Without a doubt, most hospital nurses will be using AI within a few years. The question is whether the AI tools nurses use will be another fragmented layer of technology or true assistants to help them spend more time on patient care.
EHRs and other systems are often positioned to save nurses time and reduce administrative burdens. However, these technologies have not always met the mark.
Technology’s underperformance at the bedside is a common contributor to nursing dissatisfaction, burnout, increased turnover, potential patient safety risk, and mistrust of IT teams. A 2025 Black Book Research survey found that 92% of nurses believe EHR systems have negatively impacted job satisfaction and cite spending 40% of their shifts on documentation instead of delivering care.
Since EHR documentation is one of the most time-consuming tasks, most ambient technology vendors and health system CIOs have focused initial AI efforts here. Physician needs were addressed first. And with good results. One study found a significant reduction in burnout from 51.9% to 38.8%, improving cognitive task load, time spent documenting after hours, and focused attention on patients.
However, nurse documentation has jumped out as the next frontier for health IT vendors and health system CIOs. Nursing is typically a hospital’s largest expense category and has arguably the greatest impact on patient experience and outcomes.
Combined with decades of nurse staffing shortages and a wave of nurse retirements ahead, innovators are now focused on ambient documentation and other AI-powered tools for nursing teams.
Ambient nursing documentation is only the first step
AI’s ability to enable conversational voice control over a plethora of nursing tasks is the next step to address nurse satisfaction with health IT. For example, nascent solutions enable conversational voice control of all nursing tasks, not just charting and documentation.
These other tasks could include such day-to-day steps as checking a dietary order or reporting a faulty piece of equipment in the patient’s room. Today these seemingly small steps require large volumes of nursing time and access to a wide variety of systems.
Instead of logging into different systems and entering commands, nascent technology enables nurses to use a single command to control all tools in their ecosystem. For example, a nurse could say, “I just rotated the patient in room 304, and I see they ate 50% of their lunch. Also, the workstation is broken again, and I need our protocol for changing an NG tube.”
These disparate tasks are parsed out to individual systems through the conversational interface and executed simultaneously through connections with Epic/Cerner, ServiceNow, and Lippincott.
Other nurse-facing tools will follow suit. In the coming years, different AI interfaces will be bolted onto systems like:
- Policies & procedures
- Work orders
- Interpreter services
- Dietary orders
- Staff messaging
- Virtual nursing
- TV-based patient experience platforms
- Smart Room devices (lights, blinds, thermostats)
AI-powered nurse assistants ahead
One of the godfathers of AI, Nvidia founder Jenson Huang, says “Everybody will have an AI assistant… every single job”. Notice that he didn’t say everyone will have a bunch of different assistants that they’ll need to switch between.
To use a mobile analogy, when you use your voice to place a call, send texts or get driving directions on your phone, you just talk to Siri or Google Assistant, not each individual app. You don’t have to launch, learn, and engage a different virtual assistant for calls, texts, and maps.
To truly harness the power of AI for our nursing teams, they’ll need a single conversational interface that saves them time on everything from Epic to ServiceNow. AI-powered nurse assistants will become the “easy button” for nurses to access and engage with all the systems they use throughout the day.
Image: Thai Noipho, Getty Images
Sarah Visker, MSN, RN, NI-BC, is a nurse-turned health informatics leader and currently serves as Director of Clinical Informatics at Aiva Health, a company focused on voice-powered AI solutions for nurses. She brings over 20 years of nursing experience and has led major initiatives to reduce documentation burden.
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