August 2026
HBS professor Susanna Gallani, discussing why physicians and patients hesitate to trust an AI scribe that records and transcribes clinical visits. Her point is that opacity, not the technology's usefulness, is what undermines adoption.
Transcript
so imagine anything you want to do with clinical data, whether it's research, whether it's improving care, you want to have enough adoption, enough mass to have that mass of data so that it's consistent across an organization. That would make sense. Well, when they open it up for a larger group, which they still haven't rolled it out to everyone, but they are progressively getting there. One of the largest groups, which is the group that historically has the highest level of burnout, this primary care. Once they open it up to that group, it was opt-in. But for those people that chose to use the license, many of them, a significant amount, did not pursue it. So they had the license, they just didn't do it. And in fact, there was a rule that if you didn't use it for three months, they would ask you why and potentially take it away. Because it has a cost. There is a monthly fee for this licenses, which is person by person.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're finding that the human side of AI, getting people to adopt the tools and to use them, is highly variable, right? Some people are comfortable doing it. They think, oh, this is great. This is going to make my life easier. Other people are thinking, this is something new I have to do. I have to learn how to use this. And what if it breaks? Or what if I don't do it right? What would you say to people who are listening who are maybe going through the same kind of a process in their own organization? What are the sorts of things that you have to be thoughtful about as you're trying to scale up this kind of platform?
The first thing is trust, right? We talked about it. It's really difficult for people to just embrace this when this technology changes daily. It is, from a user's perspective, an enormous black box. You put things into it, and you don't really know what happens to those things, things being information, sometimes sensitive, sometimes personal. And so having this expectation that everybody will jump at the opportunity to use it is probably misguided. So understanding what do you need to do to make it so that people trust what you're going to do with that technology. Generally speaking, security of that technology, it is a black box for the leadership too. It's not that we understand this infinitely well. Remote learning,
yeah.
Yes, and it's changing so much that we tend to understand less and less instead of more and more in certain ways, right, of what it does and what it's capable of doing. So the first thing would be trust. The second thing would be use it to bring up the humanity of the workers and not to replace them because there's a huge fear. Now, this is less prominent in healthcare, I will say, than other industries, but we all are thinking about: is this thing going to take my job, right? So understanding that that is a concern that people have, even if it is, you know, buried in the back of your psychology, but especially if you're bringing this technology in to help people make it help people
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