As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in the technologies ophthalmology practices use every day, leaders must distinguish meaningful solutions from the hype. In the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) 2026 Meeting course, “The AI-Enabled Eye Clinic: What Every Practice Leader Needs to Know,” Jeffery Daigrepont explores how practices can approach AI adoption strategically, with careful consideration of vendor contracts, data use, intellectual property, and long-term commitments.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

My name is Jeffery Daigrepont. I'm a senior vice president with the Coker Group. I've been with the firm for 27 years, and my only disclaimer is that we have no affiliations or conflicts of interest with vendors, and that's intentional. We believe it's best to be at arm's length. And so with that said, I'm excited to share with you that I'm going to be presenting this year on the AI-enabled clinic.

There's a couple key takeaways that I really hope, if you attend that session, that you leave with. First and foremost, I think it's extremely important that we try our best to define what AI is and what AI isn't. There is a lot of hype, and I'm deeply concerned that we see a lot of what we found a few years ago when electronic health records (EHRs) all came rushing in. At the highest point, there were over 600 vendors in the market, and today, there's just a handful. I see that same thing kind of playing out right now. In fact, when we ask the audience, and I'll even ask now, how many people are actually using AI? And the vast majority of hands will go up whether it's in your job or in your personal life. But then I'll ask, when did you buy it? When did you install it? Who gave it to you?

If you go Google search right now, it's powered by AI. If you're using Microsoft, you'll see Copilot is sitting there. These companies are ingesting large quantities of data and information to monetize and build their tools. So as that one Netflix documentary said, if you're not paying for the product, maybe we are the product. I say that because I think if you rush out and go purchase, contract, and financially obligate yourself the tools that may be inherently part of your core solution, you may find yourself committing to things that may not necessarily be necessary. So at the end of the road here, is AI going to be a product or a company or is it going to be features and functions that just organically exist within the tools that we use every day? And in fact, there are even some people that are speculating that we may have this concept of the headless EHR where there is no keyboards, there's no monitors, there's no servers—there's just sensors that are grabbing information.

And you might think that's kind of far out there and futuristic, but we now have cars that can drive themselves around cities. I'm sure you've seen them. We have tools that automate and facilitate transactions all the time that are not human involved and there's no hands on keyboards of any kind. It's just automatically occurring. The second takeaway that I hope we can leave you with is, if you're going to contract and you're going to commit to AI solutions, we have to understand what that means from a contractual standpoint. Who owns the IP? How's the data being used? What's your obligation if the product doesn't work as promised? What are your termination rights? And as anyone has seen over the years, there's a lot of technology that rushes in only to be seen not in existence in 2 to 3 years from now.

That's not to discourage you. I think everyone needs to be aware. I think you need to be curious. I think you need to be exploring and looking for ways to adopt, but I would encourage you to go into this with a little bit of skepticism. More importantly, make sure that you understand what your contractual obligations are. Something we've been doing for the Academy for a number of years, if you attend the conference or even if you want to follow up after the conference: We will review your vendor contracts at no cost. That's something that helps us learn and understand what the vendor community's offering and how they're asking you to commit and contract for, but more importantly, it allows us to give us feedback. And as they say, it takes a village.

So with that being said, I want to thank everyone for listening to this short video. Let me thank you again, and I'd love to thank the Ophthalmology Management publication for their inviting me to participate. Thank you.