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At a recent Google Cloud healthcare roundtable, industry experts discussed data from a new report on the return of investment (ROI) of generative AI and how AI is transforming healthcare organizations.
"For the past years, the industry conversation has shifted. Healthcare executives are now focused on both ROI and responsible deployment," said Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions for Google Cloud.
"Our report highlights two major takeaways. No. 1, AI use cases are scaling to production. Forty-four percent of executives who were surveyed are already adopting AI agents in production."
Gupta noted that leaders are making big bets on this technology, with 46% reporting that their organization is allocating over 50% of their future AI budget to AI agents.
According to the report, the No. 1 concern for executives is data privacy and security when evaluating large language model (LLM) providers.
Additionally, 74% report that their organization's genAI spend has increased as technology costs fall in 2025.
Meanwhile, 48% report their organization is reallocating non-AI budget for genAI versus 41% in 2024.
Executives also saw a shift in business priorities in 2025.
Top business objectives to pursue with genAI within two to three years include increased operational efficiency (54%), increased employee productivity (52%), improved patient experience (51%), more strategic decision-making (41%), greater AI agent deployment (39%), new product development (39%), accelerated innovation (38%), increased competitiveness/market share (38%) and increased shareholder/investor demand (28%).
"We are using clinical notes summarization. This is where we are using AI technology to help a physician understand the data of a patient a lot quicker," said Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI officer at Hackensack Meridian Health.
"We started off creating a general summary, but we realized through this new technology that we were able to customize that by specialty. So, what we are doing is adding the right kind of nuances by specialty, so if a physician is an oncologist that summary is very different from somebody who is a urologist."
Data from the report showed that 34% of healthcare executives say their organizations have launched more than 10 AI agents.
Finally, when asked how AI agents are being used, 39% said they use it for inventory tracking and restocking, 36% said for automated document processing, and 35% of the executives surveyed said they use AI agents for regulatory compliance.
