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AI adoption in medicine is accelerating: More than 12,000 primary care clinicians have enrolled in Canada Health Infoway's national AI scribe program, about 5,000 Ontario physicians use AI scribes and roughly one in five Canadian physicians now use AI tools. Almost 60% report a cut in administrative time.

AI scribes are tools that, with the patient's consent, listen to a clinical visit and automatically draft the physician's notes.

We're writing as an emergency physician who has led digital transformation in emergency departments for six years and advises on AI readiness (Ali Abdalvand), and an organizational psychologist studying burnout and responsible AI adoption (Ehsan Etezad). Our observation is that AI keeps its narrow promise of saving time. But without proper frameworks, it quietly adds new burdens that absorb those savings. We believe the fix is organizational.

Burnout stems from mismatches in workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values, not from any single task such as paperwork. One study found electronic health record design and use accounted for just 6.8% of the differences in burnout between clinicians. When work conditions such as a chaotic atmosphere and lack of control over workload were also considered, that number rose to 36.2%.

In emergency medicine, physicians are interrupted 7.9 times an hour, and prescribing error rates nearly triple with interruptions. No scribe changes that.

I think we can all relate to the idea that when you complete one task efficiently and save some time, new demands fill the space, making it seem as though nothing was saved in the first place.

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