Public Health in the Rockies 2026

Public health professionals are increasingly moving beyond introductory conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) and seeking practical skills that support responsible integration of AI into everyday work. As generative AI tools become more common across public health practice, research, teaching, communication, and administration, workforce development efforts must also evolve to address emerging competencies related not only to AI use, but also to critical evaluation, verification, and ethical implementation.

This interactive skill-building session will focus on two emerging areas of need identified through previous AI workshops, participant feedback, and ongoing workforce conversations: 1) prompting and meta prompting strategies that improve AI-supported workflows and outputs, and 2) approaches for critically evaluating, validating, and fact checking AI-generated information. Building upon multiple years of AI-focused public health trainings, facilitators will provide an “AI in Public Health: State of the Union” overview to contextualize current patterns, opportunities, concerns, and workforce readiness related to AI adoption in public health settings.

Participants will engage in hands-on activities designed to strengthen practical AI skills through real-world public health scenarios. Activities will include developing and refining prompts for public health communication and programmatic work, exploring structured and reusable prompting frameworks (“meta prompting”), comparing AI-generated outputs across tools, and practicing strategies for verifying information accuracy, identifying hallucinations or misinformation, assessing source quality, and maintaining evidence-informed decision-making practices.

Throughout the session, facilitators will encourage collaborative discussions around ethics, health equity, bias, accessibility, privacy, workforce implications, organizational readiness, and the importance of maintaining human judgment and accountability in AI-supported work. Rather than positioning AI as a replacement for public health expertise, this session emphasizes how thoughtful, collaborative, and critically engaged approaches to AI can strengthen public health capacity and resilience.

The session will prioritize interactive learning through demonstrations, collaborative exercises, audience polling, discussion, and real-world case studies drawn from public health practice and education settings. Participants will leave with practical prompting frameworks, strategies for evaluating AI-generated content, and resources to support continued learning and organizational capacity building.

This session aligns with the conference theme of “Stronger Together” by supporting collective learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and shared approaches to responsible AI integration across the public health workforce. As public health professionals navigate rapidly evolving technologies, building communities of practice around ethical and evidence-informed AI use will be essential to strengthening public health systems and advancing health equity.