Author: Kedar Ganta, Chief Product & Engineering Officer, Caregility
Each year, ambitious minds in technology, finance, and healthcare attend HLTH. The 2025 edition of HLTH welcomed more than 12,000 people who navigated a labyrinth of escalators and exhibition halls across the Venetian – a journey that demanded both strategy and stamina.
AI Everywhere, Proof Nowhere
Walking the showroom floor, you’d notice that every booth, every panel was touting a ‘next-gen AI-powered platform,’ often just steps away from a puppy park or pop-up pickleball court. While AI dominated every conversation and headline with buzzwords flying so fast, they could make even a data scientist flinch, there was a clear sense of fatigue and realism. The conference even had a dedicated “AI pavilion,” which made me smirk, given that it was impossible to distinguish a non-AI company from an AI company. Almost everyone is selling AI now.
Beyond the excitement, the gap between promise and proof is wide. But here is what I noticed – Many of the AI technologies on display worked beautifully in controlled settings, yet few showed the resilience needed for the realities of a hospital room. Beyond the slick demos and marketing gloss, few could answer the real questions: Where is this actually deployed? Can clinicians touch and feel the technology working at scale in the real hospital room? Very few AI vendors seemed to be realistic about the challenges of privacy, operational burden, and deployment feasibility.
We’re watching AI promises being sold by the truckload, and investors’ exuberance is funding this frenzy – often without demanding proof of real operational savings. Money and contracts are flowing on the strength of narratives and PowerPoints without clear understanding of measurable outcomes and demonstrated results. This isn’t sustainable.
Big Tech’s Bet
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Nvidia showed up in force this year, signaling their ambition and conviction that healthcare is ripe for disruption. It’s natural for them to think “we move fast, we have the best models, we have scale, and we can crack this.” But history is instructive. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others once announced bold moves, only to eventually readjust their strategies. Healthcare is fundamentally different and winning requires more than scale – it requires trust, clinical empathy, and the ability to operate seamlessly within regulated workflows.
Trust and Integrations
The truth is, this industry does not reward speed; it rewards trust, integration, and workflow compatibility. AI may be non-deterministic, and false positives are inevitable, yet frontline clinicians must not just use the technology but trust it. This is a problem that cannot be solved by the world’s best AI engines. It’s a human, incentive, and workflow problem.
Even so, the bright spots are real. There’s genuine optimism around administrative automation and ambient speech technology. In pharma and clinical research, AI is already accelerating drug discovery and improving clinical trial recruitment.
Providers are now adopting AI at pace, but with discernment. Leading health systems evaluate solutions based on technical maturity, production readiness, scalability, risk-level, and rapid ROI that builds organizational confidence.
Ambient documentation and revenue cycle automation continue to lead adoption; they deliver measurable ROI, tangible efficiency gains, and minimal workflow disruption. We see automation adoption increasing in people-intensive areas like prior authorization, patient engagement, and front-office operations.
The Next Buzz
After last year’s Ambient documentation frenzy, Agentic AI is getting all the attention. Vendors are now showcasing ‘AI Agents’ that promise to handle everything from charting to patient navigation. Yet, many of these offerings still feel nascent, generic, and devoid of true clinical depth. One could possess the world’s most advanced large language model, but without understanding the nuance of clinicians’ work or the importance of a handoff, even the shiniest technology will fail.
A Reality Check
Beyond the AI noise, HLTH still offered moments of grounded discussions. Mark Cuban’s remarks on pharmacy benefit managers stood out. Through his Cost Plus Drugs, he is challenging opaque pricing and pushing for transparency in drug costs, where market dynamics set prices instead of middlemen. There were also conversations about value-based care, nurses finally having a seat at the table, and the need for Interoperability and Platform thinking.
This sentiment reflects a long-overdue truth: Innovation that ignores the frontline is innovation destined to stall.
Healthcare transformation isn’t tidy – it’s messy. Building something transformative requires grit, persistence and a willingness to go deep, not just walk through the neon.
