Jason Szumski’s path reflects vet med’s AI workforce shift

CURRENT FULL VERSION: Jason Szumski, DVM, represents a career path that’s becoming more visible in veterinary medicine: the recent graduate who moves quickly from clinic floor to company founder. In Vet Life Reimagined’s WVC-era conversation about skills and AI tools shaping the future of the profession, Szumski’s story centered on building practical technology for veterinarians, not leaving the profession behind. That framing matters in a market where AI is increasingly being pitched as infrastructure for practice workflows, education, and clinician support. (vetmed.illinois.edu)

The background is familiar to many veterinary teams. New graduates face a steep transition from school to practice, and documentation demands can quickly collide with high caseloads and limited mentorship time. University of Illinois’ 2024 profile of Szumski and co-founder Aaron Smiley said those pressures directly informed VetSOAP’s design. Szumski described the confidence gap as a major challenge for early-career veterinarians, while also pointing to the practical reality that long-form notes become much harder when a clinician moves from one or two student cases a day to a full appointment load in practice. (vetmed.illinois.edu)

VetSOAP positions itself squarely in that workflow problem. The company says its software creates SOAP notes from audio recordings, emphasizes editable outputs, remote access, and a veterinarian-founded design, and lists pricing at $50 per user per month after a free trial. On its site, the company says it uses AWS and Anthropic-related infrastructure, and its privacy and terms pages draw a distinction between identifiable service data and de-identified data used for model improvement. That’s a notable detail for veterinary teams evaluating vendors, because the company’s privacy page says submitted user data is not retained to train LLMs, while its updated terms say de-identified service data may be used to train and improve VetSOAP’s own AI models and those of technology partners, with user consent controls referenced in account settings. (vetsoap.ai)

That tension around promise versus governance is also showing up in the wider AI scribe conversation. In a January 19, 2026, episode of The Cone of Shame, Andy Roark, DVM, MS, and Veterinary Innovation Council executive director Aaron Massecar, PhD, discussed AI scribes as a potentially meaningful answer to administrative burden, stronger records, and better client connection, while urging veterinarians to pay attention to how the tools are actually used. Vet Life Reimagined has explored a similar theme through conversations with Mike Mossop, DVM, and Christie Long, DVM, both of whom frame technology as something that should enhance care relationships and team sustainability rather than replace the human core of practice. Mossop described AI’s likely role as a “co-pilot” or highly functional digital assistant, while Long’s career arc—from software and business into clinical practice, telehealth, and leadership at Modern Animal—underscores how systems thinking and experimentation are increasingly shaping veterinary care delivery. (drandyroark.com)

Outside veterinary medicine, the evidence base is growing, and it’s likely influencing veterinary adoption. Yale School of Medicine reported that ambient AI scribes reduced physician burnout after one month of use in a recent study, and newer research in human medicine has examined both reductions in documentation burden and the possibility of safety risks, including transcription or treatment-related errors. It’s an imperfect comparison, but it gives veterinary professionals a useful lens: these tools may help, but they still require review, policy, and workflow discipline. That’s an inference drawn from the human-health literature and current veterinary discussion, rather than a veterinary-specific outcomes dataset. (medicine.yale.edu)

Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the Szumski story is really about workforce evolution. Practices have spent years talking about retention, burnout, mentorship, and efficiency as separate issues. AI documentation tools bring those threads together. If they work well, they could reduce “pajama time,” improve consistency in records, and give newer associates more cognitive bandwidth for medicine and communication with pet parents. But they also introduce vendor-selection questions that practice leaders can’t ignore, including where data goes, whether de-identified records can be used for model training, how consent is handled, and who remains accountable for the final medical record. AVMA’s technology policy supports innovation, but explicitly through a responsible and ethical lens. (avma.org)

There’s also an education angle. Szumski’s rise from student leader to founder suggests that veterinary schools and early-career programs may need to place more value on entrepreneurship, systems thinking, communication, and digital literacy alongside clinical competence. That idea is reinforced by other nontraditional veterinary leaders highlighted in Vet Life Reimagined. Long entered the profession as a second career after working in software and business, then moved through clinical practice, telehealth, and organizational leadership with a focus on listening, experimentation, and building sustainable care models. Mossop, whose career has included general practice, emergency medicine, a mobile veterinary service, and now a chief veterinary officer role at CoVet, has argued that innovation should start with people and values, especially when the profession feels both excited and overwhelmed by fast-moving technology. Those skills and perspectives are increasingly relevant whether a graduate wants to build a company, evaluate vendors, lead a hospital team, or simply use AI tools safely in practice. In that sense, this isn’t just one founder profile. It’s a signal that veterinary career development is broadening. (vetmed.illinois.edu)

What to watch: The next phase will likely center on adoption evidence and governance: more veterinary-specific outcomes data, clearer consent and privacy language from vendors, and sharper expectations from practices about human review, record accuracy, and how AI tools fit into training and mentorship. Just as notably, the profession’s innovation conversation is widening beyond efficiency alone. Leaders across veterinary media and practice are increasingly asking whether AI and new care models actually create safer, more sustainable jobs and more human client interactions—the standard these tools will ultimately be judged against. (vetsoap.ai)