Artificial intelligence in veterinary medicine

Happy New Year dvm360 readers! To kick off 2025, Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, chatted with Sebastian Gabor, MBA, cofounder of Digitail, to discuss the current landscape in of artificial intelligence (AI) as we head into 2025. Gabor and Christman discuss the strengths AI can provide to veterinary clinics, the amount of time it can save veterinary professionals, and the need for holistic AI integration in current systems due to the possibility of the systems not communicating with each other effectively.

Below is a partial transcript

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Where do you think [AI's] going this year now? I mean, obviously it's on a very high trajectory for success. So where do you [think]...AI [is] heading in 2025?

Sebastian Gabor, MBA: So now in a super exciting moment in history, because on 1 side, practices have realized that AI is a competitive tool, is a competitive advantage, and more and more [people] want to use it. The challenge that I'm seeing is similar to the challenge that 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 like you've probably tried yourself, is that they say that you book an appointment online and it gets into your PIMs. But reality is, you get an email and then you manually put it in the PIMs, and then that doesn't communicate with the chat tool that you're using, and so on and so forth.

So the big challenge that I'm seeing that's going to most likely happen if we continue down this path is that you'll start having a lot of AI tools that don't communicate with each other. Imagine having out of the entire patient journey, imagine you have one AI assistant that does the intake for the patient that doesn't communicate with the AI that you're using to do the medical notes, and that doesn't communicate with AI that does the discharge notes. There is no way you can actually deliver care with that. And this is the big risk, and this is why we're a big proponent that the concept of holistic AI needs to happen, and that's the way you we can actually leverage AI for good, and where we can see results, as 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 have a really great experience, and everything is personalized for them.