By: Ragnhildur (Raga) I. Bjarnadottir
What if the next big leap in nursing practice isn’t about mastering new tech, but about reframing how we relate to it?
Since generative AI like ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots have hit the mainstream, many people have treated them like advanced search engines or task automation tools. You enter a question, receive an answer, and either accept or dismiss it without further exploration. But the real magic of generative AI isn’t in static answers. It’s in the back-and-forth. These tools are at their best not when treated like vending machines, but like junior teammates—eager, fast-thinking, and surprisingly coachable.
Just as when precepting a novice nurse, the more clearly we communicate, guide, and ask for clarification, the better the results. And when we take a moment to refine a prompt or ask, “Why did you say that?” or “What’s the rationale behind that answer?” the response often becomes clearer, more tailored, and more useful. This is a shift in mindset—one that’s especially powerful for nurses, who are already practiced in collaborative, dynamic, context-aware communication.
Critically, just as with any new team member or intern, every AI response deserves careful validation. The nursing skill of critical thinking applies equally here—we must verify information, question recommendations that don’t align with best practices, and request clarification when something doesn’t make sense. And unlike your human colleagues, these AI teammates operate on probability and pattern recognition rather than true understanding. They may occasionally “hallucinate” information, draw from outdated sources, or inadvertently perpetuate biases present in their training data. While they can process and synthesize volumes of information beyond human capacity, they lack what makes your human teammates invaluable: holistic context awareness, the ability to read nonverbal cues, genuine empathy, and the nuanced clinical judgment that comes from lived experience. Your expertise remains essential in evaluating AI suggestions against the complex realities of patient care, ensuring these powerful tools enhance rather than replace the human elements at the heart of nursing practice.
In that spirit, the FloGatorAI team is excited to share Part 2 of our AI Assistant Cookbook for Nursing: Summer Edition, focused on creativity, curiosity, and critical interaction. You’ll find recipes to help you use AI chatbots to generate plain-language patient education materials, design visual aids, and spark ideas for quality improvement projects or paper outlines, sprinkled with a generous dose of evaluation and validation tips. Think of it as sunscreen for your cognitive load, keeping your summer workflow cool, clear, and protected!
But there’s a deeper lesson here too that extends beyond general-purpose chatbots and into the heart of clinical AI implementation. In healthcare, we often speak of learning health systems and personalized/precision care which can lead to the mistaken assumption that AI models deployed at the bedside are learning from each patient encounter in real time In most cases, they’re not. These models are typically “frozen” at the time of deployment, meaning their knowledge and capabilities are fixed at a specific point in time, like the content of a textbook is fixed at its publication date. AI models don’t automatically incorporate new research, evolving best practices, or unique patterns in your specific patient population unless deliberately updated by their developers.
They may appear adaptive, but unless they’re continuously monitored, updated, and re-trained, they won’t evolve with your patient population. That’s why nurses must be involved, not only in using these tools, but in shaping, evaluating, and improving them. If we want AI to reflect the real complexity of patient care, it must include the voices and insights of the people who know that care best. Otherwise, the model will be fundamentally incomplete.
As Dr. Cho stated in an earlier FloGatorAI post, AI will not replace nurses, but nurses who partner with AI will lead the transformation of healthcare. Our insight, presence, and leadership aren’t optional, they’re essential.
Ready to get inspired? Dive into Part 2 of our AI Assistant Cookbook for Nursing: Summer Edition!