I wasn’t expecting a leadership lesson. I was expecting a thriller.
Mercy, the 2026 sci-fi thriller on Prime Video starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, had me locked in from the first ten minutes. The premise: a detective accused of murdering his wife has exactly 90 minutes to prove his innocence to an advanced AI judge before facing immediate execution. The AI starts him at a 97.5% guilt rating. He has to get it below 92% to walk free. The clock is running. The stakes could not be higher.
I loved every minute of it. And somewhere between the courtroom scenes and the data forensics and the relentless ticking clock, I found myself thinking, this is actually one of the most balanced illustrations of AI I’ve seen. Not a warning. Not a utopian fantasy. Just a really honest look at what AI can do, what it can’t do, and why the human in the room still matters more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.
Here’s what I walked away with, and why I think every nurse leader needs to hear it.
What an Amazon thriller taught me about AI, expertise, and why nurse leaders are irreplaceable
AI Is Powerful. Breathtakingly So.
One of the things the movie captures beautifully is the sheer speed and scale of what AI can access. In minutes, Judge Maddox, Ferguson’s AI character, pulls phone calls, text messages, CCTV footage, financial records, location data. Information that would take a human investigator weeks or months to compile is assembled and analyzed almost instantly.
I sat there genuinely fascinated. Because what I was watching wasn’t a machine replacing human judgment. It was a machine doing what machines do best: processing enormous amounts of data at a speed no human can match. I have this internal struggle often when I think of how healthcare could truly benefit from efficiency. I recall a time you would hear a song on the radio and try quickly to hit record on the tape player or call the radio station to find out the artist and song name so you could place an order at the record store to pick up your new CD in only a couple of weeks. Now I hear the song, turn on Shazam, click one button and I own the song on my phone with the full lyrics, and possibly a music video. We KNOW it’s possible!
Think about your own world for a moment. How many hours do you or your team spend gathering information before a decision gets made? Pulling reports. Tracking down data. Cross-referencing schedules. Reviewing incidents. Now imagine a tool that could compress that work from days into minutes.
That’s not a threat to your role. That’s a gift to your most precious asset: your time.
But It Still Took an Expert to Make Sense of It All
Here’s the moment the movie got me. All that data, every phone call, every timestamp, every surveillance frame, was available. The AI had access to everything. And yet it still took Chris Pratt’s detective expertise, drawing on years of experience, instinct, and domain, to ask the right questions, connect the right dots, and reframe the narrative in a way the AI hadn’t considered.
The data didn’t solve the case. The expert did.
This is exactly the conversation we need to be having in healthcare right now. AI can surface patterns in patient data. It can flag staffing gaps, predict census trends, analyze outcomes. But it takes a nurse leader, someone who knows this unit, these patients, this team, to look at that information and know what it actually means. To know which data point matters most today. To understand the context behind the number.
This isn’t a someday idea. It’s already happening. At UCHealth, the University of Colorado’s health system, AI scans patient data around the clock for early signs of sepsis and deterioration. When it flags a patient, a critical-care nurse in their Virtual Health Center reviews the alert and decides whether to call the bedside nurse. That call gets made only when the nurse’s experience says the patient is truly at risk. The AI finds the signal. The nurse decides what it means. That’s the partnership I’m talking about.
Our clinical colleagues are already letting AI do the scanning so their expertise can go where it matters most. So here’s my question for us as leaders: Are we welcoming AI in to handle the report pulling, the data gathering, and the first drafts, so our time goes to the work only we can do? Where are you leaning into the learning, and where might you still be holding back?
AI can access everything. It still needs you to make sense of it.
The One Scene That Should Give Every Leader Pause
The AI in Mercy operates on a single, unshakeable principle: “It does not make mistakes.” The public trusts it completely. No one questions it. And that blind trust, that’s where the real danger in the film lives.
It reminded me of something Dr. Brené Brown shared that has stayed with me. She described an experiment where one group of students completed a literature review the traditional way, and another group used AI. Sixty percent of the AI-generated references were hallucinations, citations that looked completely legitimate but simply did not exist.
Sixty percent!
They looked real. The formatting was right. The journal names were plausible. But the sources didn’t exist. And if you didn’t know to look, if you trusted the output the way the public in Mercy trusted Judge Maddox, you would never know.
AI is a remarkable tool. It is not the expert. It is not the source of truth. It needs a leader who knows how to assess what it produces, ask the right questions, and paint the whole picture.
What This Means for You as a Nurse Leader
The conversation about AI in healthcare is not going away. If anything, it’s accelerating. And nurse leaders are going to be asked, more and more, to engage with AI-generated data, AI-assisted decisions, and AI-powered tools at the unit level and beyond.
Here is the posture I’d invite you into: curious, not fearful. Critical, not dismissive. Because both extremes, blind trust and outright rejection, will cost you.
The leaders who will navigate this era well are the ones who learn to use AI as a thinking partner, not an authority. Who let it do the heavy lifting on data collection while they bring the judgment, the context, and the humanity that no algorithm can replicate.
That’s not a small thing. That’s your irreplaceable contribution.
A Practice Worth Trying
The next time you use an AI tool, whether it’s generating a report, summarizing data, drafting a document, or researching a topic, run it through these three questions before you act on it:
1. Does this align with what I already know to be true from experience?
2. Can I verify the sources or data points independently?
3. What context does AI not have that I do?
Those three questions keep you in the expert seat. Which is exactly where you belong.
And if you haven’t seen Mercy yet, watch it. It will likely make you think.
AI is reshaping healthcare leadership, and the nurse leaders who thrive will be the ones who stay curious, think critically, and never forget that their expertise is what makes the data meaningful. If you’re ready to explore what leadership development looks like in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape, let’s connect.
“Reflection: Where in your leadership role are you currently letting data, AI-generated or otherwise, do the thinking for you? And what would it look like to bring your expertise back to the center of that decision?”
About the Author
Dr. Crystal Lawson is a nationally recognized nurse leadership expert, keynote speaker, and CEO & Founder of We Rise Up, LLC. She equips, empowers, and inspires nurse leaders to rise into their full potential, with confidence, clarity, and compassion. Learn more at DrClawRN.com.
