The consent gap in ambient clinical artificial intelligence: what patients are not being told

Ambient artificial intelligence (AI) scribes that audio-record clinical encounters and automatically generate clinical notes are being rapidly adopted across health-care systems in the USA. Recent evidence from a randomised trial suggests that some ambient scribe platforms reduce clinician documentation time, burnout, and task load, reinforcing expectations of continued expansion.1 For providers, these systems can lessen documentation workload and enable greater attention to patients. For health systems and payers, early financial data suggest possible changes in billing patterns and relative value units, although the net effect on spending remains uncertain.