AI: It's in your phone, why not in your practice?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an ascendant technical field with potential to revolutionize health care and orthopaedics. This paper highlights ways in which AI is already affecting members of the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA), while identifying paths to clinical application, as presented at the 2025 OTA Annual Meeting's Basic Science Focus Forum. A report from the OTA AI Task Force shared some initial accomplishments, including the crafting of a position statement. Areas of AI application in orthopaedic trauma were discussed, including the prediction of fall risk in the elderly, capabilities for automated image-based diagnosis and outcome assessment, and efforts toward creating a framework for in silico clinical trials that rely upon virtual patient cohorts. Together these applications show how AI is emerging as a foundational tool in orthopaedic trauma research. Over the next few years, these products will be moving from the research laboratory to the clinic. For the tools to be of greatest benefit, a measured development approach using teams of data scientists partnered with orthopaedic trauma surgeons must be adopted. Academia and Industry are both progressing in this direction-the best path forward will likely involve shared development efforts. As these efforts progress, OTA members will undoubtedly be involved. Both they and their patients stand to be the primary beneficiaries of many of these developments.