If you're a medical writer in 2026 and wondering where to actually begin with AI, you're not alone. The conversation has quickly moved from "Should we use AI?" to "How do we use AI responsibly, and how do I get up to speed?" This series is meant to be a practical on-ramp. In Part 1, we'll focus on orientation: understanding the landscape, getting grounded in professional guidance, and identifying a few low-risk places to start. Parts 2 and 3 (coming soon) will dig into specific workflows and building durable, ethical practices for the long term.
Start by grounding yourself in professional guidance. Before you open a single AI tool, it's worth understanding what your professional community already recommends. The International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) has been one of the clearest voices on AI use in medical communications. Its Position Statement and Call to Action on AI, first published in 2023, was followed in September 2025 by an Enhanced Guidance commentary from the ISMPP AI Task Force that focuses on three practical themes: education and training, implementation and use, and advocacy and engagement. Reading these gives you a shared vocabulary and a sense of the guardrails the field is converging on, especially around human oversight and transparency.
Learn the language before the tools. AI carries a lot of jargon, and it's easy to feel behind. ISMPP's AI Lexicon and its companion 101-level introduction to AI terms are a gentle place to build literacy on concepts like large language models, context windows, and prompting. You don't need to become a data scientist; you need enough fluency to ask good questions, evaluate vendor claims, and talk credibly with authors and clients about what these tools can and can't do.
Pick low-risk, high-oversight starting points. The safest early use cases are ones where you remain firmly in control and where errors are easy to catch. Think summarizing your own meeting notes, drafting kick-off call minutes, brainstorming outlines, or tightening your own prose. ISMPP's Checklist for Use of AI in the Generation of a Manuscript from a Study Report is a useful map here, walking through where AI can assist and, just as importantly, where quality control and human judgment must stay in the loop. The recurring theme across all of this guidance is that AI augments the medical writer rather than replacing the accountability that sits with you.
Mind the ethics and the copyright traps early. Two issues deserve attention from day one: disclosure and content rights. Authors and writers are increasingly expected to be transparent about AI use, and ISMPP's checklists for both writers and authors emphasize appropriate disclosure, bias awareness, and patient privacy. Separately, uploading scientific, technical, and medical content into generative AI platforms raises real copyright questions, which ISMPP addresses in its guidance on using STM content with these tools. Building these habits now is far easier than retrofitting them later.
Coming up in this series. Part 2 will get hands-on with specific medical writing workflows and how to integrate AI into them without sacrificing quality. Part 3 will look further ahead at building sustainable, ethical AI practices across a team. For now, the goal of Part 1 is simply this: get oriented, get grounded in trusted guidance, and take one small, well-supervised step. Timing for Parts 2 and 3 is to be determined, so check back soon.