What 2027 (and beyond) looks like
Predictions are easy. Honest ones are harder. In many conversations we had preparing for this report, we asked leaders to look ahead. What they described isn’t a utopia, but it is a plausible, grounded picture of a healthcare system that’s meaningfully different from the one we’re operating in today, built by people who are actively trying to get there.
The most consistent prediction isn’t about a specific technology. It’s about a shift in how AI is perceived.
"AI will go from kind of a feature to just an expectation. Today, AI is something we're talking about – have you used AI for this? It will shift to just: of course I'm using AI, of course this is part of the solution. Much like we saw digital 20 years ago – we had digital teams, and today those just became part of the way you did business."
That normalization – AI as infrastructure rather than initiative – is already becoming visible. The administrative layer is getting automated. The human layer is getting more intentional. And the distance between the two is closing.
"With AI, I think we will see that a lot of the paperwork and administrative tasks have become automated and relegated to the background. And we are spending more time providing care than filling out paperwork. That's where AI will help us a lot."
"If we start looking ahead two years, I think the biggest shift is AI enables us to really look at personalization of healthcare – how do we help people at the right time, the right place, with the right support, to make sure that they have the best outcomes they can."
The data already points in this direction. Consumer behavior is changing faster than many in the industry expected, and in some cases, faster than the industry is ready for.
"Just in the past year, we went from 16% of people using large language models for questions around their health to 32%. Consumers struggling with access, affordability, interpretation want to be able to ask those questions anytime – and they're just jumping in much faster than the clinical establishment is moving."
That gap between consumer demand and clinical readiness is one of the defining tensions of this moment. It’s not a reason to slow down. It’s a reason to be deliberate.
"There's such a push to get AI implemented that many healthcare companies are pushing without understanding if it's actually designed to get their ROI. I think there'll be a period in the next two to three years where healthcare companies will retreat a little from AI and reground themselves – reassess what's been put in place, whether it's what they were really envisioning, versus what they have."
That reassessment, if it comes, isn’t a failure. It’s part of how any major technology transition matures. The organizations that will emerge strongest from it are the ones that built with intention from the start – clear about what they were automating, why, and what they were protecting in the process.
Ankit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Infinitus, has watched this transition from a particular vantage point, close enough to the work to see where it’s actually moving.
"Patient services leaders not only want to use AI to uplift their teams and the patients going through these terrible journeys, but want to come together as an industry to really transform the way in which we do basic things. Things like enrolling in the program – how can we make it easier for the prescriber, easier for the patient? To making sure that everyone knows what's coming next, how long it will take, and using AI and their people to create that virtual, agentic pizza tracker for the healthcare journey."
The pizza tracker is a deliberately simple image for something genuinely complex. But that’s the point; the future these leaders are building toward isn’t defined by the sophistication of the technology. It’s defined by what a patient experiences.
The technology is getting closer every day. The will is there. The work is already underway.
