The increasing presence of AI in healthcare settings and the use of AI tools in clinical trials raise questions about how these tools can be rigorously evaluated to generate the best evidence base for their potential benefits and harms. At the NIH Collaboratory’s 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting, we spoke with Jeremy Sugarman and Adrian Hernandez about AI, research ethics, and the role of pragmatic trials in evaluating new technologies.

“The are so many ways AI is being used in healthcare and in clinical trials; the key challenge is that the technologies are rapidly evolving,” Hernandez said. “Can we keep up with the evidence generation around that? And how do we deploy things into the healthcare system knowing that they can be trusted and won’t change over time?” Hernandez is a co–principal investigator for the NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Coordinating Center, professor of medicine at Duke University, and executive director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute.

Go to the full video.

“The hope for medicine is that [AI will] improve something in the way we deliver healthcare. There are multiple ways that might happen, through better therapeutics, through increasing efficiencies within healthcare systems, but we don’t know if any of that’s true,” added Sugarman, a cochair of the NIH Collaboratory’s Ethics and Regulatory Core and the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Bioethics and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

“That’s the point where pragmatic clinical trials can come in and say, if there’s some evidence, not just somebody’s hope or whim or aspiration, that one of these things could actually help with healthcare, then we want to test that, and we want to test it to make sure that it doesn’t make things actually worse—and that’s where the ethics comes in,” Sugarman said.

In the coming weeks, we will share more highlights from the 2026 Annual Steering Committee Meeting. Access the complete meeting materials.