21 Aug 2025
“Nothing is a diagnostic tool; it is always a support tool for you, so there’s always going to be need for a vet” – vet Maria Jones.
Chris Simpson
Job Title
Image: Shutter2U / Adobe Stock
A vet helping to develop a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool to support clinical decision making says the technology is more like a new textbook than a replacement for clinicians.
Maria Jones is part of the team helping to develop Vetlexicon +AI, a new chat interface trained exclusively on Vetlexicon’s database of 28,000 pieces of clinical content and peer-reviewed research.
Its creators claim vets can ask the interface – said to be backed by more than 1,600 experts – clinical questions and be instantly presented with reliable answers drawn from its database.
Dr Jones said: “It’s definitely not a replacement [for vets], it’s just another tool. Would a textbook replace a vet? Of course it can’t. This is just the new textbook.
“Nothing is a diagnostic tool; it is always a support tool for you, so there’s always going to be need for a vet. You’ve always got to have that ability to adapt the information you’ve got to the exact patient in front of you and AI can’t do that.
“That’s always going to be human based.”
Dr Jones said there is a “three-way partnership” between vet, client and patient, and “AI just adds into that team; there’s now four of us”.
She added that the product improves workflow, can help clinicians keep up with the latest advances in medical knowledge, and that the information is current, up to date and “very reliable”.
Vetlexicon +AI is available in public beta and is set to fully go live this month. It currently offers information on three species – cats, dogs, and rabbits – but others including horses, cattle, reptiles and birds are set to be added in the future.
Andrew Balerdi, head of technology at Vetstream, which is developing the product, said it is built with “stringent protocols” to “prevent the AI from hallucinating, from going off piste to making up its own stuff”.
He added: “It’s just trained on veterinary information and will only retrieve veterinary information.”
The product is said to be built to understand veterinary workflow, understand common abbreviations, and structure its responses in tables or the SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) format.
Vetstream chief operating officer Robert Moss said that central to its development has been “making sure that the answers and the structure of the responses they get are absolutely there to support vets in practice on the frontline of clinical care”.
He described Vetlexicon +AI as “the next step in the innovation milestone” for the company, adding: “We’re getting really high scores on clinical reliability, clinical excellence, speed and the gold standard of: ‘would you recommend this to one of your colleagues?’ That’s all coming back very positively.”
