AI Can’t Do This: 4 Areas of Your Private Practice That Will Always Need a Human Touch

In a time when new tools, templates, and AI solutions promise to make everything faster and easier, it’s tempting to automate every corner of your private practice.

Don’t get me wrong, efficiency is important. Especially if you’re running a group practice and juggling admin, marketing, finances, and client care all at once.

But there are certain parts of this work that can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be streamlined out of existence. The human touch is at the core of what makes care work meaningful, effective, and sustainable for both your clients and your team.

Here are four areas of your practice that will always benefit from real human connection, and how you can intentionally weave that into your systems and company culture.

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1. Client Onboarding and First Impressions

This one might feel a bit obvious, but I know how tempting it can be to rely on automations in this system. You can automate forms and appointment reminders, but not your welcoming energy.

That first touchpoint with a new client sets the tone for their entire therapeutic relationship. Whether it’s a short personalized email, a phone call before the first session, or a small gesture like a warm greeting in your intake paperwork (“We’re so glad you’re here”), clients can feel when they’re being cared for by a human being, not a system. It’s especially important in this step to ensure potential clients know they’re not just a number; that real care and intention has been put into a smooth process for them.

If your group practice has an intake coordinator or admin support, help them lead with empathy. Build scripts or templates that capture your company values and sound like you: compassionate, calm, and client-centered.

More ideas on how to evaluate your intake process here!

2. Team Communication and Supervision

One of the greatest risks of growth is disconnection. As your team expands, communication can start to feel more like project management than human connection. But clinicians don’t just need check-ins, they need reflection, attunement, and real supervision.

Did you know many clinicians are now turning to tools like ChatGPT to receive clinical supervision? As a clinical supervisor in the other leg of my business, this feels concerning for many reasons. AI can be an incredible tool, but it doesn’t replace the nuance or heart-felt connection provided in sessions with a trained supervisor.

Supervision isn’t just about solving problems, it’s about being witnessed in the messy, emotional, sometimes uncertain work of care. A good supervisor reads what isn’t said. They notice tone, body language, and the subtle cues that signal burnout, countertransference, or emotional overload. That’s not something an algorithm can pick up on.

AI can summarize session notes, flag ethical guidelines, or offer structured questions, but it can’t offer presence. It can’t say, “You sound really tired,” or hold silence long enough for insight to surface.

As a practice owner, building human supervision into your systems shows your team that reflection isn’t an afterthought, it’s part of your culture. It reinforces that learning and growth happen in relationship, not in isolation.

3. Writing SOPs and Important Docs

There’s a growing temptation to hand over the creation of SOPs and policy documents to AI. After all, it’s fast, it sounds professional, and it fills in the blanks for you. But AI doesn’t actually know how your practice runs.

As someone who writes Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for group practices allll the timeee, I did a little experiment and asked ChatGPT to write me a sample SOP for client onboarding. Tbh, I was expecting it to give me a mediocre output. But what I wasn’t expecting was for the answers to be so general and vague that they were hilariously unhelpful (Think: “Step 2, respond to client email. Step 3, schedule.” Talk about specific and detailed! 🙃).

The whole point of having important docs like SOPs is to make everyone’s life easier, and that happens when they communicate practice boundaries, tone, and values, and are actually relevant to your company. AI has a hard time understanding how to do all that.

AI tends to flatten things. It makes everything sound like a policy manual from a mid-sized corporation, not a human-centered practice built on trust, autonomy, and compassion. And if your SOPs don’t reflect your actual systems and culture, they won’t get used. Usually resulting in your team asking you or other leadership members lots and lots of follow up questions that could have been answered in a document.

4. Celebrating and Recognizing People

One of the simplest but most powerful ways to humanize your practice is to notice and appreciate people. The small “thank you” after a full week, the birthday card, the group lunch when someone finishes supervision hours. All of these gestures communicate that you see your team as people, not productivity machines.

If your practice is remote or hybrid, think about how you can still make this tangible: sending small gifts, hosting a short connection hour, or creating a Slack channel for celebrations and appreciation. These moments of connection matter more than you might think, especially in our growing digital world.

As a practice owner, it’s easy to feel pulled between efficiency and empathy. But when you design your operations with both in mind, you create a practice that feels grounded, connected, and truly sustainable for everyone involved.

Even as tools evolve and workflows change, the human touch will always be what makes healing work possible.

Hey! I’m Charlie — Your Practice Partner.
I help human-centered group practices thrive. More about me.