AI health coaches aren’t just for athletes anymore. They’re starting to handle the day-to-day interpretation, advice, and treatment adjustments that once required doctors. From glucose monitoring to hypertension management, technologies like Dexcom, Teladoc, and Omada are quietly taking over the work of routine clinical decision-making. This new generation of digital health coaches marks the next step in a long trend — technology shrinking healthcare by making us need it less.

The naturalist John Muir saw how everything in nature is connected — and today AI is showing us the same truth inside the body. From Apple Watch studies on atrial fibrillation to new hypertension alerts, hidden links in long-collected data are transforming how we understand health.

The overwhelming majority of health-relevant data —movement, behavior, speech, sleep — is now generated outside the clinical setting. As a result, health innovation is increasingly shifting toward consumer devices and tech platforms that actually hold the data — not the EHR or the healthcare system.

Hospitals worry about retail clinics and other healthcare competitors. But real disruption may come from outside healthcare entirely: cars that don’t crash. As autonomous driving becomes safer and more widespread, the revenue ripple effects on emergency departments, orthopedics, and imaging will be profound—and sooner than most systems expect.

The public conversation about AI in healthcare swings between extremes—some predict it will replace doctors, others that it will usher in a golden age for medicine. So which is it? In my recent American Family Physician editorial, I explore how AI is less a disruptor of doctors than a powerful accelerator of consumer-driven health.

Innovations like GLP-1 drugs, self-driving cars and AI therapy chatbots are driving down illness, injury and the demand for traditional care. Rather than just improving delivery, these shifts reduce the need for doctors altogether. Snack food CEOs are planning for an Ozempic world. Why aren’t healthcare execs?

Smartphone apps that can diagnose pneumonia? FDA-approved machines that can diagnose conditions without a doctor? Robot psychotherapy? It’s not coming, it’s here now.