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Healthcare in the AI Era

Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project Healthcare research revisited in 2026New Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project research explores the Shifting Clinical Gap

The clinical workforce challenge in healthcare has fundamentally changed—and so has the solution. AI is no longer on the horizon. It is embedded in clinical workflows, reshaping roles, and demanding a new kind of workforce capability that most organizations are not yet equipped to build.

Healthcare in the AI Era: The Shifting Clinical Gap is the latest report from The Josh Bersin Company’s Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project. It examines how AI is reframing the clinical capacity crisis, transforming healthcare roles, and raising the bar on skills—all at a pace that most organizations are struggling to match.

Submit the form below to gain access to the full Healthcare in the AI Era report and to indicate interest in speaking with our team about corporate membership, including access to Galileo®:

What’s Inside the Report:

With support from Eightfold.AI, the new GWI research revisits Healthcare, the first industry studied in the project. The latest data shows that:

The clinical gap has shifted. The nursing shortage is narrowing—projections show an 8% registered nurse shortfall in 2028, easing to 3% by 2038—but nurse turnover rose to 18% in 2025, costing hospitals an average of $60,000 per departing bedside nurse. Meanwhile, the physician gap is widening to over 140,000 full-time physicians by 2038, affecting 30 of 35 specialties.

Healthcare is the fastest AI adopter, yet integration lags. Healthcare is adopting AI at 2.2 times the rate of the broader economy, with the largest investments in ambient clinical documentation ($600M) and coding and billing automation ($450M). Half of healthcare providers have reached the workflow automation stage of AI maturity or beyond, compared with only 35% of other industries. Yet technology integration—not skill gaps—remains the leading barrier to scaling AI.

Clinical roles are being transformed, not eliminated. AI-hybrid roles—clinical AI trainers, health informatics specialists, AI workflow designers, clinical data governance leads—are growing rapidly, many of which did not exist as formal job titles just four years ago. Home health and personal care aides lead projected job growth (847,000 new jobs by 2035), while nurse practitioners (+41%) and physician assistants (+21%) lead in percentage terms.

A new skills imperative: “dual fluency.” The future-ready nurse must combine deep clinical expertise with AI output literacy, clinical decision-support tools, telehealth platforms, and cross-functional collaboration skills. The largest employer-employee skill gap in healthcare is in communication—a 23-percentage-point gap that no technology alone can close.

Pacesetters start with the problem, not the technology. The top 5%–10% of healthcare organizations—what the report calls “pacesetters”—apply four diagnostic questions before selecting any AI tool: What business problem are we solving? How must work change? What workforce capabilities are required? How do we sustain progress? Organizations like Providence (projecting $100M–$150M in staffing savings through AI-based planning) and Bon Secours Mercy Health (where 52% of new hires cite an internal career pathways program as a reason for joining) demonstrate what this approach delivers in practice.

Activate this Research with Galileo Suite

Go beyond reading and put the research to work with Galileo Agent, The Josh Bersin Company’s AI-powered expert assistant. Use Galileo Agent to:

  • Ask diagnostic questions about your own clinical workforce gaps and get research-backed recommendations
  • Explore pacesetter practices from Providence and Bon Secours Mercy Health in the context of your organization’s challenges
  • Map skills adjacencies, career pathway strategies, and reskilling priorities grounded in GWI data
  • Compare your HR and L&D maturity against healthcare industry benchmarks
  • Generate custom action plans for redesigning clinical roles around top-of-license work
  • Galileo Agent synthesizes insights from over 50,000 verified research assets to give HR and clinical workforce leaders the precision and speed that today’s pace of change demands.

The research is the foundation; building the skills to act on it is the next step. Galileo Learn™ offers expert-developed courses directly relevant to the challenges explored in this report:

  • Dynamic Skilling: A Business Imperative — Understand why dynamic skilling is a strategic necessity in the AI era, and how high-performing organizations build skilling ecosystems that anticipate and close clinical and operational gaps before they emerge.
  • The AI-First L&D Paradigm — Explore how leading learning organizations are redesigning L&D from the ground up for skills velocity—the capability that healthcare organizations need most urgently right now.
  • Pacesetters in the Superworker Era — Learn how the top-performing organizations are redesigning work around AI to create superjobs, build superworkers, and sustain reinvention—directly applicable to clinical role transformation in health systems.
  • The Superworker Organization: AI Goes Enterprise — Understand the 2026 HR and leadership imperatives and how superagents, supermanagers, and superteams are reshaping workforce strategy across industries, including healthcare.
  • AI in Skills-Based HR Approaches — Learn how to use AI to map skills adjacencies, build clinical career pathways, and shift from job-based to skills-based talent strategies.
  • What Is Talent Intelligence? — Master the foundational approach to combining internal and external data to close workforce gaps through the Four Rs: recruit, retain, reskill, and redesign.

Related Resources:

Healthcare in the AI Era: The Shifting Clinical Gap was developed as part of The Josh Bersin Company’s Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project, which combines proprietary labor market data, AI-powered role and skills analysis, HR maturity benchmarking, and in-depth case studies to give HR and business leaders the most current, actionable view of workforce trends by industry.

Corporate members of The Josh Bersin Company receive full access to all GWI research, including this report, plus Galileo Agent, Galileo Learn, and advisory support from Josh Bersin Company experts. Membership gives HR leaders and teams the skills, strategies, benchmarks, and insights needed to build cutting-edge people strategies in the AI era.