Many health care leaders are leaning into agentic AI

Many health care leaders are leaning into agentic AI as adoption hurdles ease

Deloitte research suggests that health care leaders are increasing investment in agentic AI, but returns may depend on how quickly their organizations can scale beyond pilots.

11 FEBRUARY 2026 Deloitte Center for Health Solutions

Health care leaders are under continued pressure to reduce operational costs, stabilize a strained workforce, and improve access and experience.1 While artificial intelligence has the potential to be transformative, many organizations report incremental gains, often slowed by organizational and implementation hurdles rather than a lack of use cases.2 That dynamic is beginning to shift with agentic AI. Unlike traditional and generative AI, which primarily respond to prompts or support discrete decisions, agentic AI can plan and sequence tasks, adapt to conditions, and coordinate with people and platforms to help deliver outcomes across clinical, administrative, and financial domains. When designed responsibly, these agents operate with explicit guardrails and under human oversight.

To understand how agentic AI is showing up in the market, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions surveyed 100 US health care technology executives (50 from health systems and 50 from health plans) in September 2025 and conducted online focus groups with 35 health care technology executives, futurists, technologists, and agentic AI leaders (see methodology). The findings suggest that long-standing AI adoption challenges—constraints that are likely shaping early agentic AI scaling—are beginning to ease: 40% of surveyed leaders say technical talent limitations are no longer a major challenge. Leaders also reported reduced friction from resistance to change (38%), leadership buy-in (35%), and data quality concerns (32%) (figure 1).

Together, these signals suggest that agentic AI is moving beyond experimentation. For executives, the focus should shift from adoption to scale, and from pilots to real operational impact. That means scaling agentic AI responsibly to unlock measurable improvements in consumer engagement, care delivery, workforce capacity, and core administrative and payment workflows.

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