AI is increasingly being adopted across healthcare and in 2025, it will be a driving force behind a smarter, nimbler, and more personalized experience. From research labs to patient care, AI-powered solutions will enhance the healthcare experience for administrators, professionals, researchers, and patients alike.
With a year of promise, innovation, and excitement ahead, there are three areas where AI will have a transformative impact on the industry. These include digital health agents that will improve the patient healthcare journey, robots capable of performing complex surgical tasks and generative AI tools that will aid and speed up drug discovery.
Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences for EMEA at NVIDIA.
The dawn of agentic AI
In the healthcare setting, agentic AI and multi-agent systems will help address the existential challenges of workforce shortages and the rising cost of care.
Agentic AI is a new category of generative AI that operates virtually autonomously. It can make complex decisions and take actions based on continuous learning and analysis of vast datasets. Agentic AI is adaptable, has defined goals and can correct itself, and can chat with other AI agents or reach out to a human for help.
This new era of ‘digital humans’ can take clinical notes and book patient appointments. This introduces an era of services delivered by software, leading to the emergence of the service-as-a-software industry. The new normal will soon be always-on, personalized care services. Healthcare staff will collaborate with agents to reduce their administrative workloads. AI agents will retrieve and summarize patient records, as well as recommend clinical trials and state-of-the-art treatments for their patients.
The role of robots
Robots will work alongside and support human clinicians in a variety of ways. On one end of the scale, they’ll be much better equipped to respond and react to human commands. They’ll also play an increasingly central role in assisting and performing complex surgeries.
While robots are nothing new, we haven’t seen them integrate into society and support our daily lives as we have with other technological innovations. But that is set to change. This transformation is being made possible by digital twins, simulation, and AI that train and test robotic systems in virtual environments to reduce risks associated with real-world situations. These tools also train robots to react to virtually any scenario, vastly enhancing their adaptability and performance across varying clinical situations.
These new virtual worlds for training robots are the key to making autonomous surgical robots a reality. The surgical robots will perform complex surgical tasks with precision, decreasing cognitive workloads for surgeons and reducing patient recovery times. There is a tremendous potential here to increase equity of access to high-quality care, particularly in developing countries.
AI factories for drug discovery and design
Generative AI models in drug discovery will liberate scientific thinking and exploration. Take a generative AI tool like ChatGPT — when you prompt it to generate an email, it doesn’t need to put pen to paper for trial and error. Now think about the impact this will have on drug discovery.
We’re already witnessing techbio and biopharma companies combining models that generate, predict, and optimize molecules to explore near-infinite possible target drug combinations — all before needing to enter time-consuming and financially costly wet lab experiments.
AI factories, a new class of data centers that enhance AI capabilities, will transform the drug discovery process. These AI factories will use all available wet lab data to improve AI models, then update and redeploy those models for future experiments. Each experiment will benefit from the last and new information will be fed into the next. This will shift the focus of drug discovery from beyond just discovering new drugs to actively designing and engineering them.
As we look ahead to 2025, we’ll discover new applications and ways to interact with AI. In the coming year, the healthcare industry will be able to use AI models, combined with their proprietary data to develop systems that can reason. This will empower the next generation of digital health agents, unlock a new age of robotics and enable new developments and breakthroughs in drug discovery and design.
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