Virtual Journal Club: AI-Enhanced CPD as a Rapidly Evolving Sociotechnical System: A Theoretical Framing

Overview

Join us for this important session to review and discuss the interaction between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the complexity of Healthcare CPD. Our panelists will present why and how we need to invest in our capacity to govern AI-enhanced CPD and to avoid AI taking the dominant governance role.

Artificial intelligence is transforming CPD practices. Yet much of the literature treats AI as a set of tools or as isolated concerns such as ethics, literacy, or explainability—rather than as a system-transforming force. The recently published paper positions CPD as a complex socio-technological system that is being transformed by AI in ways that are fundamentally changing that system and the nature of learning, governance, and professionalism. Therefore, a need emerged for a unifying theoretical framework to govern the transformations AI is bringing to CPD.

In this session, we will discuss the toolset that can help guide that transformation: ALEERRT-CA. It is a theory-driven framework grounded in Complexity Theory and Actor-Network Theory. The framework can help us better understand and plan AI-enhanced CPD. By examining real-world CPD ecosystems, the framework showcases how agency is redistributed among humans and technologies, how black boxes (complex systems we do not understand well) emerge at the system level, and why our governance capacity must evolve alongside technological capability. During this discussion, we will invite participants to move beyond tool adoption toward (re)designing AI-enhanced and human-centric systems. The goal is to increase our capacity to design trustworthy AI-enhanced CPD in which humans are actors and AI is a tool – because the alternative is a system designed by AI in which humans can be tools.

Whether you are a CPD researcher or practitioner, there will be something in this session relevant to your work. As always, we welcome your thoughts and perspectives and hope to see you engaged in our VJC.