| | | AI news you ought to know about now:- Here are a few numbers to startle your eyes wide open. $100B+—How much Big Tech’s behemoths are each spending to construct new AI-ready data centers. (They’re unsurprisingly led by Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.) 1M+—How many American homes could be powered by the equivalent amount of energy used by each of these soon-to-open building compounds. $100M+—How much AI experts and researchers are commanding in salaries and signing bonuses. Add these figures together and you’ve got a big-business spending spree to match the wildest dreams of the most profligate wish-listers the American people could elect to run the U.S. government. The math is from New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz. “This astonishing spending, critics argue, comes with a huge risk,” Metz writes. “AI is arguably more expensive than anything the tech industry has tried to build, and there is no guarantee it will live up to its potential. But the bigger risk, many executives believe, is not spending enough to keep pace with rivals.” Stated that way, the rush sounds more like a defensive, feast-or-die feeding frenzy than a ravenous buying binge. Either way, here’s what some of Metz’s reliable sources on big money tell him behind the newspaper’s’ paywall about what’s happening here:
- ‘The thinking from the big CEOs is that they can’t afford to be wrong by doing too little, but they can afford to be wrong by doing too much.’—Jordan Jacobs, a partner with the venture capital firm Radical Ventures.
- ‘Apple seems to be sitting on its hands. But I am sure they will surprise us before too long.’—Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture firm Menlo Ventures.
- ‘Everyone is deeply afraid of being left behind. … Christopher Columbus thought he was headed to the Orient, and he ended up in the Caribbean. He did not get to where he thought he was going, but he still got to a place that was highly valuable.’—Chris Nicholson, an AI-focused investor with Page One Ventures.
- Not all the action in healthcare AI is in clinical applications. There’s a lot happening with ‘backend’ AI too. These days, for example, medical centers are using the technology for everything from accelerating management and review of vendor contracts to automating tasks in the procurement and compliant use of equipment and supplies. That doesn’t mean humans presently dealing with those kinds of duties are on the way out. “In the world of pharma and healthcare, the people who are being asked to do [procurement and compliance] work are highly educated, expensive and ambitious,” David Gould, chief customer officer with the tech vendor EncompaaS, tells Business Insider. If used optimally, he hints, AI can help those professionals cut their per-task times from hours to minutes, freeing them up to concentrate on work that can only be done by living, breathing people.
- Some employees are likely to need training or retraining to make assistants of algorithms, suggests Jeremy Strong, supply chain VP at Rush University Medical Center. “Ensuring there’s a plan in place to address AI upskilling and acknowledging the significance of changes to employees’ job functions can help to manage the transition,” Strong says to BI.
- To this Gould adds: “The better employees get at asking precise questions, the more AI algorithms can improve at providing accurate answers.”
- Posted June 25, the article is one in a BI series on innovations in logistics. Read the article and access the series here.
- Back in the clinical realm, AI is saving lives. The business magazine Fast Company uses a story in this vein—one that went viral on social media—to unfold some nice reporting on some sharp tech vendors. What the companies all have in common is success at driving AI further into healthcare. “The healthcare industry moves very slowly, until it doesn’t,” notes senior writer Mark Sullivan. He takes a look at one company that’s “tackling clinical decision support—one of the most challenging areas in medicine—and appears so far to be winning over doctors at an impressive pace.” Find out which company he’s referring to and/or read the whole article here.
- Newsweek is out with its AI Impact Awards for 2025. Zeroing in on the competition’s healthcare awardees, the magazine describes a handful of high-achieving innovators. One is the largest virtual cancer clinic in the U.S. That would be the American Cancer Society partner Color Health. The judges like Color for its novel AI architecture that “creates accurate clinical recommendations for clinicians, expanding access to world-class oncology expertise for doctors working at major cancer centers, small community health facilities and every setting in between.” Get the rest.
- What does SaaS have to do with healthcare AI? Maybe not all that much now, but don’t be surprised when the two converge at scale. With AI-embedded Software as a Service solutions, healthcare organizations can better integrate, automate and secure their complex operations across multiple environments, Frank Attaie, general manager for public sector, healthcare and life sciences at IBM, explains at HealthTech magazine. “Ultimately,” he adds, “they also help healthcare organizations build cost savings and efficiencies to further invest in growth, patient-oriented applications and new services.”
- We’re living through the Great Forgetting, and it’s costing us. So reflects Debbie Jenkins, a publishing strategist whose shingle says she helps consultants, coaches and expert business owners turn their ideas into books that solve expensive, urgent problems. Voicing her concern about the price that “digital amnesia” exacts from business executives and other leaders, Jenkins defines the condition as Information Age “erosion of our cognitive infrastructure: the mental models, patterns and insights that separate exceptional leaders from average ones.” Storing content for later consumption does not improve understanding, she warns. Nor does the search function help one’s mind synthesize information. “And AI summaries, while efficient, can make [matters] worse,” she writes at SmartBrief. “They compress knowledge without embedding it. Outsourcing your thinking dulls your cognitive edge. The friction that forms real understanding disappears.” Hear her out.
- The U.S. is one of 23 countries that consider workforce AI training and education only a medium priority. Our homeland has a less detailed plan than 13 nations that see such measures as high priorities. The surprising juxtaposition is brought to light at the University of Georgia. It was from there that workforce education researcher Lehong Shi, PhD, led the study that produced the findings. Discussing the project with the university’s news operation, Shi stresses that building AI skills and competencies at the national scale is crucial in today’s world. “If you want to be competitive in other areas,” she says, “it’s very important to prepare employees to work with AI in the future.”
- From AIin.Healthcare’s siblings:
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| | | Nabla Raises $70M Series C to Deliver Agentic AI to the Heart of Clinical Workflows, Bringing Total Funding to $120M Nabla’s ambient AI is now trusted by over 130 healthcare organizations and 85,000 clinicians, including leading systems like Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Carle Health, Denver Health, and University of Iowa Health Care. With this new chapter, the company is expanding beyond documentation into a truly agentic clinical AI, enabling smarter coding, context-aware EHR actions, and support for more care settings and clinical roles. |
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| | | The field of medical humanities can help “tame” advanced technologies so that healthcare workers can tap emerging innovations without sacrificing the heart of the clinician-patient relationship. Researchers break down the how’s and why’s in a paper published June 24 in Australia-based Monash Bioethics Review. The capacity of the medical humanities to “analyze ethical dilemmas, promote empathy and enhance patient narratives provides an essential counterbalance to the dehumanizing tendencies that may accompany the critical adoption of technologies,” explain Marco Paglialonga, RN, PhD, and Cristiana Simonetti, PhD, of the University of Foggia in Italy. Stated another way, one of the primary aims of medical humanities as a field today is to harmonize technological innovations with care models that appreciate patients as, in the words of the authors, “whole persons” who have not just bodies but also minds and relationships. Here’s more from the paper. 1. Collaboration between healthcare technology and the medical humanities is not only desirable but essential. AI can be developed in a way that respects cultural diversity, eliminates algorithmic bias and enhances understanding of human experiences, the authors point out. Meanwhile the medical humanities “can provide a critical context to guide such developments.” More: ‘Examples such as the integration of narrative medicine with AI tools demonstrate the potential of this synergy, paving the way for new modalities of empathic and personalized care.’
2. The effective integration of AI requires ongoing efforts to balance efficiency and humanity. “This includes training health professionals from an interdisciplinary perspective, developing strict ethical regulations and adopting a participatory approach involving patients, physicians, computer scientists and humanists,” Paglialonga and Simonetti write. ‘Only through this holistic view will it be possible to realize the full potential of AI, making it an ally of medicine without sacrificing humanity in care.’
3. Imagining a future in which the medical humanities ‘complete’ healthcare technology is not just a theoretical exercise but a practical and moral necessity. The medical humanities—which are closely related to storytelling in ethics and empathy—can connect technology and human care. ‘In this scenario, AI is no longer just a technical tool: It becomes fundamental in expanding the capacity for care.’
4. In the future, AI will support physicians not only in identifying medical abnormalities but also in recognizing the life histories that define patients as unique individuals.Picture med-school settings in which AI-based simulations enrich student-teacher interactions, training generations of physicians how to navigate technological complexities and moral dilemmas. ‘And anticipate a world in which medicine never loses sight of its fundamental purpose: to serve humanity.’
Read it all. ———————————— - In other research news:
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