Artificial intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI) are reshaping the way clinicians’ access and digest information. Summaries appear instantly. Clarifications are offered in seconds. A review of a topic that once required significant deliberation and time can now be produced immediately with a short prompt.
Clinicians have always had access to information. What’s new is the immediate, personalized, and conversational way GenAI can help interpret it. Clinicians can ask an AI platform to break down complex topics, compare clinical studies, or create a customized explanation tailored to their needs. This could represent a significant shift in how knowledge is acquired by clinicians.
It sparks an important question for health professional educators:
If clinicians can receive interactive, individualized responses on demand, how can we best differentiate our offerings from AI platforms and continue to deliver unique value to the health professional community? Or simply, how do we keep making CE matter to clinicians?
This question doesn’t imply a diminished importance of CE. Instead, it aims to clarify what CE can deliver that AI cannot. When clinicians are asked what they value most from conferences, workshops, and live sessions, their answers consistently point toward the human elements: peer-to-peer exchange, networking, trusted faculty, validation from colleagues. In today’s landscape, CE is not competing with AI. It is evolving alongside it. The opportunity lies in designing learning experiences that leverage AI’s strengths while elevating what humans do best: reflect, converse, challenge, and learn from each other.
How AI Shapes Learning Efficiency in Continuing Education
AI excels at simplifying educational tasks such as:
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- generating summaries
- organizing complex information
- clarifying new concepts
- reviewing data or guidelines
All of this can help clinicians learn faster and more flexibly. But highly condensed or pre-organized educational material may leave less room for the deeper cognitive processes (like comparison, question-asking, perspective-taking) that traditionally happen in discussion and peer-based learning. As educators, we know that these reflective moments are where new insight forms, judgement improves, and professional growth takes shape.
Therefore, from the perspective of maximizing efficiency, the goal would not be to limit AI use but instead to ensure that clinicians still have opportunities for deliberate thinking, peer engagement, and metacognitive awareness as part of their educational journey.
Why Social Learning Strengthens Metacognition
Metacognition (being aware of your own reasoning and learning from it) is a vital part of CE. Clinicians rely on it to monitor understanding, recognize gaps, evaluate assumptions, and refine professional judgment. These skills thrive in environments where ideas are verbalized and compared.
Social learning environments create that opportunities to enhance these skills by inviting clinicians to:
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- articulate their interpretation of a concept
- hear how others approach the same material
- compare reasoning strategies
- reflect on different viewpoints and feedback
- refine their understanding in real time
A single question from a colleague can activate more cognitive processing than an hour of passive content review. That type of peer dialogue enhances retention, supports mastery, and helps clinicians apply new knowledge with confidence in their practice environments.
AI can accelerate access to knowledge. Social learning supports better decision-making, practice change, and lifelong learning.
Small Group Learning Enables Distributed Cognition
The use of GenAI is generally a solo activity with all cognition centered on optimizing the output to your prompts. Learning within groups distributes cognitive effort across multiple people, teams, tools and systems, allowing learning to more accurately reflect real-life decision making.
In small-group CE settings, clinicians are given the opportunity to interpret concepts and case-based material through multiple perspectives:
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- clinical experience
- ethical considerations
- specialty background
- cultural context
- long-term reasoning strategies
One clinician may notice a nuance others missed. Another might offer a different rationale. Someone else may ask a clarifying question that reframes the discussion entirely.
This shared cognitive process strengthens professional reasoning and builds the reflective habits that CE can uniquely support and lead to deeper understanding.
The Bottom Line: Evolving Together
GenAI will continue to be a powerful ally in continuing education. It improves access, streamlines information gathering, and supports busy clinicians. Continuing education that integrates metacognition, social learning, and distributed cognition will continue to hold exceptional value to health professionals as they increasingly engage with AI platforms. Together, these approaches to CE help clinicians not just acquire knowledge, but actively reflect, collaborate, and apply it in real-world practice. By promoting self-awareness of reasoning, peer discussion, and team- or system-based problem-solving, CE programs will continue to strengthen clinical judgment, support practice change, and improve patient outcomes.