I was honored to deliver the keynote address at the PCC Conference 2025 in Washington,D.C. This vital event, themed “scaling What works for Better Health,” convened hundreds of leaders, clinicians, and advocates dedicated to strengthening primary care in the United States.

I extend my sincere gratitude to Ann greiner, President and CEO of the primary Care Collaborative, for her inspiring leadership, and to Clive Fields, founder of village MD, for his insightful introduction and interview. My thanks also go to the dedicated staff and volunteers who made the conference such a success.

Their work,and the conference itself,underscore a belief I’ve long held: primary care is the cornerstone of American medicine. yet, despite growing patient needs, investment in primary care – in terms of time, respect, and resources – has lagged behind.

We are now at a critical juncture. Primary care physicians are facing unprecedented pressures from rising chronic disease rates, increasing administrative burdens, and the demand for more personalized care. Fortunately,a powerful new tool has emerged in the last two years with the potential to transform the profession: generative AI (GenAI).

If implemented strategically, GenAI can empower primary care doctors to reclaim their time, combat burnout, and rebuild the crucial doctor-patient relationship.However, realizing this future requires proactive leadership from clinicians.This was the central message of my keynote.

A 2022 study in The Journal of General Internal Medicine revealed a stark reality: a primary care physician would need over 26.7 hours each day to provide all recommended preventive, chronic, and acute care to their patients. This is an impractical workload, even before accounting for documentation, inbox management, and follow-up tasks.

It’s no surprise that so many primary care doctors feel overwhelmed and burned out. In response,many health systems are turning to AI for support. Though, current conversations and solutions are frequently enough too limited in scope.

Currently, the primary submission of GenAI in healthcare is administrative – tasks like ambient listening, transcription, note-writing, referral drafting, and prior authorization. while these applications offer some relief by reducing documentation time,thay are insufficient to address the escalating challenges posed by the chronic disease epidemic. GenAI must be viewed not as a sophisticated scribe, but as a .

Emerging evidence demonstrates that GenAI systems are already achieving diagnostic accuracy comparable to, and sometimes exceeding, that of physicians. Studies from Stanford and Harvard show large language models can analyze complex patient histories with remarkable skill. And with GenAI capabilities doubling annually, these tools are rapidly improving.

Soon, GenAI will assist doctors in identifying care gaps, triaging urgent issues, recommending personalized treatment plans, and proactively managing chronic diseases in real-time. Integrated with wearable devices and trained on interactions between leading disease management clinicians and their patients, these tools will be adept at recognizing when medical conditions are poorly controlled and require intervention.

Looking further ahead, artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI capable of human-level reasoning, learning, and problem-solving across multiple domains – is projected to arrive within the next five years.AGI will transcend the role of assistant and be recognized as