AI agents in Alzheimer's disease management: challenges and future directions

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease pose a major global healthcare challenge, with cases projected to rise sharply as populations age and effective treatments remain limited. AI has shown promise in supporting diagnostics, predicting disease progression, and exploring biomarkers, yet most current tools are narrowly focused, unimodal, and lack longitudinal reasoning or interpretability. By enabling context-aware analysis across imaging, genomics, cognitive, and behavioral data, agentic AI can track disease progression, identify therapeutic targets, and support clinical decision-making. Over time, these systems may detect gaps in their own information and request targeted data, moving closer to real clinical reasoning while keeping clinicians in control. The next frontier in medical AI lies in developing autonomous, multimodal agents capable of integrating diverse data, adapting through experience, supporting decision-making, and collaborating with clinicians. Furthermore, ethical, patient-centered AI requires close technical-clinical collaboration to support clinicians and improve patient outcomes. This perspective examines AI's current role in Alzheimer's care, identifies key challenges in integration, interpretability, and regulation, and explores pathways for safely deploying these agentic systems in clinical practice.