I spent three days at AONL 2026. Here’s what stayed with me.
I’ve been a nurse for 35 years. I’ve done the rounds, stood at the bedside, and sat in a lot of conference halls watching the health tech industry try to explain itself to clinicians. Last week in Chicago at AONL 2026, something felt genuinely different.
The question wasn’t whether AI belongs in nursing. It was how to make it work, and how to make sure nurses get to shape it.
I was there representing CipherHealth, giving demos of our Ambient Listening technology inside CipherRounds. But more than showing a product, I was listening. Which, as it turns out, is the whole point.
Ambient Listening was everywhere — on the floor and on the stage
If you walked the exhibit hall at AONL 2026 then you couldn’t miss it: ambient listening was showing up across booths, in conversations, and on stage. Multiple vendors were showcasing it. Health systems were presenting on it. It wasn’t a niche topic tucked into a breakout, it was a through-line of the entire conference.
What struck me wasn’t just the volume of the conversation. It was the maturity of it. Nurse leaders weren’t asking ‘what is this?’ anymore. They were asking ‘how do we implement it well?’ and ‘how do we protect what makes nursing, nursing?’ That shift in the question tells you everything about where the industry is headed. The best technology doesn’t ask nurses to adapt to it. It adapts to how nurses actually workflow.
That’s not a technology argument. That’s a nursing argument. And it’s exactly why this technology, done right, is one of the most meaningful shifts our profession has seen in a long time.
The ROI is real. Less time documenting after-the-fact, more consistent patient feedback, faster service recovery. But the human case is what moves me. When a nurse walks into a patient’s room and stays fully present in that conversation, without a screen competing for attention, something changes. Patients feel it. Nurses feel it.
“It’s about time.”
I gave a lot of demos at our booth this past week. I showed how Ambient Listening works inside CipherRounds — the nurse rounds, the conversation is captured, AI structures it in real time, and the nurse reviews and approves. No new system. No extra steps. No memory tax at the end of a twelve-hour shift.
After one demo, a nurse leader looked at me and said, simply: “It’s about time.”
Two words that said everything. Because this problem isn’t new. Nurses have been splitting their attention between patients and documentation for too long. The tools have just finally caught up to what the bedside actually needs.
Rounding is where some of the most valuable patient insight gets generated and where most of it gets lost. A patient mentions the food is cold, that they’re not sleeping, that they’re anxious about going home. The nurse hears it. Then they leave the room and try to reconstruct it from memory while managing everything else. That’s not a failure of the nurse. That’s a failure of the system.
AI’s real job: Give nurses their expertise back
The anxiety I heard most on the floor was this: will AI diminish the nurse’s role? Will efficiency come at the cost of clinical judgment?
Here’s what I believe: the right AI doesn’t replace the nurse. It returns the nurse to the reason they became a nurse.
Nursing has accumulated an enormous administrative debt. EHRs, compliance charting, structured data entry — all necessary, and all pulling clinicians away from the work only they can do. When ambient tools give nurses even an hour back per shift, that translates to real presence at the bedside. That’s what “top of license” looks like in practice. Not a policy statement. A daily reality.
The technology is ready. Leadership is the lever.
If there was a cautionary note at AONL, it was this: technology alone doesn’t transform care. Leadership does. The most successful implementations are the ones where nurse leaders build psychological safety on pilot units, bring their teams into the process early, and communicate transparently when things need to adjust.
Culture moves at the speed of trust. You can’t mandate innovation. You have to earn it.
Walking the floor this week, I was struck not just by the interest in ambient listening, but by the readiness. Nurse leaders aren’t waiting to be handed solutions. They’re asking hard questions and leaning in. The appetite for tools that work inside existing workflows — without adding complexity, without asking already-stretched teams to do more — was everywhere.
Stay present with patients. Not screens.
That’s what we had on the backdrop at our booth. It’s not marketing copy. It’s the clinical argument. And from what I heard in Chicago last week, nursing is ready to claim it.
Donna Pritchard, DNP, MSN, FNP-BC, is VP of Clinical Strategy at CipherHealth. CipherHealth’s Ambient Listening capability is available within CipherRounds. You can request a demo here.