Dive Brief:

• Cloud-based software company Salesforce is rolling out a library of prebuilt artificial intelligence tools meant to make it easier for providers, payers and other healthcare companies to apply digital labor to time-consuming tasks.
• Salesforce’s “Agentforce for Health” relies on agentic AI, which unlike older AI assistants can operate relatively autonomously.
• The product includes patient access and services capabilities, including answering questions and checking patient eligibility with insurers; public health capabilities, like helping organizations monitor the spread of infections; and clinical capabilities to accelerate research and development for drugs and medical devices.

Dive Insight:

Artificial intelligence has been used in healthcare for years, but the technology has only recently begun to be adopted more widely with the advent of large language models and generative AI. Now, healthcare providers are growing increasingly more interested in agentic AI to automate tasks, according to experts.

Previous AI assistants were limited in their ability to act independently. Agentic AI by comparison can make its own decisions in pursuit of a goal, and can operate without constant human intervention or guidance.

Agentic AI could potentially be a huge help in healthcare, an industry dogged by persistent labor shortages and rampant burnout among workers that remain.

Much burnout can be chalked up to heavy administrative burden. According to some research, healthcare workers spend the majority of their week working on administrative tasks, such as scheduling patient appointments, documenting clinical visits and communicating with insurers.

That’s not to mention the cost: Healthcare administrative spending in the U.S. is approximately $1 trillion annually, according to consultancy McKinsey.

Now, tech companies like Salesforce are pointing to these challenges in pitching their agentic AI offerings to healthcare companies that may be fed up with tedious, route tasks.

Agentforce for Health can chat directly with patients, match them with in-network providers and schedule their appointments, the company announced on Friday. It can also summarize information for care coordinators and communicate with insurers on behalf of providers to check a patient’s eligibility for a service.

Skills in the library also include helping epidemiologists to trace diseases by pulling data from disparate registries, and accelerating patient matching for clinical trails, Salesforce said.

Healthcare teams estimate they’d save up to 10 hours a week by using AI agents, according to a Salesforce survey released in tandem with Agentforce for Health.

Salesforce is rolling out Agentforce’s skills through September this year for clients of its cloud platform.

Salesforce is much smaller than other tech companies like Google and Microsoft that are also jockeying for partnerships with healthcare organizations. Google, for example, also has an agent platform, called Agentspace, that helps organizations craft their own AI agents.

However, Salesforce says its customer relationship management platform sets it apart from its peers.

Along with Agentforce, Salesforce also offers a conversational AI assistant called Einstein Copilot Health Actions that became generally available in April.