The first draft a new hire used to write badly, and learn from, now arrives finished. Healthcare marketing never had a residency. It had the entry-level job, and AI is absorbing that job one task at a time.
Judgment in this field is tacit knowledge. It is knowing when a quote will land wrong with physicians, or when a headline will read as spin. It comes from repetition with feedback, and those repetitions lived inside the lowest-value work: the rewritten press release and the service line page that came back covered in red. That is the work AI now handles first. Stanford’s payroll research suggests the change is arriving quietly, as junior roles that never get posted rather than people shown the door.
The case for AI as a faster apprenticeship is real. A tool can put the patterns of the best people in the building in front of a beginner at the moment of need. The trouble starts when the tool leaves the room. In one field experiment, high school students who practiced math with an unguarded chatbot scored better in practice and worse on the exam than students who never had it. They looked finished before they had learned anything.
Experience is what protects senior people for now, and Chris Boyer and Reed Smith question how long that holds. Workers who trust AI more tend to check its output less. Experienced endoscopists in Poland found fewer precancerous growths on their own after routine AI use, though a three-year Japanese study found no such decline. Most AI-drafted patient messages still pass through a human reviewer. That safeguard works only while the reviewer’s judgment stays sharp.
Rose Glenn and David Jarrard argue that communication education was already teaching theory without application, and that the gap widens once AI takes over the tasks where application used to happen. Their answer runs through internships, relationships with compliance and physician leaders built before a crisis, and a new textbook for students and early-career professionals. David’s sharpest point is that as more skills become AI-integrated, real-world experience becomes worth more.
If no one on your team has written a discharge instruction from scratch this year, who will notice when the AI gets one wrong?
MENTIONS FROM THE SHOW
- Healthcare’s Long Walk Toward the Patient, the free eBook marking 500 episodes: https://www.touchpointpodcastbook.com
- Jarrard Inc: https://jarrardinc.com/
- David Jarrard, executive chairman, Jarrard Inc.: https://jarrardinc.com/team/david-jarrard/
- Rose Glenn, lecturer in the Department of Communication & Media at the University of Michigan: https://prod.lsa.umich.edu/comm/people/regular-faculty/rmglenn.html
- Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26/
- Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, “Generative AI at Work,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics: s: https://nber.org/papers/w31161
- PNAS, 2025: : https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122
- “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking,” CHI 2025: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf
- Budzyń et al., “Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy,” The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 2025l: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
- Okumura et al., “Long-term impact of computer-aided adenoma detection,” Endoscopy, 2025: https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/all/doi/10.1055/a-2661-2624
- Fortune, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke on “slop grenades,”: https://fortune.com/2026/09/17/shopify-tobias-lutke-ai-slop-grenades/
- TP506, “Who Hears the Patient Now,” with Amy Brown of Authenticx, on AI voice agents in access centers
- TP464, “The AI Loop Problem (Where Humans Still Matter Most),” on human-in-the-loop and human-out-of-the-loop models
- Reed Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reedtsmith/
- Chris Boyer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/
- Chris Boyer website: http://www.christopherboyer.com/
- Chris Boyer on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisboyer.bsky.social
- Reed Smith on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/reedsmith.bsky.social
From the cold open:
- Hidden Valley Spooky Ranch: https://finviz.com/news/395227/hidden-valley-introduces-spooky-ranch-the-iconic-dressing-takes-on-a-haunting-hue-for-halloween
Recommendations from this episode:
- Chris: Visit an apple orchard this fall
- Reed: Neagley on Prime Video https://www.joblo.com/reacher-season-four-neagley-spin-off/amp/
