AI made every doctor in the study worse

Experienced doctors got worse at spotting cancer after using AI. Every single one in the study.

The Lancet tracked doctors before and after they used AI to spot polyps during colonoscopies. Before AI assistance, they caught 28 per cent of cases. After months working with AI, when they went back to working without it, their detection rate dropped to 22 per cent. Six percentage points gone.

The AI did not make them better at the job. It made them comfortable not looking as hard.

A separate study published in Nature Medicine tested AI differently. Across 463,000 women in Germany, AI served as a second pair of eyes for breast cancer screening. It flagged scans the radiologists missed. Seventeen per cent more cancers caught, with no increase in false alarms.

In the breast cancer screening, doctors still made every call. The AI caught what slipped through. In the colonoscopy study, doctors stopped looking because the AI was doing it for them.

Automate the formatting, the scheduling, the data entry. But the judgement calls, the ones where being wrong costs money, those stay with your team. The moment your people stop checking AI's work is the moment the mistakes start landing on your clients.