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AI and the business of practice

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Presentation

Getting It Done Conference · Lincolnshire Local Medical Committee · 18 September 2025

Invited presentation

Overview

This presentation explores how generative AI can act as a virtual business consultant for GP practice managers — making sophisticated business development support accessible without specialist expertise or significant cost. The talk moves through six practical use cases: building a compelling online presence, targeting patient demographic groups, enhancing patient experience through education and content, strategic service development using deep research tools, ethical implementation and data protection policies, and managing the change process with staff. Each use case includes example prompts and AI-generated outputs demonstrated with real practice scenarios.

Slides

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  • What software engineers can teach us about AI in doctoral research

    PhD students are using AI across their doctoral work, but current policies focus on permission rather than specification. Drawing on how software engineers solved a structurally identical problem, this post introduces the research harness: a seven-part operating context that makes AI contributions visible, traceable, and supervisable. The harness addresses drift, offloaded thinking, and attribution failures — not by restricting AI use, but by specifying what the agent can and cannot do within the work.

  • The research harness: a framework for bounded AI use in doctoral work

    Current responses to AI use in doctoral research locate the problem either with institutions through policy, or with students through judgement and AI literacy. This essay argues that neither response addresses the structural source of the difficulty. The characteristic problems of AI use in doctoral research are not problems of policy or capability; they are problems of working with an agent in the absence of a defined operating context. Drawing on software engineering practice, it develops the concept of the research harness: a structured specification, negotiated between researcher and supervisor, of what an AI agent is doing in a doctoral project. The harness has seven components — knowledge base, interpretive permissions, tools, authority, scope register, process record, and amendment protocol — and can be entered at a minimal level and developed iteratively alongside the work.

  • We're comparing AI chatbot health advice to the wrong thing

    One in seven people in the UK are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing a GP. The institutional response has been to warn them off, but that response applies a standard it doesn't consistently apply to anything else in the system. This post argues that the risk comparison driving those warnings is systematically skewed, and that a more honest accounting points toward an entirely different kind of response.

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