New Report: Hospitals Are Rolling Out AI—But Nurses Say They’re Being Left Behind

Nurses are absorbing rising patient loads, growing administrative work, and increasingly complex cases, but a new global report says they are also being handed AI tools they were never trained on, in workplaces where their voices are rarely heard. The Clinician of the Future 2026: Nurses Edition report from Elsevier, released around International Nurses Day, surveyed 692 nurses and 2,065 doctors across 118 countries between December 2025 and February 2026.

The headline finding is that nurses lag well behind doctors on AI adoption, but the gap is not about willingness. According to Axios, the report points to a lack of training, a lack of nursing-specific tools, and a workforce that is not being invited into decisions about how AI gets deployed at the bedside. And that gap is showing up in trust. Only 42% of nurses say AI tools are trustworthy today.

Indeed, this data aligns with Nurse.org’s own 2026 State of Nursing Survey findings about AI use among nurses which showed similarly concerning trends. Read more in: Nurses Are Being Asked to Use AI Tools They Don’t Trust & Were Never Trained On.

Compared to a year ago, 61% of nurses say they are seeing more patients. About 71% still believe they have enough time to provide good care, which is actually higher than doctors at 60%. But for nurses who said the opposite, the pressure points are familiar: high patient volumes (71%), excessive administration (64%), a lack of support staff (56%), and increasing complexity of patients’ medical needs (56%).

Burnout is showing up in the data too. 34% of nurses said they have experienced tiredness or exhaustion that has impaired their ability to treat patients effectively. 43% said keeping up with medical advances is challenging, and 42% said the same about keeping up with new technologies.

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The most striking gap in the report is not about technology, it is about who gets to make decisions. 41% of nurses said their views are rarely or never adequately represented in their organization’s decision-making processes. Only 19% of doctors said their own views are rarely or never represented.

Amy Hall, dean of nursing at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University, told Axios that “nurses need a stronger voice in which tools are adopted,” pointing to the gap between available AI solutions and nursing-specific clinical needs.

Overall, 41% of nurses report using AI at work, compared to 57% of doctors. Of nurses who do use AI, only 30% frequently use a clinical-specific tool, versus 37% of doctors. Instead, many nurses lean on generalist AI for professional education (42%), patient education (40%), and querying medical literature (34%).

Elsevier points to a structural reason: tools designed for nursing workflows lag significantly behind physician-focused tools. A scoping review in BMC Nursing found that research on clinical decision support systems built for the nursing process lags behind work on systems for physicians, and that development for nurses “remains in its infancy.”

There is also a time problem. Nurses are at the bedside far more than doctors. Research published in the American Journal of Medicine found that on a day shift in ICU settings, patients spend 86% of their care time with nurses and only 13% with doctors. That leaves less white space in a nurse’s day to learn and lean on AI, especially when training is missing. Only 46% of nurses said their institution is good at providing AI training, and just over half said the same about access (51%) and governance (51%).

Despite all of that, nurses are not anti-AI. 80% of nurses said AI will not replace clinicians but will become a critical assistant in the next 5 to 10 years. 78% expect AI skills will be essential to clinician training, and 61% expect clinicians using AI will deliver better care than those who do not.

One nurse from the United States, quoted in the report, said AI “allows me to spend more time looking at and talking with my patients instead of taking notes. It also is very helpful in creating patient education materials or instructions that can be tailored to their specific needs.”

But trust is still a problem. Only 42% of nurses said AI tools are trustworthy today. When asked what would change that, nurses pointed to tools that are easy to use (65%), comprehensive across multiple sources (62%), transparent with citations (61%), safe and unlikely to cause harm (60%), and built on peer-reviewed content (60%).

This report lands at a moment when hospital systems are rolling out AI documentation assistants, ambient scribes, predictive monitoring, and triage tools, often with limited input from the nurses who actually use them. The Elsevier data is one of the largest global signals so far that the rollout has a representation problem, not just a technology problem.

For nurses, this matters in three concrete ways:

1. When tools are designed without nursing workflows in mind, the documentation burden and the cognitive load both fall back on you.
2. When training budgets skip the bedside, nurses end up using generalist chatbots for patient education and clinical questions, which raises safety concerns, as these tools do not always produce reliable answers.
3. The report adds documented evidence to a long-standing argument inside healthcare: nurses belong on AI governance committees, technology selection panels, and policy working groups, not just on the receiving end of whatever IT decides to deploy.

Interested to learn more? Read about Nurse.org’s AI findings in: Nurses Are Being Asked to Use AI Tools They Don’t Trust & Were Never Trained On.

🤔 Has your hospital asked nurses for input before rolling out new AI tools, or do they just show up on your shift? Tell us in the comments below.

Nursing Industry Research