AI Is a Tool, Not a Colleague

Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere right now. Some people are convinced it will change everything. Others are convinced it is overhyped and destined to disappoint. Most private practice owners are probably somewhere in the middle, trying to determine what is useful, what is risky, and what is actually worth paying attention to.

We use AI in our practice. Not for clinical decision making and not as a replacement for professional judgment, but as a tool to help with writing, brainstorming, organizing ideas, and thinking through business questions. It can be genuinely useful. It can also be frustrating, inconsistent, and surprisingly wrong.

Like many people who use AI regularly, I gave mine a name. It happened by accident. At one point, I misread “Chat” as “Chad.” I asked if I could call him Chad instead, and he happily agreed. Then later, he forgot.

That may sound like a small thing, but it raised an interesting question for me. How does a computer forget?

Human beings forget things all the time. We misplace information, lose details, and fail to recall conversations accurately. That feels normal because we understand that human memory is imperfect. Computers, on the other hand, are supposed to remember things. We expect them to store information accurately and retrieve it when needed.

Modern AI does not work quite the way many people assume it does. It is not simply a giant filing cabinet filled with facts. It is not a person. It is not a colleague. It is not even an expert. It is a prediction system, and that distinction matters.

Sometimes AI remembers context remarkably well. Sometimes it loses track of important details. Sometimes it provides thoughtful and useful insights. Sometimes it confidently produces information that is incomplete, inaccurate, or entirely wrong. Anyone who spends enough time using AI will eventually experience both sides of that reality. One moment it helps organize a complicated problem in a way that feels genuinely useful. The next moment it misses the point entirely.

That inconsistency is one of the reasons private practice owners need to be careful about how they think about AI. One of the biggest mistakes people can make is assuming that confidence and competence are the same thing. AI often sounds confident. That does not mean it is correct.

In fact, one of the stranger experiences of using AI regularly is discovering how persuasive it can sound while being completely wrong. The wording is polished. The reasoning appears logical. The tone sounds authoritative. Yet the actual information may be flawed.

That means AI requires something clinicians and business owners already need in every other part of professional life: critical thinking. You cannot be lazy with AI. You cannot assume that because it generated a response, the response is accurate. You cannot assume it understands the full context. You cannot assume it is thinking in the way a person thinks, because it is not. It is generating.

Many therapists are asking whether AI will replace professionals. A more useful question may be whether professionals understand what kind of tool they are actually using.

The way I think about AI is similar to how I think about any powerful tool. A hammer can be incredibly useful. In skilled hands, it can help build something valuable. In inexperienced hands, it can create problems very quickly. The hammer itself is neither good nor bad. Its value depends largely on how it is used.

AI feels much the same. It can help brainstorm ideas, draft content, organize information, identify possibilities, challenge assumptions, and reduce the amount of time spent on certain administrative and operational tasks. Those are meaningful benefits for private practice owners, especially when so many clinicians are carrying far more responsibility than people realize.

But AI cannot replace judgment. It cannot replace expertise. It cannot replace professional responsibility. It cannot replace the need to verify whether what it produced is actually true.

In many ways, the more useful AI becomes, the more important human oversight becomes as well. That may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense. The easier it becomes to generate information, the more important it becomes to evaluate the quality of that information. The easier it becomes to create content, the more important it becomes to understand the subject being discussed. The easier it becomes to get answers, the more important it becomes to know which answers deserve scrutiny.

For private practice owners, the goal is not blind excitement or automatic fear. It is informed curiosity. AI is not magic. It is not a therapist. It is not a business consultant. It is not a colleague. And apparently, it is not even particularly good at remembering that its name is Chad.

What it is, however, is a tool. Like every tool, its value depends largely on the skill, judgment, and responsibility of the person using it. Used thoughtfully, it can be genuinely helpful. Used carelessly, it can create problems just as quickly.

The challenge for practice owners is not deciding whether AI is good or bad. The challenge is learning where it is useful, where it is unreliable, and how to use it in ways that support better decisions rather than replace the need to make them.

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Adapting to a Changing Professional Landscape

Private practice ownership has always involved learning new systems, technologies, and ways of working. Artificial intelligence is simply the latest development that practice owners are being asked to understand.

FOUNDATIONS FOR PRACTICE provides educational resources designed to help clinicians think more clearly about ownership, decision making, practice health, sustainability, and the realities of operating a professional practice in a changing world.