AI Agents to Enhance Difficult Conversations Among Nursing Students

Effective communication is a critical nursing competency, yet students often experience anxiety and have limited opportunities for practice before clinical encounters. Traditional teaching methods and standardized patient interactions provide constrained, single-instance practice and feedback, hindering both confidence and the transferability of skills. The findings from this study indicate that integrating an AI chatbot into nursing education can serve as an effective preparatory tool to enhance students' confidence, readiness, and communication skills for navigating challenging clinical conversations. Although the chatbot experience had its limitations, it provided most students with a valuable opportunity to practice, reflect, and apply feedback before engaging in live simulations. The combination of positive Likert scale results and qualitative reflections underscores the chatbot's role in reducing anxiety, promoting skill development, and offering structured, accessible practice in a low-stakes environment. As nursing education continues to explore innovative technologies, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) driven simulation tools have the potential to complement traditional training methods, bridge the gap between theory and practice, and better prepare future nurses for the complexities of real-world patient care. Further research should explore strategies to enhance emotional engagement in AI simulations, examine the long-term impacts on communication competency, and improve chatbot adaptability and realism.

AI Agents 

AI and LLM Applications

Symposium on Data Science and Statistics (SDSS) 2026