the heart of our mission. The opportunity with AI is to give them time back by easing administrative burden, moving information more cleanly across our system, helping patients reach the right care faster, and supporting better decisions at the bedside and in our operations. We serve urban and rural communities across northeastern New York and western New England, so access matters, and AI can be a real workforce tool when it removes delays and closes gaps.
Some roles will evolve as our clinicians, researchers, and educators work alongside AI, and as an academic medical center, we have a responsibility to prepare the next generation and build the governance and safety expertise that responsible use requires. But we have to be disciplined, because healthcare is built on trust, and AI has to strengthen that trust, not get ahead of it. The productivity AI creates is a choice, not an outcome, and we intend to invest it in our people, our patients, and our communities. Our goal is not to chase technology for its own sake, but to use it in ways that support our colleagues, improve the patient experience, and help Albany Med Health System become the first choice for care, careers, and partnership across the region.
Perry Sham. CFO of Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center (N.Y.): Hospitals across the nation are trying to understand how AI innovations can help reduce costs or improve quality. Currently, we’ve found that AI can help automate clerical and reporting tasks, but that only skims the surface of its overall potential. Ideally, I’d like to see AI automate many of the reporting requirements needed by regulatory authorities, payers, grant managers, and the like.
As we further integrate AI into our organization, I believe it can begin to not only identify opportunities for cost reduction or quality improvement, but help drive it as well. From a workforce standpoint, I don’t think this is necessarily a tool that would replace staff, but rather support them and enhance their current functions.
Sanjay Singh, MD. Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Executive of Allina Health (Minneapolis): We are in an extremely exciting time where medicine is being transformed at a historic pace — driven by breakthroughs in AI, genetics, and new medical technologies.
At Allina Health, we believe AI is a transformational technology, but it must be clinically led. In every specialty where we deploy AI, our clinicians remain at the helm — guiding, overseeing, and validating every application. We see AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a powerful tool to support our care teams who deliver care.
That’s why our care team members work closely with our AI teams to adopt and even help develop algorithms that improve care and the care giving experience while enhancing productivity and reducing administrative tasks. Throughout this work, we design care models and workflows with the patient at the center, always prioritizing what is in the best interest of patient care.
Roger Mitty, MD. President of Care New England Medical Group (Providence, R.I.): In the very near-term time horizon of two years, I believe that AI will enable our workforce to follow the adage “work smarter, not harder.” An example of this is our decision at Care New England to invest in an AI powered ambient listening dictation solution for our entire clinical workforce, including learners and nurses. Our focus with this investment is not so much on revenue enhancement (although that always helps) but more on improving clinician satisfaction and reducing burnout. The next AI enabled technologies that we will adopt will include support for our administrative staff around tasks such as obtaining prior authorizations, scheduling appointments, answering phones and doing targeted clinical outreach. Outside of the two year time horizon, we will start to see a repurposing and redesign of our workforce as AI enabled functions around tasks such as patient triage, decision support and medication renewals become widely available.
Andrea Turner, PhD, JD. CEO of Harbor UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles County Health Services: AI has already shaped our workforce in many ways and has inspired us to work more efficiently in other areas. AI has helped us to capture in real time patients who are at risk for cardiac infarction which led to preventative intervention. Additionally, AI has helped us to decrease our patient falls substantially. In the next two years we will have responsibly reduced our workforce with the use of AI in areas such as sitters, patient access, and security. As technology improves and health care adjusts to how it can be deployed to effectuate timely and effective care, hospitals will become more efficient with better outcomes.
Arsenial Runion. CEO of East Liberty Health Care Center (Pittsburgh): Over the next two years, As CEO of East Liberty Family Healthcare Center. I believe AI will significantly reshape the workforce within Federally Qualified Health Centers by improving efficiency, reducing administrative burden, and allowing staff to focus more on direct patient care. At East Liberty Family Healthcare Center, I see AI helping providers complete documentation faster through ambient charting and clinical support tools, which will improve productivity and reduce burnout. I also believe AI will improve patient access by assisting with appointment scheduling, reminders, outreach, and multilingual communication. For organizations like East Liberty Family Healthcare Center, AI will be less about replacing people and more about helping us sustain our mission, improve operations, and serve more patients effectively. We are excited about the future of AI!
Marie Langley. CEO of Desert Valley Medical Group (Victorville, Calif.): In the outpatient setting, I expect AI to start reshaping the healthcare workforce over the next couple of years in a few practical ways:
- Streamlining call centers and front-end operations. AI can take on a large portion of patient access work, which, candidly, isn’t always consistent today. These tools can triage questions, route patients appropriately, and handle common requests in real time. I’ve seen demos where AI can confirm, cancel and reschedule appointments, verify eligibility, and even support authorization workflows. This has the potential to reduce administrative burden in physician offices while giving patients quicker, more direct access to what they need.
- More effective patient portals and better access to care. Most organizations have patient portals, but many are still clunky and underutilized. AI can make them more proactive; monitoring lab results, flagging issues, and reminding patients about preventive care like mammograms and colonoscopies. Done well, this could help close care gaps and make it easier for patients to stay on top of their health.
These are just a couple of examples, but they highlight where things are heading which includes less friction on the administrative side and more timely, accessible care for patients.
Gregory R. Johnson, MD. System Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of UnityPoint Health (West Des Moines, Iowa): At UnityPoint Health, artificial intelligence is becoming a key tool to support our teams and address physician shortages across our largely rural health system. Over the next two years, I believe AI will automate routine tasks and streamline workflows, not replace jobs. Most importantly, this will free up clinicians’ time to focus on work that needs human connection. This shift will help us recruit and retain talent where interpersonal skills matter most, strengthening both our workforce and the care we deliver.
Craig Cheifetz, MD. President of Primary Care Service Line at Inova (Fairfax, Va.): Over the next two years, AI will and already has begun to fundamentally reshape our primary care workforce — not by replacing people, but by enabling our teams to practice at the top of their license. At Inova, tools like ambient documentation through Abridge are already reducing documentation burden and giving clinicians more time back with patients, which is where their greatest value lies. This shift allows physicians, APPs, nurses, and care teams to focus less on administrative work and more on clinical decision-making, relationship-building, and patient engagement. AI will also bring real-time, evidence-based insights directly into the visit, supporting better decisions in the moment without disrupting workflow. As these tools mature, we’ll see new roles emerge around care coordination, data interpretation, and digital patient engagement, making care more proactive and personalized. Just as importantly, those who embrace these capabilities will be able to deliver higher quality care more efficiently and with greater professional satisfaction. Ultimately, AI will help us extend the reach of our workforce—allowing us to care for more patients, more effectively, while preserving the human connection at the core of primary care.
Deborah Visconi. President and CEO of Bergen New Bridge Medical Center (Paramus, N.J.): Over the next two years, I believe AI will help relieve some of the pressure our healthcare workforce has been carrying for years. In hospitals, too much time is spent on documentation, administrative tasks, scheduling challenges, and navigating systems that pull people away from patient care. If implemented thoughtfully, AI can help simplify many of those burdens and allow our teams to spend more meaningful time with patients and with each other.
At Bergen New Bridge Medical Center, we do not view AI as a replacement for people, especially in healthcare, where compassion, judgment, and human connection matter so deeply. I see it as a tool that can support our workforce, improve efficiency, and help us make better-informed decisions. But technology alone is never the answer. As leaders, we have a responsibility to introduce these tools carefully, train our teams well, and make sure innovation never comes at the expense of humanity.
Shadi Jarjous, MD. Chief of Hospital Medicine Division and Vice Chair, Operations, Emergency and Hospital Medicine Department at Lehigh Valley Health Network, Jefferson Health (Philadelphia): Our priority over the next couple of years is to equip our team with both current and emerging AI tools that enhance their work and serve as a true force multiplier, improving safety, quality, efficiency, and organizational performance while reducing administrative burden. We have already adopted several AI-enabled solutions to streamline documentation, chart review, and care coordination. Our immediate goal is to give our clinicians meaningful time back with patients and ease the administrative load that derails efficiency and fuels burnout.
Looking ahead, we envision AI serving as a second set of eyes for early deterioration detection, diagnostic support, and utilization stewardship, strengthening reliability and safety without increasing workload. At the same time, AI will bolster operational and financial performance through more accurate documentation, optimized throughput, and smarter staffing, enabling stronger ROI.
By helping clinicians practice at the top of their license and restoring time for human connection, we hope AI augmentation will serve as a thoughtful support, strengthening workforce sustainability, improving satisfaction, and elevating the care we deliver.
Amit Rastogi, MD. President and CEO of Jupiter (Fla.) Medical Center: When applied thoughtfully and responsibly, artificial intelligence has the potential to have a transformative impact on how healthcare teams deliver care. In the near term, AI offers opportunities to support physicians with faster, more informed clinical decisionmaking while simultaneously reducing administrative burden and helping ease burnout across care teams. Just as importantly, AI can streamline communication and patient education, making it easier for patients and families to understand care plans and navigate complex areas like billing and test results. Together, these efficiencies can create more space for human judgment and relationships that are central to providing the highest quality, safety, and patient experience.
Vicente Resto, MD, PhD.COO of Faculty Group Practice and Senior Vice President of Health System Ambulatory Operations and Surgical Services at University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston, Texas): At UTMB we are deploying AI powered solutions broadly across the enterprise. Applications range from clinical solutions that help us better screen for pathology such as undertreated cardiovascular disease or undetected lung nodules to tools that help support our work force’s efficiency and wellbeing. Examples of the latter include AI powered ambient dictation tools, clinical decision-making tools, tools supporting administrative work such as data management and development of presentations, as well as tools that help our staff manage patient interactions with our enterprise. These deployments have successfully aided performance. To date, they have not impacted the size or scope of our labor force. Over the next two years we expect further penetration of these assistive technologies as we continue the process of educating our workforce on how to best incorporate them into our everyday work.
Shannon Cermak. COO of Medical Group at Loyola Medicine (Maywood, Ill.): In the coming years, Loyola Medicine is committed to safely incorporating artificial intelligence across the organization to help providers spend more time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. For instance, AI-powered ambient listening tools enable us to securely capture patient encounters in real-time to help clinicians focus on patient care, rather than typing. We are also taking advantage of EMR AI functionality to streamline documentation and improve the patient experience. These tools include AI?assisted text editing, dashboard summaries, inpatient and outpatient insights that summarize patient information, and draft responses for patient messages, all designed to reduce administrative burdens while keeping clinicians in full control of decision making. These tools help providers work more efficiently, avoid burnout and focus on what they value most — delivering high?quality, compassionate patient care.
Marc Augsburger, BSN. President and CEO of Edgerton Hospital and Health Services (Wis.): I believe that as AI takes shape in healthcare, there will be numerous new opportunities for us to use this technology to our advantage. I see AI making large strides with the method in which our insurance claims are put together, checked for accuracy and then submitted to the payor. This should decrease the time needed for payor review and subsequently lead to quicker pay time turn around.
There will be significant and continued advances in AI assisted diagnosing of medical conditions, especially those that are less common and much harder to diagnose. This will lead to more accurate testing, most likely driving quantity and time for testing down, ending with a decrease in overall healthcare cost.
In addition, AI will play a significant role in market share analysis. This will lead to getting the right information in front of our customers at the right time. We will have a tighter handle on what’s going well, what needs improvement and what we might want to consider no longer doing. We want to capitalize on the wins and minimize our losses.
Eric D. Fish, MD. President and CEO of Schneck Medical Center (Seymour, Ind.): Over the next two years, AI will elevate our workforce in ways that are both meaningful and measurable. At Schneck, we’re already seeing our providers reclaim hours once lost to documentation through ambient AI, and we’re just getting started. But how we adopt AI matters as much as what we adopt. Our guiding principles are clear: patient safety comes first, clinical decisions stay with licensed professionals, and every AI solution we deploy must demonstrate real clinical, operational, or financial value.
Naveen Mehrotra, MD. President of Medical Staff at Saint Peter’s HealthCare System (New Brunswick, N.J.): AI will not replace the healthcare workforce but provide them with skills and tools to enhance the patient experience and improve their care. Healthcare requires a human touch which is a critical part of the healing. AI will provide solutions to reduce the documentation burden and streamline the efficiency in the administrative workflow. It will also allow clinicians to access critical information at the Point of care to improve management of patients.
Chris A. Klay. President and CEO of Southern Illinois Market at Hospital Sisters Health System (Springfield, Ill.): Like most segments of society, healthcare is surely not immune to the impacts of AI in our clinical and non-clinical work. In my opinion, AI is something that we will have to embrace as a profession because this technology is fast becoming a primary economic tool. In our industry, we are rightfully focused on identifying ways to integrate AI technology into our work yet providing the appropriate protections specific to HIPAA, IT security, strategic planning, and financial data. As we continue to navigate identification of risk and implement focused protections, AI is already adding value to our organization. For example, AI enhancements have been added to our MRI machines, allowing us to reduce MRI times by twenty minutes in some situations, creating improved capacity and access for our patients. Additionally, our electronic medical records partner has implemented ambient listening features which allows our physicians to gain patient consent prior and use this technology to accurately capture clinical encounters in the ambulatory space. This tool assists with differential diagnoses, medication use, and specialist referral coordination. Although these two AI features are proving to be a success, we continue to have opportunities for more rapid adoption of these validated tools across our organization. Understanding that requests for and utilization of AI will continue to evolve, we have implemented an AI Governance Committee which is tasked with evaluating requests to implement and use new AI tools within our organization. This approach has created an objective approach in assessing AI opportunities but allows for proper discernment around needed protections. In summary, I am excited to know of our early successes and look forward to being strategic in expanding AI integration into our operational and clinical work.
Megan Remark. Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of HealthPartners Care Group (Bloomington, Minn.): AI is poised to reshape our workforce by improving both capacity and experience, particularly for the clinicians and care teams serving patients every day. At HealthPartners, that impact is significant. We have a team of more than 2,100 physicians and nearly 1,400 advanced practice clinicians that support 1.4 million patients across our system. Our approach is not about replacing people; it’s about reducing administrative burden so our teams can focus more fully on patient care, clinical decision-making and human connection.
On the clinical side, AI is increasingly acting as a companion to care teams, helping summarize charts, support documentation and streamline workflows from pre-visit planning to post-discharge follow-up. We’ve already introduced ambient listening technology to more than 2,500 clinicians, and in a pilot among primary care teams, we saw an 11% improvement in time spent working after hours. One clinician told us, “I haven’t been this excited to come to work in over a decade.” That kind of feedback reinforces the opportunity AI creates not only for efficiency, but for restoring joy and sustainability in the practice of medicine.
Over the next two years, we expect AI capabilities to become even more predictive and proactive, helping forecast workforce demand, identify patient needs earlier and personalize engagement in more meaningful ways.
Importantly, AI will remain a support tool, not a replacement for human expertise. Trust is central to our approach. We are embracing a culture of open dialogue and training teams across our organization to use AI thoughtfully and responsibly to create real value for patients, clinicians and care teams. We’re still just scratching the surface of what artificial intelligence can do in healthcare, but we believe its greatest potential lies in helping people do their work with greater focus, connection and purpose.
Mark Marsh. President and CEO of Owensboro Health (Ky.): AI is rapidly evolving from isolated pilots to embedded, workflow-level capabilities across Owensboro Health, positioning it as a foundational operational asset. In the near term, the impact is expected to center on workforce augmentation and capacity creation rather than large-scale displacement, particularly in administrative functions where automation can reduce manual workload and improve throughput. Clinically, AI will automate and streamline documentation and generate relevant insights, enabling providers and nurses to focus more on patient care, clinical judgment, and communication while maintaining accountability through human oversight. Within the revenue cycle, AI-driven support for coding, prior authorization, and denial management will enhance efficiency, accuracy, and revenue protection, allowing staff to shift toward higher-value oversight and exception management activities. Similarly, in IT and support functions, automation through virtual agents and intelligent summarization will reduce routine workload and enable teams to focus on process optimization, incident response, and continuous improvement. Governance will remain critical, with established structures ensuring rigorous oversight for accuracy, bias, and performance, reinforcing trust in AI-enabled workflows. As adoption scales, AI literacy will become a baseline expectation, requiring staff to understand when and how to effectively use and validate AI outputs. Overall, AI will reshape how work is performed, elevate the role of human expertise, and accelerate Owensboro Health’s progression toward higher digital maturity. The organization is well positioned to leverage AI to improve productivity, enhance workforce experience, and strengthen alignment with its mission to heal the sick and improve the health of the communities it serves.
Christine Alexander-Rager, MD. President and CEO of The MetroHealth System (Cleveland): My hope is that AI continues to reshape our workforce by freeing our workforce. If we continue to embrace AI’s ability to ease administrative burdens, improve staffing/scheduling, and optimize clinical and operational workflows, our caregivers get to go home on time and use their vacation days for true vacations instead of for catching up on work. That means they can return to work refreshed, reenergized and reengaged. During the hours they do work, they get to do more of what they answered the calling of medicine to do: provide direct patient care.
The potential extends far beyond time savings. AI is already transforming diagnostics, clinical decision-making, patient monitoring, supply-chain operations and more. It is uncovering insights that were once buried in data and allowing us to act on them with greater speed and precision.
The potential extends further, beyond our clinical work. In the revenue cycle, AI is reducing claim denials and accelerating reimbursement. In human resources, finance and other administrative functions, it is enabling more efficient, less fragmented operations across the organization.
When you step back and take it all in, it can feel like every corner of healthcare is on the verge of being upended. And perhaps it is.
But I think back about 25 years, when we first began adopting the electronic health record. We heard similar predictions of sweeping transformation. In reality, while EHRs significantly improved how we operate, they became powerful tools – a foundation we could build upon – rather than a cure-all on their own.
AI may follow a similar path: a potent tool and an exciting foundation on which we can build a better healthcare system.
As long as we stay focused on our patients, we’re headed in the right direction.
Jeff Joyner. President of Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center (Woodbridge): Artificial Intelligence technologies are already in place across Sentara, and we’re seeing AI working effectively to improve efficiency, access, quality and safety. For example, one of the early tools that Sentara rolled out in 2024 was designed to address physician burnout by helping our physicians draft their clinical notes. With reduced time spent on paperwork, our professionals have more time to focus on direct patient interactions. Over the next two years, we are looking to adopt additional AI-related technologies across our system that will continue to show the benefits while helping us cut costs in significant ways.
However, it is essential that appropriate safeguards and a strong governance framework be in place to ensure responsible use – and Sentara’s AI Oversight Program is doing just that. By combining innovation with strict governance, Sentara continues to harness AI’s potential while minimizing risks, ensuring that technology serves patients and providers without replacing the human touch.
Ashwani Bhatia, MD. CEO of BayCare Clinic, LLP (Green Bay, Wis.): At BayCare Clinic we see AI affecting our workforce but in a positive way. It has a transformative capability that could reshape both healthcare delivery and the future workforce. As a physician-led organization in Wisconsin, where healthcare talent shortages continue to create significant challenges, AI has the potential to help us bridge workforce gaps while improving access, precision, and quality of care. From revenue cycle management and coding to surgical scheduling, predictive analytics, and patient selection for appropriate procedures, AI is enabling us to move toward more proactive, data-driven, and personalized care pathways.
More than anything, however, I believe the real opportunity lies in re-educating and retraining our workforce to work effectively alongside AI. The future healthcare workforce will need to become increasingly fluent in using intelligent and agentic AI systems as part of everyday clinical and operational workflows. Roles will evolve from repetitive task execution toward higher-value analytical thinking, clinical judgment, patient engagement, and oversight of AI-enabled processes. At BayCare, we believe this transformation is not about replacing people, but about empowering our teams to work at the top of their abilities (we call it working at the top of our licensure in healthcare), reducing unnecessary administrative burden, improving operational efficiency, and ultimately creating a more adaptive and sustainable healthcare system capable of meeting the growing needs of our communities.
Caswell Samms. Executive Vice President and CFO of Nemours Children’s Health (Jacksonville, Fla.): Over the next two years, I believe we’ll see AI significantly enhance proficiency, accuracy, and outcomes, which will help foster a more productive workforce and increase operational efficiency within the industry. Given the human-centered nature of healthcare, I see AI as a powerful tool that will support care teams and staff in making data-driven decisions and serve as a conduit for improving both clinical outcomes and patient experience. While many organizations are actively evaluating their specific use case for AI adoption, its potential to transform the way we work across the industry is undeniable.
Jim Heilsberg. CFO of Quincy Hospital; Major Construction Project Manager of TriState Health (Clarkston, Wash.): I believe that AI will continue to provide new tools that will impact software dependent tasks traditionally done by humans. A new level of staffing will emerge that assists in managing the new AI tools and analysis of results.
In addition, AI will continue to develop and produce tools that will allow all professional staff to work up to their license instead of doing computer entry or documentation of items that are better handled by machines.
Beth Walker. CEO of Ochsner Medical Center (New Orleans): AI will help us strengthen our workforce by expanding our team’s efficiency. Over the next two years, we expect tools to reduce routine tasks, support better decision-making, and give our teams more time to focus on meaningful, hands-on work and the people we serve. AI will help our team members build new skills and create more personal experiences for our patients. Our focus is to use this technology responsibly so we can do our best work and deliver a better patient experience and better outcomes across our organization.
Jeffrey P. Gold, MD. President of University of Nebraska System (Lincoln): In the fall of 2022, the University of Nebraska Medical Center established the GenAI Working Group and, subsequently, a Gen AI Center, to address the opportunities and challenges associated with the rapidly evolving technology as related to interprofessional education, bioscience research and clinical care.
Later, in late 2024, the NU System established an AI Task Force to recommend a comprehensive, forward-looking strategy for integrating AI research, education, innovation and workforce development across the NU System of all campuses, colleges and programs of excellence. The report and recommendations delivered by the task force have led to the development of a new pan-university AI Institute, which aims to prepare Nebraska’s students, faculty and communities to thrive in the AI era. At the same time, it strives to ensure that AI tools developed and deployed across the NU system are done so responsibly and strategically.
The work of the AI Institute, which is co-led by two faculty members from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and includes collaborators from each of our other three campuses, will guide how AI will reshape the workforce, both within our university system and beyond for undergraduate and graduate higher education. The clinical workforce has deeply embraced the use of AI across the diagnostic, interventional and administrative aspects of care with great success and new platforms being added almost weekly.
Susan Ehrlich, MD. CEO of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital: AI is already profoundly changing the way we work generally in healthcare. Ambient scribe, chart summarization, and widespread use of Open Evidence, for example, has already transformed staff experience in many healthcare organizations and for many providers. Over the next two years, we plan to implement ambient scribe and chart summarization. AI also has tremendous potential to accelerate achieving our strategic goals in the areas of equity, safety, quality, staff experience, patient engagement and financial stewardship. All these investments are critically important at a time when state, federal and local funding cuts threaten our financial stability and viability as a vibrant and essential safety-net provider for San Francisco as well as an academic teaching and research hospital. Most exciting – we have already started to augment our Lean process improvement tools with AI, allowing us to better understand and focus on patient flow and safety improvements by leveraging the vast amount of unstructured note data held within our EHR. In a resource-constrained environment, our challenge is that healthcare is replete with all kinds of AI investments, and the key is to identify and implement the tools that provide most value to our patients and staff.
Kristopher Doan. President of Augusta Medical Group at Augusta Health (Fishersville, Va.): We are already starting to see AI make significant impacts in our industry – probably the most mainstream being the use of ambient listening for clinical documentation. That has started to lessen the administrative burden for providers, and nursing is next up. I also see AI making big impacts in the rev cycle with automated coding and charge capture, claims generation (and resubmission), prior auth automation, and denial appeal drafting. In many of these cases, it will not replace people; but rather supplement an already thin workforce that is not likely to return to pre-pandemic levels. We’re also starting to see some early AI interaction directly with patients. I don’t think we’ll see mainstream adoption of patients trusting AI in the next two years, but keep an eye out for AI to make an impact in areas like patient prep for surgery, education, and scheduling. AI governance in a health system is going to be the next big challenge.
Chuck Porth. CEO of Uncompahgre Medical Center (Norwood, Colo.): We have decided to be a late adopter regarding AI. We’ve tested it in several areas and don’t believe its accuracy is where we want it at this time. As such the expectation is AI will have a minor impact on staffing in the immediate future.
Antwan Williams. COO of Lake Mary Hospital, Orlando Health (Fla.): We are working very closely with our organizational and technology experts to answer this very question. The primary problem to solve in my opinion is how we leverage existing technology to further enhance our patients’ experience and the great care our teams provide every day. AI is already being used daily to make life better and easier for both our patients and our team members outside of healthcare. If both groups were polled in two years, I believe patients would say it is easier to connect with their care team and understand their information. I also believe our team members would clearly feel the efficiency gains that allow them to focus more on care and connection. My expectation is that our workforce will be so excited by the progress that they will want more, and they will want it faster.
William Wertheim, MD. Executive Vice President of Health Sciences at Stony Brook (N.Y.) Medicine: Artificial intelligence will significantly reshape the healthcare workforce over the next two years, particularly by improving efficiency, accelerating research, and enhancing clinical decision-making. At Stony Brook Medicine, we are using AI to support earlier detection of diseases such as breast cancer and heart disease, while also advancing vaccine and treatment research through data-driven innovation. At the same time, we have to be realistic about both the opportunities and the limitations of this technology. AI can analyze massive amounts of information faster than any human being, but it cannot replace the judgment, empathy, and trust that physicians, nurses, and caregivers bring to patient care every day. Healthcare is deeply human, especially during moments of fear and difficult decisions, and no algorithm can replicate that connection. I believe the workforce of the future will rely on AI as a powerful tool to reduce administrative burden and improve outcomes, while allowing clinicians to spend more meaningful time with patients. The responsibility of healthcare leaders will be ensuring these technologies are implemented thoughtfully, ethically, and in ways that strengthen – rather than diminish – the human side of medicine.
Dev Sangvai, MD, JD. Secretary of North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (Raleigh): AI has the potential to significantly transform North Carolina’s health workforce by streamlining clinical decision?making, reducing administrative burden, and giving providers more time to focus on direct patient care. These efficiencies can help alleviate workload and cost pressures across the system.
At the same time, the impact of AI will not be uniform across the state. Limited broadband access, gaps in technology infrastructure, and lower awareness in rural and underserved communities could slow technology adoption. Preparing our workforce with strong AI literacy — both in how to use these tools effectively and how to care for patients who arrive having already engaged with AI — is essential.
It’s also important to recognize that not all roles will be equally impacted. While AI could reduce the demand for certain diagnostic roles, many parts of healthcare depend on human connection. For example, high?touch jobs like supporting older adults and people with disabilities rely on dignity, intuition, emotional presence and trusted relationships. These are qualities technology cannot replicate and will remain central to providing care to North Carolinians.
Leong Koh, MD. Executive Medical Director of Northwest Permanente: AI will reshape the workforce by augmenting human capabilities. For example, it will enable physicians to spend more time focused on caring for patients by shifting repetitive work like documentation and email triage, to AI tools that manage those tasks. AI tools can also help diagnose diseases earlier, and predictive tools can help manage clinic capacity and follow-up care more efficiently, empowering clinicians to work at the top of their license. This ensures that physicians and clinicians maintain the essential human connection that AI cannot replace.
Calvin Wheeler, MD, BS Pharm. Pediatric Neurologist of The Permanente Medical Group (Ret) KP Bernard J Tyson School of Medicine (Pasadena, Calif.): AI is moving at a record pace and impacting various industries in major ways. AI is also impacting the healthcare delivery system in ways we could not have imagined just two to three years ago. It is difficult to predict exactly how AI will reshape our workforce in the next two years, however, we are already seeing its impact already in areas of health maintenance, pre-healthcare visit planning, in-visit evaluation and documentation, procedural assistance, and post-visit and post-procedural follow up.
Health systems are looking for ways that AI can enhance, expand and / or leverage access or services. Current AI applications will likely significantly impact staff providing appointment booking, pre-appointment and data documentation, patient intake and ID verification as well as post-discharge instructions. I think some staff providing EHR billing, Insurance clarification, pre-approved answers to specific questions, medication reminders, and symptom monitoring will be at risk. With many of these administrative and monitoring functions being at risk for staff reduction, there is also a significant enhancement by AI on the patients’ diagnostic and evaluation front, such as AI use in GI Genius to assist the doctor in polyp detection during colonoscopy. This kind of AI intervention and support is less likely to cause reduction in staffing, however, should increase efficiency, productivity and quality. AI has been and continues to be incorporated into many devices across the outpatient and inpatient care delivery experience.
At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14-17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health.