🚀 Mission View
A sharper perspective on this week's issue that matters at the intersection of health and AI.
If you’ve been following AI closely, your news feed probably looks like mine — a steady stream of takes about whether the boom is sustainable or if a bubble is about to burst.
Last week, I noted that healthcare is an outlier in AI adoption — not just compared to other sectors, but compared to its own historically slow embrace of technology. Which raises the question: if the AI market cools, what happens to a sector that’s possibly more exposed than others?
A recent analysis ~Medscape of the so-called “AI bubble” offers an encouraging note: “Taken together, none of our sources predict a medical apocalypse if the AI bubble deflates.” The bigger opportunity — and the moral imperative — is to get AI right as it becomes more embedded in the health system.
Farzad Mostashari, CEO of Aledade, puts it plainly: he’s open to AI vendors, but only if their pitch is about outcomes, not output. “It needs to be about better coordination, more engaging patient outreach, and a more holistic understanding of patient conditions,” he says. As he sees it, payment models shape behavior. If incentives reward speed and coding, vendors will build for speed and coding. If incentives reward health, they’ll build for health.
That may be the deeper question right now. Not whether there’s an AI bubble, but whether the business model around AI in healthcare will reward the right kind of innovation. The tools aren’t the problem. The incentives are.
Because what a travesty it would be if — at a moment of enormous possibility — we used new technology to double down on everything that already makes our system so maddening and ineffective.
🛜 Field Signals
A quick hit on this week’s key policy shifts and industry trends.
Amazon on Tuesday said it would cut 14,000 corporate roles, in an effort to thin out bureaucracy and be more flexible in an AI-driven era. Though Amazon CEO Andy Jassy later said that this week’s 14K job cuts were not AI-driven but about stripping layers after pandemic overhiring.
OpenAI completed its controversial transition to a public benefit corporation, while also simultaneously renegotiating its Microsoft arrangement to address tensions surrounding AGI rights and ownership stakes.
Separately, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the company is on track to achieve an “intern-level research assistant” by next year and a fully-automated AI researcher by 2028.
xAI released Grokipedia, an AI-driven Wikipedia-style encyclopedia with 800K+ Grok-generated articles, and options to let users submit corrections with real-time AI edits.
Nearly two-thirds of patients are worried that the artificial intelligence their health plans use isn't fair, with 67% saying they're afraid AI could unfairly deny them care, according to a Pollfish survey commissioned by Zyter|TruCare
Extropic just introduced thermodynamic sampling units (TSU), a new chip architecture that handles probability calculations instead of traditional processing, claiming the hardware can run AI models using 10,000x less energy than current GPUs. Read: if the hype pans out, AI’s energy woes may be somewhat solved.
🛠️ Practical Edge
Actionable tips and tools to help leaders strengthen capacity and apply AI in their work.
Anthropic just released Claude for Excel in beta, letting users interact with the AI assistant through a sidebar that can read, analyze, and modify spreadsheets, alongside new connectors and Skills for the financial industry.
Kamil Banc from AI Adopters Club analyzed 30 days of his ChatGPT and Claude conversations — and discovered he wasn’t just chatting, he was quietly building systems. From triaging emails and drafting presentations to cleaning data and automating workflows, patterns emerged that looked less like “prompting” and more like infrastructure. The takeaway: many professionals are already automating meaningful chunks of their work without naming it as such. By reviewing your own prompt history, you can spot repeatable workflows that could be turned into reusable templates, AI skills, or even new organizational processes.
🌅 On the Horizon
A quick look at the developments and events expected to shape the weeks ahead.
Nov. 5–6: GovAI Coalition Summit 2025 in Arlington, VA.
Nov. 18-20: AI in Healthcare & Pharma Summit 2025 (RE•WORK) in Boston. Register here.
Dec. 8-9: Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.
Feb. 11-13: The Complexities of AI in Health Care by American Health Law Association in Las Vegas and Virtual. Register here.
⌚️ Closing Time
A parting thought on what health leaders need to be focused on.
NVIDIA may be quickly becoming the quiet backbone of healthcare’s AI buildout. This week alone several important partnerships were announced:
Verily announced it will integrate NVIDIA’s AI stack into its precision health platform, powering large-scale model development across health systems, payers, and research partners.
Johnson & Johnson MedTech revealed plans to use NVIDIA AI in its Monarch surgical robot for kidney stone procedures.
Eli Lilly teamed up with NVIDIA to build pharma’s “most powerful” AI supercomputer — an “AI factory” for accelerating drug discovery.
Together, these deals signal NVIDIA’s deepening role as the infrastructure layer for AI in health — from the operating room to the data center.
Till next time,
