Defining the Healthcare AI Landscape: Key Insights from our AI Summit

When OpenAI co-founder & president Greg Brockman emphasized the scale of what’s now possible with today’s compute power, he highlighted a key truth: healthcare's AI opportunity isn't limited by technical capability but the willingness to reimagine.

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We recently hosted the AI + Healthcare Summit to explore one of the most urgent questions facing our industry: how can we responsibly and meaningfully integrate AI into healthcare? Co-hosted with Sutter Health and John Doerr, the summit brought together leaders across the healthcare and technology ecosystems — from C-suite executives at the largest payers and providers to startup founders and Silicon Valley pioneers. Our keynote speakers, Greg Brockman and Bret Taylor (OpenAI chairman and Sierra co-founder), are not just observers of AI’s rise, they’re shaping its trajectory.

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This summit highlighted both the urgency and the opportunity that AI presents for healthcare. And what emerged was clear: the breakthroughs ahead will depend as much on how we lead and collaborate as on the technology itself.

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The following themes capture some of the most resonant insights from the summit for both healthcare executives and AI founders:

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The Compute Leap

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The scale of computational power now available to solve healthcare's biggest challenges represents a fundamental shift in what's possible. Greg Brockman's emphasis on this unprecedented capability highlighted how dramatically the landscape has changed in just a few years. 

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• Takeaway: Rather than focusing solely on incremental improvements, leaders should be asking: what can we do now that we couldn’t even contemplate before? From virtual clinical trials to real-time clinical decision support at the point of care, this computational leap opens the door to entirely new approaches to care delivery. 

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Speed, Focus, and the Power of Partnership

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Leaders repeatedly emphasized how the speed of development has made it easier for healthcare organizations to build custom tools internally, especially for well-defined operational use cases. However, one leader explained that partnering with a startup is like having dedicated compute power working on your specific problem. 

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• Takeaway: The “build vs buy” debate has shifted “could vs should”. Rather than building everything internally, healthcare organizations should leverage external partners who can serve as dedicated, high-velocity development teams. These tiger teams operate at the clockspeed necessary to solve complex healthcare challenges rapidly while accessing specialized AI capabilities without needing to replicate them in-house. Healthcare leaders should focus on identifying the right startup partners.

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Embracing the Paradigm Shift 

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We are entering a new phase where multimodal models — those that can process and integrate text, voice, images, and structured data — are reshaping the boundaries of what's possible. Bret Taylor described to attendees how this technology will fundamentally transform both our daily lives and the healthcare experience, enabling ambient scribing for clinicians, real-time translation and noise cancellation in patient encounters, and AI-assisted diagnostics powered by fused EHR and imaging data.

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• Takeaway: The future of healthcare will be ambient, interactive, and seamlessly multimodal. Leaders identified opportunities to leapfrog legacy systems by envisioning new workflows from the ground up — along with the importance of ensuring these systems are explainable and trusted by clinicians and patients alike.

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Rebuilding the Value Chain

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While attendees extensively discussed the tension between technical advancements and cultural readiness across their organization, one leader broke down a structured progression from individual adoption to system-wide transformation that can ultimately rearchitect entire healthcare processes. 

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The first level of change happens with an individual who recognizes the power of AI and gets more comfortable with integrating AI into their daily workflow. This individual’s experience ultimately expands to their larger working group. Then, once multiple working groups collaborate with each other, we’re not just implementing AI in healthcare — we're rebuilding entire value chains.

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• Takeaway: Cultural transformation isn't a side initiative. It's the precondition for eventual third orders of innovation. Prior authorization exemplifies this opportunity. It touches multiple working groups across payers and providers, from utilization management teams to provider offices to clinical staff. The most impactful AI implementations will redesign value chains across verticals, requiring coordination across multiple stakeholders and systems. 

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AI Will Create Jobs of the Future

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As AI transforms healthcare workflows, it will also generate entirely new roles and specializations, some of which we can’t yet imagine. This future will prioritize reinvention over replacement. Bret Taylor reminded the room that before the iPhone, no one could have predicted “influencer” as a job category. We’ve reached a similar inflection point with AI.

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• Takeaway: Several leaders urged organizations to prepare for a new class of healthcare professionals who are not just users of AI, but orchestrators of it — individuals who understand clinical context, data infrastructure, and prompt engineering. In fact, organizations are already shifting their hiring mindsets. One leader shared a principle in development: “We don’t hire someone until they can prove they can’t do it with AI.” Forward-looking healthcare organizations will create space for new roles to emerge organically from experimentation on the ground.

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Reset our Mindset around “Jobs to be Done”

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Leaders consistently urged attendees to reframe how AI projects are scoped and prioritized. Rather than starting with the technology itself, organizations should anchor their initiatives in the outcomes they hope to achieve. Instagram head of product Ashley Yuki explained how her team identifies a problem first and then determines if AI is the right tool or solution. 

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• Takeaway: AI in healthcare must start with clarity on the outcomes we want to achieve. Whether it's reducing readmissions, streamlining referrals, or improving workforce efficiency, leaders emphasized the need to define success before selecting tools. As one health system executive put it, “Putting AI on top of a fax machine doesn’t give you better care. We need to eliminate the fax machine first.”

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This summit brought our belief at Define Ventures to life: the future of healthcare will be driven by those who pair deep domain expertise with a technology-forward mindset. And as we heard from leaders inside and outside of healthcare at the summit, the real breakthroughs will come not just from technology itself but from how we organize, design, and lead its adoption.

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Greg Brockman reminded us that there is no finish line with developing and innovating generative AI — it's a spectrum. This is a valuable framework for healthcare executives and founders to embrace in their quest to rebuild healthcare. The question isn't whether AI will transform healthcare, but whether we'll actively shape that transformation or simply react to it.

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