SAN FRANCISCO — Leading oncologists said this week that artificial intelligence will one day be as integrated into cancer care as it is in smartphones and self-driving cars — and that this is a change we should welcome.

Their comments, made at STAT’s Breakthrough Summit West on Wednesday, reflected an optimistic view for how the health care system can use AI across nearly all aspects of cancer care, from matching patients with clinical trials to predicting how they might fare on a given treatment. Some of this work is already happening. The panelists noted that AI has the potential to offer deep expertise across a growing number of precisely defined cancer indications, and that the technology can generate insights research focused on individual hypotheses might miss.

Whether these tools will be widely accepted by patients and health care providers, however, is a different question. The panelists stressed that physicians need better ways to understand the strength of AI-powered findings, adding that these tools can aid human judgement but will never replace it.