Note: This post is excerpted from our report, The agentic AI workforce is coming to healthcare.

You may be wondering: While voice AI agents’ capabilities sound great, will people really talk to AI? The answer is yes – and they already do.

Many (if not most) people in the US talk to AI every day, whether it’s asking Siri to set a timer, directing Alexa or Google Home to play their favorite playlist, or even prompting ChatGPT to research a topic for them. AI is already seamlessly integrated into millions of people’s days, and that doesn’t include the healthcare phone conversations that Infinitus has been automating with AI since 2019.

In healthcare settings, we have found that payor agents enjoy speaking to our AI agents, in great part because they are patient and efficient. In one analysis of 1,000 phone calls from our AI agents to payors, 93% of payor representatives responded positively when asked how their experience talking with the AI agent was. In addition, a Google Cloud survey revealed 58% of patients believe using AI to complete administrative tasks is a “good or great” idea, while 98% of payors and and 89% of providers reported positive opinions about the use of AI to streamline administrative tasks. 

But what about voice AI agents leading conversations with patients? Here, too, most consumers are already comfortable with AI. In fact, in one 2024 study, 52% of people said they would be interested in receiving immediate medical information from AI. 

Infinitus recently led a survey of 500 US adults to better understand some of the challenges patients currently face when trying to acquire information about their medical conditions or medications they have been prescribed, which might be able to be solved by voice AI agents. We found that a significant percentage of patients have been unable or unwilling to speak to a healthcare provider when they sought information – and 79% of them had searched for the information on Google instead.

Some of the challenges our survey respondents reported included:

  • 43% have had a question they were embarrassed to ask a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare worker
  • 58% have been frustrated by an inability to reach a doctor, nurse, or other healthcare provider when they had a question or concern
  • 48% have had a medical question outside of regular business hours, and were unable to speak to a medical professional

Voice AI agents can mitigate all of these challenges – and unlike Google or other internet search options, can be built to give only approved, accurate information which commercial teams have painstakingly already gotten approved.

If you’d like to learn more about how voice AI agents can bridge critical gaps in patient access, ensuring that people get the answers they need when they need them, read our full agentic AI report, explore our AI agent offerings, or reach out to us today.