Facing overwhelming administrative burdens, relentless financial pressure and the urgent need to efficiently serve patients at the highest standard of care, the global healthcare workforce has been grappling with burnout at an existential scale.
Healthcare demand now far exceeds the industry’s supply capabilities. Meanwhile, a rapid evolution of AI agent technology is emerging to help fill the gap. By augmenting human capabilities and making patient interactions more personalized, AI agents are transforming traditional healthcare experiences, helping to foster stronger engagement and create better patient outcomes.
Empowering providers to deliver more personalized patient care with AI
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AI agents are rapidly improving patient experiences across all aspects of healthcare, helping providers deliver more attentive, patient-specific and compassionate care. They’re the latest development in an AI transformation that’s already underway across the healthcare industry.
In 2024, 80% of hospitals reported using AI to enhance not just workflow efficiency, but also the quality of patient interactions and support. This number is projected to increase by 133% (from $32.34 billion to over $431 billion) by 2032, signaling healthcare’s fundamental shift towards more responsive, empathetic care.
This suggests more than just an integration of new technologies into the healthcare industry — rather, a fundamental shift is taking shape, redefining how care pathways are architected, delivered, managed and experienced across the board.
Ambient AI solutions — proactive intelligent systems that operate seamlessly in the background, continuously sensing and adapting to their environment — can help anticipate needs and respond to real-time cues. In healthcare environments, these solutions provide decision support and operational insights that lead to increased awareness, care enrollment, optimized scheduling and more personalized care management, contributing to better patient outcomes and satisfaction.
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Ambient clinical voice solutions alone represent a global addressable market of $21–22 billion by 2032, underscoring the urgency and scale of this transformation across the healthcare industry. Providers who fail to embrace digital workflows that implement ambient clinical voice solutions, risk falling behind, both in terms of patient satisfaction and financial sustainability.
When combined with agents, ambient AI technologies can deliver greater impact by independently analyzing data streams, augmenting clinical decisions making and initiating complex actions across multiple systems. When applied to real-world use cases, comprehensive, agent-powered solutions are enabling providers to spend more time connecting with patients and tailoring care to individual needs, ultimately fostering a more thoughtful, human-centered engagement.
Healthcare AI agents in action
Microsoft-owned Nuance is one of the companies leading the way in ambient AI technology with its Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX), an AI-based clinical solution marking a turning point in the evolution of patient engagement.
DAX runs in the background of your medical appointment to capture doctor-patient conversations in real-time. The AI agents powering DAX can then generate clinically useful medical notes using AI scribe technology.
With DAX, doctors can turn their attention away from the computer screen and toward the patient, knowing that AI is taking care of producing accurate and billable medical notes to reduce administrative load.
The results have been astounding – with doctors who have used DAX reporting that the tool saves them multiple hours per week, that they can use to better serve their patients or just get some rest, while also helping them improve the quality of their patient interactions.
Abridge is pioneering how ambient AI and intelligent agents work together across the healthcare journey. Deploying Abridge’s AI tools to orchestrate background tasks, real-time documentation and clinical decision support creates an agentic AI factory — an always-on support system to help providers spend less time on administrative work and more time with their patients.
Its technology not only transcribes and summarizes provider-patient interactions in real time, but also integrates seamlessly with electronic health records to reduce administrative burden, enhance clinical accuracy and decrease the distance between the clinician and their patient.
By embedding AI agents directly into the care workflow, Abridge is empowering over 2,000 providers who serve over 1 million patients to focus more on patients while ensuring that critical information is captured in a structured and actionable way, laying the groundwork for a more responsive and intelligent healthcare system.
Always-on, continuously learning agents — available 24/7 — act as personalized, domain-specific support systems that guide patients through their healthcare journeys while capturing valuable feedback for the broader healthcare system. Designed for accessibility, these agents can be multilingual, customized to reflect cultural nuances and local dialects, a capability critical for improving patient engagement across diverse populations.
Hippocratic AI, another disruptive healthtech company, offers AI agents that automate tasks like patient outreach, history-taking and referral validation. These agents can help patients feel supported and heard while minimizing wait times, helping to reduce overdependence on physical interactions with providers.
Hippocratic AI’s agents can be available on-demand and can provide services including infant car seat safety checks, post-opt check-ins and disaster response in a range of languages and cultural backgrounds, providing patients a sense of comfort and familiarity.
Embedding intelligence into healthcare operations
Ultimately, AI agents are streamlining operations and logistics in ways that will lead to lower costs, more personalized products, and more positive and efficient patient experiences through faster drug discovery times and reduced errors. By augmenting human capabilities, these agents will help clinical providers maximize workflows and allow them more time and energy to focus on the needs of their patients.
Since adopting agentic AI technologies, the UK’s National Health Service has already seen more patients securing appointments, more time spent by clinicians with patients, and less time wasted on administrative tasks.
With over 53,000 patients waiting for a first appointment and 25,000 waiting for elective surgery, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has worked to increase customer service and decrease wait times for NHS patients through its Proactive & Accessible Transformation of Healthcare (PATH) initiative in collaboration with NVIDIA, General Catalyst, Hippocratic AI, and Sword Health. PATH will integrate agentic AI into its infrastructure to prioritize care, undertake remote patient monitoring, and manage resource allocation.
When AI agents are properly used, they can also serve as trusted advisors for patients, answering their most mundane questions quickly and at all hours of the day. Not only does this save time for providers and improve the patient’s experience, but it can also encourage them to ask questions that they might otherwise feel embarrassed to ask, helping to address potential issues before they become problems.
Another unique solution bringing AI agent impact to the forefront is Teton’s Teton One intelligent monitoring solution, serving as a 360-degree view of patient condition, behavior and needs making workflows easier for healthcare workers and improving patient care.
Teton’s AI-based solution detects patient movements and activities, alerting healthcare workers instantly of critical needs and incidents to help them provide the fastest possible response and treatment.
Teton One has demonstrated profound impact on patient care in the area of fall incidents, with the neurology department at Nordsjællands Hospital and Nordic Health Lab seeing an improved reaction time of 59% faster, and a drop in the baseline number of falls by 47% – massive benefits for patients and providers alike.
Reframing AI in the healthcare industry
By unlocking the benefits of AI in healthcare, the industry can stabilize the unbalanced supply and demand caused by limited resources and aging global populations.
To do so, healthcare organizations must prioritize AI transparency, guardrails, compliance, efficiency, equitable access, accessibility and patient engagement at every step. It’s already happening — from digital patient enrollment and intake to AI-powered appointment scheduling, ambient AI care management and real-time information retrieval.
By adopting this technology, healthcare organizations can deliver the kind of seamless, personalized experiences that patients deserve and return their focus to their reason for choosing the healthcare profession.
Editor’s Note: NVIDIA has working relationships with companies and organizations mentioned in this article including Abridge, Hippocratic AI, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, General Catalyst, and Sword Health. The startup Teton was part of NVIDIA’s Inception program.
Photo: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images
Trent Norris is the global head of business development for digital health at NVIDIA. With over 30 years of experience in healthcare and life sciences, Norris has held leadership roles at Microsoft and Flywheel.io, where he drove AI adoption in medical imaging, clinical research, and enterprise health platforms. He specializes in ISV and partner strategy, go-to-market execution, and building commercial and product organizations that scale.
Using his deep technical fluency and business acumen, Norris accelerates the adoption of agentic AI, GPU computing, and cloud-native platforms across payers, providers, and pharma. His work spans early-stage advisory to billion-dollar healthcare platforms, with a focus on outcome-driven solutions that improve patient care and system efficiency.
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