If you’ve felt a little dizzy keeping up with AI lately, you’re not alone.
In the past year alone, we’ve seen a flood of new large language models—GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini, Llama, Mistral and more—each arriving with breathless announcements about what it can do. New terminology is multiplying just as fast. Agentic AI. Retrieval-augmented generation. Multimodal models. And now MCP—Model Context Protocol—a standard that allows AI systems to connect with external tools and data sources, essentially letting AI “reach out” and interact with other software in real time. Each of these represents something real and worth understanding. But taken all at once, they can produce more confusion than clarity.
For clinicians running busy practices, this pace isn’t just inconvenient—it can be paralyzing. The sheer volume of what you could learn about AI makes it tempting to wait until things settle down. They won’t.
Bite-Sized AI Education
That’s exactly why we structure AI in Eye Care the way we do. When you listen to the Real Talk podcast, our Knowledge Bytes are short, focused segments that pair with this publication, both of which are built on a simple premise: you don’t need to understand everything about AI to benefit from it. You need digestible, clinically relevant pieces you can actually absorb between patients. Stack enough of those, and the bigger picture starts to take shape.
We’re not the only ones thinking this way. The U.S. Department of Labor recently launched “Make America AI-Ready,” a free, seven-day AI literacy course delivered entirely by text message. Daily lessons take about 10 minutes, with interactive challenges that teach concepts and ask participants to practice. The course is intentionally designed for those who may be a little fearful of or unsure about AI. The five core content areas include understanding AI principles, exploring AI uses, directing AI effectively, evaluating AI outcomes and using AI responsibly. You can enroll for free by texting READY to 20202.
The federal government building a bite-sized, accessible AI curriculum and delivering it via SMS tells you something about where we are as a country: widespread AI fluency is now considered a workforce priority, not a tech-sector perk.
Pick One Thing
So how does a busy ophthalmologist or optometrist cut through the noise?
My advice: pick one thing.
Analysis paralysis is real, and AI can theoretically touch almost every corner of your practice—documentation, coding, patient communication, diagnostic support, scheduling, prior auth. That breadth is exactly what makes it overwhelming. The solution isn’t to tackle it all. It’s to start somewhere specific and small enough to actually finish.
For me, that starting point was operative notes. I began having AI assist with drafting op notes—a task that is time-consuming, repetitive and structurally predictable, which makes it well-suited for AI augmentation. The time savings were immediate. More importantly, it gave me a concrete, low-stakes environment to learn how to prompt effectively, evaluate AI output critically and build confidence in the workflow before expanding to anything else.
You don’t need to understand MCP or memorize the differences between competing models to do this. You need one use case, a willingness to iterate and a few minutes a day.
That’s what we’re here for.
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