Happy new year dvm360 readers! To kick off 2025, Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, spoke with Sebastian Gabor, MBA, co-founder of Digitail, to discuss the current artificial intelligence (AI) landscape as we head into 2025. Gabor and Christman discuss the strengths AI can bring to veterinary clinics, the amount of time it can save veterinary professionals, and the need for holistic AI integration into current systems due to the possibility of the systems not communicating effectively with each other.
Below is a partial transcript
Adam Christ, DVM, MBA: Where do you think (AIs) are going next this year? I mean, it’s clearly on a very high trajectory toward success. So where (do you think)…AI going in 2025?
Sebastian Gabor, MBA: So now at a super exciting moment in history, because on the one hand the field has realized that AI is a competitive tool, is a competitive advantage, and that more and more (people) want to use it. The challenge I see is similar to the challenge we’ve seen in the industry, where we had all the legacy systems, like legacy PIMs (practice information management software)… and then you had a lot of add-ons. on top. And the problem with those add-ons, as you’ve probably tried yourself, is that they say you book an appointment online and it ends up in your PIMs. But the reality is that you get an email and then manually put it into the PIMs, and then that doesn’t communicate with the chat tool you’re using, and so on and so forth.
So the big challenge that I think is most likely going to happen if we continue down this path is that you’re going to have a lot of AI tools that don’t communicate with each other. Imagine ignoring the entire patient journey, imagine having one AI assistant doing the intake for the patient that doesn’t communicate with the AI you use to take the medical notes, and that doesn’t communicate with the AI that does the discharge notes. You can’t actually provide care with that. And this is the big risk, and that’s why we’re very much in favor of making the concept of holistic AI a reality, and that’s the way we can actually use AI for good, and where we can see results like in 40 hours per DVM per month saved, where we can see that vets can now go home on time, (and) here we can see that the pet parents are having a great experience and everything is personalized for them.
