One week after one of the most prominent voices in the artificial intelligence (AI) field made an ominous prediction, a new startup is making progress that supports the claim.
In a recent blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that 2025 would be the year in which AI agents would join the workforce. In the future he sees, AI will significantly change the way companies conduct business; Altman frames this as an overall positive development.
Now, an AI startup is taking significant steps toward helping deliver on the potential. OpenAI isn’t the company, but it seems to have the potential to change things for certain aspects of the healthcare industry.
This comes at a time when the use of AI in this sector may raise some red flags. But the company is helping usher in a future in which this new technology plays a pivotal role in healthcare.
A major change could be coming to the healthcare industry, courtesy of the AI revolution.
AI agents may be coming to a hospital near you
Would you trust non-human agents to assist in your hospital visits? That question has likely been on many people’s minds recently as emerging AI capabilities have led to advancements across many different industries, including healthcare.
One member of that group is Hippocratic AI, a healthcare technology startup founded in 2022. The company is working to create AI agents — e.g., sophisticated chatbots or digital assistants — that can help with non-diagnostic patient-facing tasks, such as appointment preparation, pre-operative procedures and chronic care management.
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Hippocratic AI recently achieved a key milestone when it successfully closed out its Series B funding round just nine months after its Series A. Led by Kleiner Perkins, the big venture capital (VC) firm that has backed companies such as Google (GOOGL) , Amazon (AMZN) , the recent funding round netted the startup a $141 million, bumping it up to a valuation of $1.64 billion.
Over the past year, the startup received a $17 million investment from Nvidia (NVDA) after being backed by investment leaders General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. Hippocratic issued a statement on the recent Series B success, stating:
“The company took the opportunity to take on additional capital to further its mission to provide healthcare abundance and improve patient outcomes in the world through its safety-focused Polaris constellation LLM architecture. The new capital will be used to expand the company to more verticals (pharma, payors) and new markets (EMEA, Southeast Asia, Latam).”
TechCrunch reports that Hippocratic AI is focused on helping address the current healthcare industry staffing shortage by deploying AI agents to perform what it describes as simple tasks, thereby freeing human workers up to do other things.
However, this news comes at a time when the use of AI in certain areas of healthcare is under scrutiny. Since the murder of former UnitedHealthcare (UNH) CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024, health insurance providers have come under fire for using AI to review health insurance claims, many of which were denied.
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Despite this, Silicon Valley is clearly confident that companies like Hippocratic have plenty of room to run as their technology continues to be utilized in the industry. According to TechCrunch, the startup has “signed contracts with 23 health systems and insurers” as of 2024, indicating that interest remains fairly high.
What does AI mean for healthcare?
One of the VCs who helped drive Hippocratic AI’s recent funding round provided context on the market, which he certainly sees as having high growth potential.
“The total addressable market of using generative AI for solving healthcare staffing shortages is probably 10 times the size of the healthcare software market alone, and we’re excited to support the Hippocratic AI team on their journey,” says Mamoon Hamid, a partner at Kleiner Perkins.
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He also cites the startup’s focus on patient safety and “unique constellation LLM architecture” as primary reasons for the firm’s interest in its work and decision to invest in it.
Hippocratic AI reports that its AI agents have successfully completed hundreds of thousands of patient calls. “Patient response has been outstanding, giving their GenAI agent interactions an average rating of 8.7 out of 10,” the company reports.
This suggests that sentiment from patients toward medical AI agents may not be too negative, as the technology continues to spread across hospitals. In previous years, studies have found that the majority of people don’t trust the use of AI in healthcare settings and feel that more transparency is needed.
However, this trend is still new, and it will be difficult to assess the impact of agents like Hippocratic AI on the broader industry until more data is released.
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