This week I attended the Animal Health and Nutrition Innovation conference in Boston. This was my second trip to Kisaco’s animal health event here in the US and I thought I would highlight one of the panel discussions that I felt most of us haven’t thought through the consequences of its adoption.
The title of the panel discussion was “AI in Veterinary Practices – Impact on Productivity, Client Engagement, Quality of Care (Clinical Decision Making) and Revenue. That’s a lot to cover in 30 minutes. One of the panelists, Adam Little, President, Exponential Animal Health, Inc., said something that really caught my attention, “…soon, the veterinary clinic that doesn’t use AI will provide substandard care.” He went on to say that AI will allow veterinarians to do things they would rather do and reiterated how fast AI will change the quality of care.
What’s happening in human medicine is coming over to veterinary medicine. AI will improve medical diagnoses by enhancing imaging, predicting risks, analyzing pathology and processing clinical data. It will be integrated into how veterinarians provide care to pets and more likely will be a “second opinion” for veterinarians. The large language models used, like those from Open ai and Xai, will continue to improve performance and accuracy as they are better and better trained. We might be experiencing AI fatigue about now, but we need to keep thinking about how our industry is about to change.
Bob Jones