By Raga Bjarnadottir, PhD, MPH
As our longtime readers know, the FloGatorAI blog releases two seasonal AI Prompt Cookbooks each year. These are intended to be practical guides to help nurses experiment with generative AI (see definition and background in the December 2024 post).
But as AI becomes deeply embedded in care delivery, our goals must expand beyond clever prompts or productivity hacks. The real opportunity before us is not just using AI more effectively, but to evaluate and shape the technologies entering our practice environments.
If our recent discussions at the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium made one thing clear, it is that the era of abstract AI debates is over. The tools are not abstract; they are here and now. The urgent question now is whether nurses will be passive recipients of these tools or active co-designers and stewards.
This winter edition of the FloGatorAI Prompt Cookbook is designed to help you choose the latter.
Turning insight into inquiry
Over the last few months, we have explored the high stakes of AI integration. We warned against the environmental costs of an “AI everywhere” mindset, the seductive dangers of simulated intimacy and the regulatory shifts demanding greater transparency.
This Cookbook is designed to operationalize those insights. It moves us from discussing the risks to testing for them in real time:
• Operationalizing the “junior teammate” model:
In August, we drew a hard line between treating AI as a supportive tool versus a substitute for human connection. This Cookbook includes prompts to stress-test that boundary, helping you identify when a tool is truly augmenting work and when it may be simulating care in misleading ways.
• Checking the “green” cost:
In September, we argued that indiscriminate AI adoption harms the health of our planet. The new prompts offer a structure to evaluate “utility versus cost,” empowering you to ask whether a generative AI feature is genuinely necessary or simply energy-intensive digital clutter.
• Acting on governance:
Last month, we highlighted the FDA’s new focus on lifecycle accountability. This Cookbook helps you with specific language to use when questioning vendors and pilot teams, ensuring nurses can demand the transparency and safeguards that regulators and our professional ethics now expect.
What’s new in this edition
Generative AI tools (ironically, including the very systems we are critiquing) can help nurses rehearse the skills required for this level of participation. This year’s templates are designed to help you:
• Identify red flags: Spot overpromising or “hallucinated” capabilities in new digital health tools.
• Draft the right questions: Generate precise inquiries for those who build these tools about training data, bias and explainability.
• Anticipate friction: Map potential workflow disruptions and cognitive load risks before a tool goes live.
• Evaluate “augmentation”: Distinguish between tools that automate nursing judgment (dangerous) and those that support it (desirable).
A cookbook for a different kind of competence
Generative AI can absolutely save time and ease documentation burdens. But the highest value AI can bring for nursing today is not in automating documentation or helping write emails; it is in acting as a catalyst for your critical thinking, helping you clarify questions, surface risks and strengthen your judgment.
When nurses move from passive users to active partners, technology becomes safer, more equitable and more aligned with the values of our profession. We are excited to share the newest Winter Prompt Cookbook with you. Use it to ask the hard questions. Because the future of AI in nursing is not built by algorithms alone. It is built on the questions nurses are willing to ask.