AI Is Here: Nini Wu, MD, on Embracing Artificial Intelligence in Community Oncology

The evolving role of artificial intelligence (AI) in cancer care was the topic of many conversations at the 2025 Community Oncology Conference, organized by the Community Oncology Alliance (COA), in Orlando, Florida.

Nini Wu, MD, MBA, chief medical and development officer at Navista, Cardinal Health, shared insights from her panel discussion at the meeting on the practical and promising ways AI is shaping the future of community oncology. Drawing on years of experience as a community medical oncologist, Wu emphasized that AI is no longer a distant possibility but a present reality, already being adopted by nearly half of practices. She emphasized a grounded, human-centered approach by viewing AI as a tool to support—not replace—the people at the heart of cancer care.

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Can you share the key takeaways from your COA 2025 discussion on the future implications of AI in oncology?
The key takeaways of AI in oncology, in particular for Community Oncology, is that it's here. Even a few years ago, there was discussion about the potential of AI in supporting community oncology, and there are projections of where it's going, and that is as high as 70% to 80% in the next 2 or 3 years. But we also know from a poll that we did at Cardinal that already 40% to 50% of practices are utilizing AI, so we start there.

The other takeaway of where AI is going and some of the really exciting new capabilities that Dr Flora emphasized that will support patients and their journey through how the revenue cycle is taken care of, to reduce that patient challenge and experience and how physicians and other clinicians will be able to deliver the care is incredibly exciting. But the key takeaway that I bring to it is: how we go from where we were to continue forward to the future, through a very pragmatic viewpoint, is that we need to understand, at the end of the day, that AI is a tool that supports people.

We need to understand the human experience and the patients through their journey, as well as the work that the clinicians and the teams in the practices have to go through on their day-by-day basis. And how do we utilize the AI to support those specific steps? So it was really a focus, and in a sense, a mini manual on how to bring AI into the practices.