This is the new reality for patients at a small number of clinics in Southern California that are run by the medical startup Akido Labs. Instead, they see a medical assistant, who can lend a sympathetic ear but has limited clinical training. A doctor then approves, or corrects, the AI system’s recommendations. There’s a big gap in expertise between doctors and AI-enhanced medical assistants, says Emma Pierson, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley. What distinguishes ScopeAI, Goodner says, is its ability to independently complete the cognitive tasks that constitute a medical visit, from eliciting a patient’s medical history to coming up with a list of potential diagnoses to identifying the most likely diagnosis and proposing appropriate next steps.