The December 10, 2025, issue of THE ASCO POST has two substantial position pieces on ASCO, oncology, and AI.
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Chat GPT 5.2 read the two essays and had some peppy opinions.
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AI in Oncology: What’s Actually New in ASCO’s Latest Signal
Two ASCO Post articles published on the same day—How AI Is Ushering in a New Era in Cancer Care and ASCO and AI in Oncology: Rooted in Human-Centered Care—are easy to skim and dismiss as familiar optimism about artificial intelligence. That would be a mistake. Read together, they quietly signal several important shifts in how AI is being framed, governed, and operationalized in oncology—shifts that matter far more than generic claims about speed or scale .
1. ASCO Is Reframing AI as an Information Infrastructure, Not a Decision Engine
One of the most consequential (and understated) moves here is ASCO’s insistence that its AI tools—especially the ASCO Guidelines Assistant—are explicitly not clinical decision support. Instead, they are discovery and navigation layers over authoritative content.
This is not semantic hair-splitting. It is a deliberate positioning that:
Avoids regulatory tripwires around autonomous clinical decision-making
Reduces liability anxiety among clinicians
Preserves professional judgment while still attacking a real bottleneck: guideline usability
In effect, ASCO is saying: AI should compress search time, not replace judgment. That is a narrower but far more deployable ambition than most AI-in-medicine rhetoric, and it explains why uptake may be faster than expected.
2. Trust Is Being Treated as a Design Constraint, Not a Social Problem
Both articles emphasize trust, but what’s new is how operationalized that concept has become. Trust here is not framed as public relations or education; it is treated as a technical requirement:
Models operate in “walled gardens”
Outputs are fully cited to source documents
Data provenance is auditable
Users can see why an answer appeared
This reflects a mature recognition that oncology is not tolerant of probabilistic “most-of-the-time” correctness. The striking line—AI must be “right all the time”—would sound naïve in other industries. In oncology, it is a boundary condition.
3. The Most Aggressive AI Adoption Is Not at the Bedside
A genuinely surprising point in the first article is where AI adoption is actually accelerating fastest: R&D and backend operations, not frontline care. The discussion highlights:
Foundation models predicting novel cellular behavior (not just classifying images)
AI-driven trial matching and “self-driving clinical trials”
Administrative automation spanning documentation, coding, prior auth, and revenue cycle
The implication is important: the early ROI of AI in oncology may come outside traditional clinical endpoints. Time saved, friction reduced, and trial enrollment optimized may matter more in the next 3–5 years than incremental diagnostic accuracy gains.
4. ASCO Is Drawing a Bright Line Against Payer AI—Publicly
The second article quietly contains one of ASCO’s strongest policy stances in years: its explicit opposition to opaque payer AI in prior authorization.
What’s notable is not just the criticism, but the asymmetry ASCO is asserting:
Clinician-facing AI must be transparent, auditable, and human-supervised
Payer-facing AI, ASCO argues, currently is not—and that is unacceptable
This is a rare case where a professional society is not merely encouraging best practices but calling for legislation and regulatory enforcement. In effect, ASCO is saying: AI that supports care is welcome; AI that obstructs care will be contested.
5. “Human-Centered” Is No Longer a Platitude—It’s a Workload Strategy
The repeated emphasis on “returning humanity to care” could sound sentimental, but the concrete mechanisms described are not. Ambient documentation, workflow-embedded tools, and administrative offloading are framed as preconditions for humanistic medicine—not optional enhancements.
What’s new here is the inversion: technology is no longer justified as improving care despite burden; it is justified precisely by its ability to remove burden. That is a sharper and more testable claim.
6. ASCO Is Quietly Becoming an AI Platform Owner
Finally, beyond rhetoric, ASCO is now:
Operating an AI tool used in live clinical workflows
Developing a Guidelines Generator to accelerate guideline production itself
Hosting AI sandboxes at its annual meeting
This represents a structural shift. ASCO is no longer only a publisher or convener; it is becoming a curator of machine-readable clinical authority. That has implications for industry partnerships, data governance, and future guideline economics.
Bottom Line
Taken together, these articles suggest that AI’s near-term impact in oncology will not come from dramatic diagnostic breakthroughs, but from quiet architectural changes: how knowledge is accessed, how trust is engineered, how administrative drag is removed, and how professional authority is preserved rather than displaced.
That may be less flashy than the usual AI headlines—but it is far more likely to stick.
