What exactly is a virtual assistant in healthcare? Imagine a specialized, AI-powered member of your team that tirelessly handles the tedious but essential administrative tasks that often bog down a medical practice. It's the digital helper that takes care of scheduling, answers common patient questions, and sorts out paperwork around the clock, which frees up your human staff to do what they do best: provide excellent, hands-on patient care. This technology is no longer a futuristic concept but a practical tool that modern clinics are leveraging to streamline operations, reduce costs, and significantly enhance the patient experience.
The New Face of Healthcare Efficiency
Picture a typical morning at any busy clinic. The phones are ringing off the hook—people calling for appointments, asking for prescription refills, or trying to sort out a bill. Your front desk team is buried, trying to manage check-ins while tackling an endless pile of administrative work. It’s a recipe for long patient wait times, staff burnout, and a less-than-ideal patient experience.
This scene is playing out in clinics everywhere, from small private practices to large hospital networks. It creates a significant operational bottleneck that hurts both the patient experience and your clinic’s overall workflow. Patients become understandably annoyed while sitting on hold, and your skilled, valuable staff ends up spending their time on repetitive tasks instead of connecting with the people right in front of them. It’s a frustrating and inefficient cycle that gets in the way of providing top-notch, compassionate care.
A Practical Solution for Modern Clinics
Now, imagine a different, more streamlined scenario. What if a sophisticated system could field the majority of those routine calls and questions automatically, accurately, and instantly? That's precisely where a virtual assistant in healthcare comes in. This isn't just about adding new technology for technology's sake; it's about fundamentally rethinking your clinic's processes to make everything run smoother for everyone involved—patients, staff, and providers alike.
These AI-powered assistants are designed from the ground up specifically for the healthcare environment. They're built to handle a wide range of medical-related tasks with precision and compliance, such as:
- Automating Appointments: The system can intelligently book, reschedule, or cancel appointments based on your clinic's live calendar, provider availability, and appointment type, all without human intervention.
- Answering FAQs: It can instantly provide clear and accurate answers to common questions about clinic hours, accepted insurance plans, directions, pre-visit instructions, or available services.
- Simplifying Patient Intake: It can guide new and existing patients through the necessary digital paperwork before they even walk through the door, ensuring all information is collected accurately and efficiently.
This isn't about replacing your dedicated staff—it's about empowering them. By taking over the monotonous, time-draining tasks, a virtual assistant gives your team the breathing room to focus on more complex patient problems, provide in-person support, and deliver the compassionate, hands-on care that truly makes a difference in a patient's journey.
By automating routine interactions, a virtual assistant helps reduce the administrative burden on providers by up to 30%. This allows skilled professionals to redirect their focus toward high-value clinical activities and direct patient care.
It's no surprise this technology is catching on fast. The healthcare virtual assistants market was valued at around USD 1.7 billion in 2025 and is expected to skyrocket to USD 19.5 billion by 2035. This massive growth projection underscores just how critical these tools are becoming for clinics looking to operate more efficiently, lower the ever-rising costs of delivering care, and meet modern patient expectations. Learn more about the market growth projections.
What Is a Healthcare Virtual Assistant?
When you hear the term "healthcare virtual assistant," it's easy to picture a simple chatbot on a website that can only respond to a few pre-programmed keywords. But in reality, we're talking about something far more sophisticated and purpose-built for the unique demands, complexities, and regulatory requirements of a medical practice.
Imagine a front-desk coordinator who works 24/7/365, never needs a break, is never sick, and can handle thousands of patient inquiries simultaneously without a single slip-up in accuracy or tone. That’s the kind of power and reliability a virtual assistant in healthcare brings to the table. It’s a digital team member trained on specific medical workflows, designed to understand patient needs with empathy, and built to plug seamlessly right into your clinic's daily operations. This assistant often becomes the first, most reliable touchpoint for patients, freeing up your human staff from repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher-value interactions with the people right in front of them.
The Technology Behind the Scenes
This isn't just a simple script following a rigid flowchart. A true, enterprise-grade healthcare virtual assistant is powered by a sophisticated suite of technologies working in concert to create genuinely helpful, human-like conversations.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): This is the core engine. AI is what allows the assistant to perform complex tasks autonomously, such as scheduling multi-step appointments, triaging patient symptoms, and making intelligent decisions based on the data it receives.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Think of this as the assistant's ears and mouth. NLP enables the system to understand the nuances of how people actually talk and write—including slang, accents, and complex sentences—and then respond in a way that feels natural, conversational, and clear.
- Machine Learning (ML): This is the brain that gets smarter and more efficient over time. With every patient interaction, the ML component learns and improves, getting better at anticipating patient needs, understanding intent, and providing the right answers faster and more accurately.
These technologies combine to create a powerful tool that doesn't just follow orders—it understands context, learns from experience, and adapts to the specific needs and workflows of your practice. While the applications are highly specialized for healthcare, many of the core principles of AI-driven automation are shared with tools like a customer service virtual assistant.
More Than Just a Consumer Gadget
It's tempting to lump a professional virtual assistant in healthcare in with consumer gadgets like Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant. While they both use AI to understand and respond to voice commands, that’s where the comparison ends. Healthcare virtual assistants are purpose-built for a complex, highly regulated environment where security, accuracy, and patient safety are paramount—mistakes are not an option.
A healthcare virtual assistant is not a generalist; it is a specialist. Its design prioritizes security, accuracy, and deep integration with clinical systems, making it a trusted and reliable tool for both patient-facing and administrative tasks.
This specialization is precisely what makes them so valuable. They are engineered from the ground up with the specific goal of solving the real-world challenges of a busy medical office, not for playing music or checking the weather.
Key Differentiators for Medical Use
So, what really sets a medical-grade assistant apart from its consumer-focused counterparts? A few non-negotiable features make it a safe, compliant, and practical tool for any clinic, practice, or hospital.
1. HIPAA Compliance
This is the absolute baseline and the most critical requirement. Any technology that handles, transmits, or stores protected health information (PHI) must be fully HIPAA compliant. This guarantees that every patient interaction is secure, encrypted, and handled according to strict federal privacy laws. Vendors must be willing to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), legally binding them to these standards.
2. EHR Integration
To be truly useful and not just another isolated piece of software, a virtual assistant must communicate seamlessly with your Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. This direct, two-way link allows it to see a provider's real-time availability for booking appointments and, just as importantly, write appointment details, patient information, and communication logs directly into the patient's chart. This eliminates the need for manual data entry, which reduces errors and saves significant staff time. You can take a closer look at how this all connects in our full guide to the healthcare virtual assistant.
3. Medical-Grade Accuracy
These assistants are not trained on general internet data. They are trained on huge, curated datasets of medical information, including complex medical terminology, common patient questions, and typical clinical workflows. This specialized training is how it knows the difference between a "new patient visit" and a "post-op follow-up," and can route inquiries to the correct person or department with incredible precision. This unwavering focus on accuracy is key to keeping your practice running smoothly and safely.
Automating Your Administrative Workflow
Anyone working in healthcare knows the administrative grind all too well. It’s the mountain of paperwork, the endless stream of phone calls, the constant data entry, and the repetitive follow-ups that pull skilled staff away from what they do best: caring for patients. This administrative overload is a primary driver of employee burnout, a major source of operational inefficiency, and a significant bottleneck in the day-to-day operations of nearly every medical practice.
A virtual assistant in healthcare tackles this problem head-on. It's meticulously designed to automate those repetitive, time-sucking tasks that bog down your practice, giving your team much-needed breathing room and empowering them to work at the top of their license. The result is a calmer, more organized, and far more efficient work environment where both staff and patients thrive.
From Manual Chaos to Automated Clarity
The difference a virtual assistant makes isn't just theoretical or incremental; it’s a practical, night-and-day shift in how your front office operates.
Let's paint a picture. Your front desk staff member likely spends a significant portion of their day playing phone tag—scheduling and rescheduling appointments, answering the same insurance and logistical questions over and over, and painstakingly typing information from paper forms or phone calls into the EHR. This constant juggling act often leads to long hold times for patients, rushed interactions, and a high risk of typos in crucial medical records.
Now, imagine this: a healthcare virtual assistant steps in and intelligently handles over 80% of those inbound calls and routine tasks. It books appointments 24/7, verifies insurance eligibility in seconds, and sends patients digital intake forms that sync directly to your EHR. Suddenly, your staff is free to welcome patients warmly, manage complex billing questions, handle escalations, and deliver that personal, empathetic touch that builds lasting patient loyalty.
Key Administrative Use Cases
A virtual assistant in healthcare really shines when it takes over specific, high-volume administrative jobs. Let’s look at the areas where these tools make the biggest, most immediate impact.
1. Intelligent Appointment Scheduling
Scheduling is the classic administrative headache. A virtual assistant integrates directly with your EHR calendar, understanding everything from provider availability and appointment types to clinic hours and specific scheduling rules.
Patients gain the power to book, reschedule, or cancel their appointments on their own time, from any device, without ever needing to speak to a person. The system also sends out automated, customized reminders via text, email, or voice call, which is a simple but incredibly effective way to slash no-show rates and keep your schedule optimized and full.
2. Automated Insurance Verification
Denied claims are a massive drain on a practice's revenue, and a surprisingly high percentage of them boil down to simple errors or outdated information related to insurance coverage. A virtual assistant can completely automate the verification process.
Before an appointment, the assistant can check a patient's eligibility and coverage details in real-time by connecting with insurance payor databases. This simple, proactive step flags any potential issues right away, allowing them to be resolved before the visit. This dramatically reduces claim denials and keeps your billing cycle running smoothly and predictably.
3. Digital Patient Intake and Onboarding
The old clipboard and stack of paperwork are not just inefficient; they’re a recipe for errors, lost information, and a poor first impression. A virtual assistant brings this entire process into the 21st century by sending new and existing patients a secure link to digital intake forms.
By automating routine administrative workflows, a virtual assistant can help reduce manual data entry by over 90%, minimizing human error and ensuring that patient records are accurate and up-to-date from the very first interaction.
Patients can fill out their medical history, sign consent forms, and provide insurance details from the comfort of their home, on their own device. That information is then automatically and accurately parsed and moved into their EHR file, saving your team from hours of tedious and error-prone transcription.
Let's take a closer look at how these tasks are transformed.
How a Virtual Assistant Automates Administrative Tasks
Here’s a breakdown of common administrative tasks in a healthcare setting and how a virtual assistant streamlines them to improve efficiency, accuracy, and patient convenience.
| Administrative Task | Traditional Manual Method | Automated Virtual Assistant Solution |
|---|---|---|
| Appointment Scheduling | Staff answers calls, checks calendars, and books slots manually. This is limited to office hours. | Patients self-schedule online or via phone 24/7; system sends automated reminders and confirmations. |
| Insurance Verification | Staff calls insurance companies or manually checks different online portals one by one, often a day before the visit. | Assistant runs real-time eligibility checks automatically at the time of booking and again before the visit. |
| Patient Intake | Patients fill out paper forms in the waiting room; staff then manually types all the data into the EHR. | Patients complete dynamic digital forms at home; data syncs directly and instantly to the correct fields in the EHR. |
| Answering FAQs | Staff repeatedly answers common questions about hours, location, parking, insurance, etc., over the phone. | An AI-powered chatbot or voice assistant provides instant, accurate answers to routine queries online or by phone. |
| Data Entry | Staff manually enters patient demographics, medical history, and billing information from various sources. | Data from digital forms, phone calls, and web chats is captured, structured, and populated into systems automatically. |
As you can see, the shift from manual to automated isn't just about saving a few minutes here and there; it’s about creating a fundamentally more reliable, scalable, and efficient operational system.
The growing demand for this kind of efficiency is clear. The global healthcare virtual assistants market is projected for major growth through 2035, largely because practices are under immense pressure to automate tasks like scheduling and patient queries. This push is not only making care better for patients but also making operations more sustainable for providers. For more detail, you can explore the full report on futuremarketinsights.com.
To understand how the underlying AI technology is changing other parts of the practice, you might find this article on AI's impact on lead generation for healthcare practices insightful. By automating the administrative front-end, healthcare organizations are building a stronger foundation for sustainable growth and better patient care.
Improving Patient Engagement and Clinical Support
While sorting out the administrative chaos at the front desk is a huge win, the real magic of a virtual assistant in healthcare happens when it moves beyond administrative work and into clinical support roles. These advanced AI tools are now stepping into functions that directly support patients throughout their care journey, improving the entire experience from the moment they book an appointment to their long-term follow-up care.
This represents a significant shift in healthcare delivery. The virtual assistant is no longer just a background operational tool; it’s becoming a frontline partner in a patient's care. It proactively gives people the information, reminders, and support they need to better manage their own health, which leads to a much more collaborative, effective, and proactive approach to medicine.
Delivering Proactive Patient Support
One of the most practical and impactful clinical uses for these assistants is automating personalized patient communication at scale. Instead of your clinical staff spending hours on manual phone calls or sending generic emails, a virtual assistant can deliver timely, specific information that guides patients every step of the way, ensuring they are prepared and informed.
Think about what this looks like in practice. The assistant can automatically send:
- Personalized Medication Reminders: A simple text, app notification, or voice call can gently remind patients to take their medications on time. It's a small nudge that can have a huge impact on treatment adherence and health outcomes.
- Pre-Operative Instructions: A series of automated messages can walk a patient through everything they need to do before a procedure—from fasting guidelines and medication adjustments to what time they need to show up and where to park.
- Post-Visit Care Plans: After an appointment, the assistant can follow up with a clear, easy-to-understand summary of the doctor's instructions, links to helpful educational materials, and reminders for any upcoming follow-up visits.
This kind of proactive, consistent support means patients never feel like they're navigating their care alone. They have a constant, reliable source of information available 24/7, which builds their confidence, reduces anxiety, and ultimately leads to better health outcomes.
Acting as a Smart Frontline Triage
Another game-changing function is intelligent clinical triage. When someone feels sick, they often don't know where to turn. Should they book a routine visit? Head to urgent care? Or is it a true medical emergency? A healthcare virtual assistant can serve as a helpful and reliable first point of contact.
Using pre-approved clinical protocols (often based on established standards like the Schmitt-Thompson protocols), the assistant can ask a series of structured questions about the patient's symptoms. Based on their answers, it can suggest the right level of care—be it a telehealth call, an in-person appointment, or a recommendation to visit the ER. This gets the patient to the right care setting faster and helps your clinic manage its flow of patients much more effectively, preventing unnecessary visits and ensuring urgent cases are prioritized.
By providing 24/7 access to trusted information and intelligent guidance, a virtual assistant empowers patients to become more active participants in their own health. This allows clinical staff to dedicate their valuable time and expertise to more complex medical issues and direct patient care.
Enhancing Chronic Disease Management
Managing a chronic condition like diabetes, hypertension, or asthma is a daily commitment. For these individuals, a virtual assistant in healthcare can become an invaluable long-term partner in their health journey.
These tools can help patients with chronic conditions to:
- Track Symptoms and Vitals: Patients can easily report their blood sugar levels, blood pressure readings, or daily symptoms through a simple text, voice message, or app interface. This data can be automatically logged in their EHR for the care team to review.
- Access Educational Resources: The assistant can offer up articles, videos, and guides related to their specific condition on demand, helping them understand their health better and learn self-management techniques.
- Receive Motivational Nudges and Support: A little encouragement and a few timely tips can make all the difference in keeping patients on track with their diet, exercise, and medication plans.
This continuous loop of support and data collection helps prevent complications, reduces the need for frequent, expensive hospital visits, and improves the overall quality of care. Fostering this kind of proactive connection opens the door to other strategies to improve patient satisfaction and build lasting, trusting patient relationships.
The Business Case for a Virtual Assistant
Bringing a virtual assistant into your practice isn't just about adding a new piece of technology or modernizing your operations. It's a strategic business decision with a very real and measurable return on investment (ROI). While smoother workflows and happier staff are great starting points, the true win is how those efficiencies directly boost your bottom line, reduce operational costs, and strengthen your competitive position in the market.
Think of a virtual assistant in healthcare as an investment in efficiency and growth, plain and simple. It's about drawing a straight line from automated tasks to measurable financial results, whether that’s lower overhead costs, increased revenue, or happier patients who keep coming back and referring others.
Boosting Operational Efficiency
The first and most immediate thing you’ll notice is a major leap in operational efficiency. Administrative tasks are essential, but they can easily swallow up a huge chunk of your staff's day. When you automate these repetitive, low-value duties, you free up your talented team to focus on work that truly requires a human touch and critical thinking.
Imagine the ripple effect this creates. Your front desk staff, no longer buried in scheduling calls, can give patients in the office their full, undivided attention, resolving complex issues and providing a superior service experience. It's not just about saving time; it's about reassigning your most valuable asset—your people—to activities that directly improve patient care and satisfaction. This kind of automation can cut the administrative burden on providers and their teams by up to 30%.
Driving Financial Gains
Better operations almost immediately translate into tangible financial benefits. A virtual assistant can improve your practice's financial health in several critical ways.
- Fewer Patient No-Shows: Automated appointment reminders are incredibly simple but powerfully effective. Practices that implement them consistently see a significant drop in missed appointments, which directly protects a vital source of revenue and keeps your providers' schedules full.
- A Healthier Revenue Cycle: By automating crucial processes like insurance verification and patient intake, a virtual assistant drastically cuts down on billing errors, data entry mistakes, and rejected claims. This means you get paid faster, your accounts receivable days decrease, and your overall cash flow improves.
- Lower Overhead Costs: One virtual assistant can perform the work of several administrative staff members for a fraction of the cost. When you add up salaries, benefits, training, and the cost of office space, the savings can be substantial—often cutting administrative overhead by as much as 60%.
By automating routine interactions and optimizing schedules, a virtual assistant directly impacts revenue. It transforms administrative functions from necessary cost centers into drivers of financial stability and sustainable growth.
Enhancing the Patient Experience
At the end of the day, a fantastic patient experience is one of your strongest business assets and a key competitive differentiator. When patients have a choice of where to receive care, satisfaction is what keeps them loyal and brings in new referrals from friends and family. A virtual assistant in healthcare makes your practice more accessible, responsive, and convenient, 24/7.
When patients can easily book an appointment whenever it suits them (even in the middle of the night), get quick answers to simple questions without waiting on hold, and receive helpful, proactive reminders, they feel more in control of their healthcare and more valued by your practice. This positive feeling builds deep loyalty and makes them more likely to recommend you. In fact, over 70% of patients report being more satisfied after using an AI virtual assistant for basic inquiries and scheduling. That improved experience isn't just a nice-to-have; it's a core driver of long-term patient retention and practice growth.
How to Bring a Virtual Assistant Into Your Practice
Bringing a new piece of technology like a virtual assistant into your practice might feel like a huge, daunting undertaking. However, if you break the process down into clear, manageable steps, it becomes much more straightforward and achievable. A well-thought-out implementation roadmap can make all the difference between a frustrating project and a seamless, successful launch.
This isn't just about plugging in new software. It's about carefully and strategically weaving a new tool into your daily operations to support your team, delight your patients, and ultimately, improve how you deliver care.
First, Pinpoint Your Goals and Pain Points
Before you even start looking at different vendors or technology options, the first and most critical step is to look inward. What are the biggest headaches and inefficiencies your practice faces day-to-day? A successful rollout starts with having a crystal-clear idea of the specific problems you want to solve.
Is your front desk staff constantly drowning in phone calls, leaving patients on hold and feeling frustrated? Perhaps your appointment no-show rate is consistently chipping away at your revenue. Or maybe manual data entry from intake forms is leading to frequent errors in patient records. By zeroing in on these specific issues, you can set concrete, measurable goals for what you want a virtual assistant to achieve.
For example, your goals might be to:
- Cut patient hold times on the phone by 50% within three months.
- Lower your appointment no-show rate by 25% in the first quarter.
- Automate 100% of new patient intake to free up your staff for more important tasks.
Next, Vet Your Vendors and Plan the Integration
Once you know what you need to accomplish, it's time to find the right technology partner. The truth is, not all healthcare virtual assistants are created equal. You'll want to create a detailed checklist of your "must-have" features and requirements for any medical practice.
The right virtual assistant is more than a tool; it's a strategic partner. Prioritize vendors that demonstrate a deep understanding of healthcare workflows, rigorous security protocols, and a proven commitment to seamless integration with your existing clinical systems.
Your evaluation process should really nail down three key areas:
- HIPAA Compliance and Security: This is non-negotiable. The vendor must sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and provide clear documentation of their security measures, data encryption protocols, and compliance certifications.
- EHR Integration: The assistant has to talk flawlessly with your Electronic Health Record system. It needs to read provider schedules in real-time and write back appointment and patient data without a hitch. Ask for a live demonstration of the integration with your specific EHR.
- Customization and Scalability: Every practice is different. The solution should be flexible enough to adapt to your unique workflows, appointment types, provider preferences, and scheduling rules. It should also be able to grow with your practice.
After you've selected a vendor, it's time to map out exactly how the assistant will plug into your daily operations. Decide which tasks it will own completely and create a clear plan for how it will hand off more complex situations or frustrated patients to your human team.
Finally, Prepare Your Team and Go Live
At the end of the day, your team is the key to making this implementation a success. It's crucial to introduce the virtual assistant in healthcare as a helper and a tool for empowerment, not as a replacement. Frame it as a new digital teammate designed to take the tedious, repetitive work off their plates so they can focus on what matters most—the patients.
Provide solid, hands-on training for your staff and be transparent about how their roles might shift for the better (e.g., more time for patient interaction, less time on the phone).
Don't try to do everything at once. A phased rollout is almost always the best approach. You could begin by just automating appointment scheduling via phone. Once that is running smoothly, you can add web-based scheduling. Then, watch the analytics, gather feedback from your staff and patients, and tweak the process. This step-by-step approach lets you make smart adjustments, build confidence across the organization, and ensure you achieve long-term success.
Frequently Asked Questions
It's smart and responsible to have questions when looking at new technology, especially in healthcare. When we talk about bringing a virtual assistant into a healthcare setting, doctors, practice managers, and IT leaders want to know about the nuts and bolts—security, patient adoption, and how it connects to the complex systems you already use. Getting straight, transparent answers is the only way to feel confident about your decision.
Here are the most common questions we hear from healthcare professionals, answered plainly so you can see if this technology is the right move for your practice.
How Secure Is a Healthcare Virtual Assistant?
Patient privacy is non-negotiable, and this is always the first and most important question. The answer is that any virtual assistant platform built specifically for healthcare must have security at its very core.
- HIPAA Compliance is Mandatory: This is the absolute baseline. A legitimate vendor must be fully HIPAA compliant. This means they utilize end-to-end encryption for all patient data, both in transit and at rest, and will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), which makes them legally responsible for protecting that information under federal law.
- Strict Access Controls and Auditing: These systems are architected to ensure only authorized personnel can see sensitive information. Access is tightly controlled, authenticated, and logged, creating a clear audit trail for any data interaction.
Think of it this way: these platforms are put through their paces with intense security audits and penetration testing to make sure every single patient interaction meets or exceeds federal and state privacy laws.
Will Patients Actually Use an AI Assistant?
It’s easy to wonder if patients, particularly older demographics, will be put off by talking to an AI. However, the data and real-world results tell a different story. People today are all about convenience, and a well-designed virtual assistant offers exactly that.
We've all gotten used to using digital tools for just about everything else in our lives, from banking to ordering food. When an assistant solves a real problem for a patient—like letting them book an appointment at 10 PM without waiting on hold, or getting an instant answer to a simple billing question—they're more than happy to use it. The key is to deploy the tool for the kinds of tasks where speed, accuracy, and 24/7 access really matter. The goal is not to replace human empathy but to handle transactional tasks efficiently.
How Does It Integrate with Our EHR System?
For a virtual assistant to be genuinely helpful and not just another silo of information, seamless integration is essential. The best platforms are designed to plug right into the major Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems that practices already know and use, like Epic, Cerner, or Athenahealth.
A virtual assistant's real value comes alive when it works as a natural, integrated part of your existing systems. Good EHR integration means no more copy-pasting information between screens, which keeps data accurate, improves workflows, and frees up your staff.
This connection happens behind the scenes using secure, modern APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). This allows the assistant to see a doctor’s schedule in real-time, book appointments directly into the correct slot in the EHR, and update patient demographic and communication records automatically. It’s all about cutting out the manual work, eliminating duplicate data entry, and reducing the potential for human error that comes with it.
Ready to see how a clinically-trained voice AI can change how your practice operates? Simbie AI automates routine tasks like appointment scheduling and patient intake, cutting administrative overhead by up to 60%. Discover a smarter way to manage your clinic by visiting https://www.simbie.ai.