Significant and rapid advancements in cancer research have been attributed to Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, AI’s role and impact on the clinical side has been limited. This discrepancy manifests due to the overlooked, yet profound, differences in the clinical and research practices in oncology. Our contribution seeks to scrutinize physicians’ engagement with AI by interviewing 7 medical-imaging experts and disentangle its future alignment across the clinical and research workflows, diverging from the existing “one-size-fits-all” paradigm within Human-Centered AI discourses. Our analysis revealed that physicians’ trust in AI is less dependent on their general acceptance of AI, but more on their contestable experiences with AI. Contestability, in clinical workflows, underpins the need for personal supervision of AI outcomes and processes, i.e., clinician-in-the-loop. Finally, we discuss tensions in the desired attributes of AI, such as explainability and control, contextualizing them within the divergent intentionality and scope of clinical and research workflows.