The next phase of AI in healthcare promises to be much bigger than automation.

At Asembia’s AXS26 Summit, Infinitus CEO and Co-founder Ankit Jain and Optum Rx CIO Santiago Abraham discussed what comes after the first wave of AI deployment: from agent-to-agent interoperability and AI-assisted workforces to the possibility of more connected, personalized healthcare experiences.

Below is the second in a series of edited excerpts from their conversation. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here, or watch the full conversation here.

Ankit Jain: One of my biggest frustrations as a patient is how transactional healthcare has become. Every interaction feels disconnected. You’re constantly re-explaining yourself, carrying context between organizations, and starting over with every new touchpoint.

As we think about agentic systems, how do we avoid simply creating thousands of disconnected AI point solutions?

Santiago Abraham: The good news is there are technology solutions that are already are in the environment that we’re excited about to help solve that. One of them is what we call “agent-to-agent (A2A) interactions.” And really, this is a way for the agents to interoperate across.

So what may seem to you as a single experience may actually be powered by a series of agents working in orchestration.

I’ll give you a simple one: When you have a health plan app, you want that health plan app to have understanding of all of your benefits – medical, pharmacy, dental, etc.

Well, if we don’t have A2A, you wouldn’t get that. You would just get the medical view. So working with our health plan partners, really we’re talking about interoperating. I call it pharmacy superpowers. I want to give the health plan app pharmacy superpowers. We can do that with A2A.

Ankit Jain: A lot of organizations are trying to figure out whether they need to build orchestration layers themselves or whether somebody else becomes the connective tissue across the ecosystem. How do you think about that?

Santiago Abraham: I would say question one is really: What is the experience you’re trying to build and how are you trying to be interoperable with an ecosystem?

The cool thing is the tech is now catching up to the experience need that we have, which is to really create that full experience from an orchestration perspective. There’s a lot of tech available, there are some partners who are kind of focusing there, but there’s also a lot of open source solutions that are already spinning up to solve for that as well.

Ankit Jain: Another challenge organizations are dealing with is fear around AI. People are asking:
What does AI mean for my role? Where do I even start learning this technology? How do organizations help teams adopt AI productively instead of fearfully?

Santiago Abraham: That’s probably the most important question of today’s discussion. At the end of the day, this is disruptive, it is different. And the first thing that your organization ultimately needs to focus on is really working on that change management program.

The way we’ve organized this – and this is an area that we have leaned into –  it starts with your technology team. At Optum we’ve trained 17,000 engineers with AI and are continuing that journey.

 Category two is business executives leadership – really understanding the art of possible, getting them excited, understanding the opportunities. That’s critical to then really inspire the teams.

Then you get into the team itself. And candidly, the best use cases come from the bottom up. The operator closest to the work, closest to the patient, closest to the client is really going to understand best where those opportunities lie.

Ankit Jain: One of the things we’ve learned is that people need examples before AI starts to feel real or useful. Otherwise it stays abstract.

Santiago Abraham: Exactly. Examples are super, super important. This thing is a little bit hard to get your arms around. Giving examples to teams is really important because then that finally becomes real.

And giving them examples maybe not in their space, maybe in an adjacent team space, really then gets them thinking differently and kind of plugging in. People learn through examples in the end.

Ankit Jain: There’s also a lot of discussion right now around autonomous AI versus humans remaining in the loop. How are you thinking about that balance evolving over time?

Santiago Abraham: For us, for example, care and care determination decisions have to be with a human at the center with AI assist.

I think every team, every business needs to look at the strategy around AI – what’s the right use case? Human in the loop is interesting because today you work through an assistant capability which is really helping you operate with more productivity, more speed.

Where this is going – which is where you’re headed next – is really around “human on the loop.”

So now you’re getting into scenarios where you’ve got an autonomous agent, [and you can]  think of it like a junior worker. And that’s really the game changer in my mind.

Ankit Jain: If you had to place a bet on where AI delivers the most value in healthcare over the next several years, where would it be?

Santiago Abraham: Number one is quality. Getting really opportunistic consistency of AI is really a game changer.

The second thing is cost. Everybody always goes to admin efficiency. But I’d go further than that: Really being able to get to insights at scale – fast insights at scale – and understanding where we’re going and what opportunities we have to really impact cost in a more productive way.

And then the third and final thing, and the thing I’m most excited about, is really experience.

The experience of a hyper-personalized assistant that really is supporting you in your care journey, kind of walking you through that whole continuum, really taking care of you.

An assistant for the patient, but also an assistant for the pharmacist, an assistant for the operator, an assistant for our clients and customers.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.