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Attendees at HIMSS in Orlando, Florida 2024.

Courtesy of HIMSS

The hottest new technology for doctors promises to bring back an age-old health-care practice: face-to-face conversations with patients.

As more than 30,000 health and tech professionals gathered among the palm trees at the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida, this week, ambient clinical documentation was the talk of the exhibition floor. 

This technology allows doctors to consensually record their visits with patients. The conversations are automatically transformed into clinical notes and summaries using artificial intelligence. Companies like Microsoft’s Nuance Communications, Abridge and Suki have developed solutions with these capabilities, which they argue will help reduce doctors’ administrative workloads and prioritize meaningful connections with patients. 

“After I see a patient, I have to write notes, I have to place orders, I have to think about the patient summary,” Dr. Shiv Rao, founder and CEO of Abridge, told CNBC at HIMSS. “So what our technology does is it allows me to focus on the person in front of me — the most important person, the patient — because when I hit start, have a conversation, then hit stop, I can swivel my chair and within seconds, the note’s there.” 

Administrative workloads are a major problem for clinicians across the U.S. health-care system. A survey published by Athenahealth in February found that more than 90% of physicians report feeling burned out on a “regular basis,” largely because of the paperwork they are expected to complete. 

More than 60% of doctors said they feel overwhelmed by clerical requirements and work an average of 15 hours per week outside their normal hours to keep up, the survey said. Many in the industry call this at-home work “pajama time.” 

Since administrative work is mostly bureaucratic and doesn’t directly influence doctors’ decisions around diagnoses or patient care, it has served as one of the first areas where health systems have seriously begun to explore applications of generative AI. As a result, ambient clinical documentation solutions are having a real moment in the sun. 

“There isn’t a better place to be,” Kenneth Harper, general manager of DAX Copilot at Microsoft, told CNBC in an interview. 

Microsoft’s Nuance announced its ambient clinical documentation tool Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Express in a preview capacity last March. By September, the solution, now called DAX Copilot, was generally available. Harper said there are now more than 200 organizations using the technology. 

Microsoft acquired Nuance for around $16 billion in 2021. The company had a two-story exhibition booth in the exhibit hall that was often packed with attendees

Harper said the technology saves doctors several minutes per encounter, though the exact numbers vary depending on the specialty. He said his team gets feedback about the service almost daily from doctors who claim it has helped them take better care of themselves — and even saved their marriages.

Doctors using A.I. to fight burnout: Apps for medical record technology

Harper recounted a conversation with one physician who was considering retirement after practicing for more than three decades. He said the doctor was feeling worn out from years of stress, but he was inspired to keep working after he was introduced to DAX Copilot. 

“He said, ‘I literally think I’m going to practice for another 10 years because I actually enjoy what I do,'” Harper said. “That’s just a personal anecdote of the type of impact this is having on our care teams.” 

At HIMSS, Stanford Health Care announced it is deploying DAX Copilot across its entire enterprise. 

Gary Fritz, chief of applications at Stanford Health Care, said the organization had initially started by testing the tool within its exam rooms. He said Stanford recently surveyed physicians about their use of DAX Copilot and 96% found it easy to use. 

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that big a number,” Fritz told CNBC in an interview. “It is a big deal.”

Dr. Christopher Sharp, chief medical information officer at Stanford Health Care and one of the physicians who tested DAX Copilot, said it is “remarkably seamless” to use. He said the tool’s immediacy and reliability are accurate and strong but could improve at capturing a patient’s tone. 

Sharp said he thinks the tool saves him documentation time and has changed how he spends that time. He said he is often reading and editing notes instead of composing them, for instance, so it is not as though the work has disappeared entirely.

In the near term, Sharp said he’d like to see more capabilities for personalization within DAX Copilot, both at an individual and specialty level. Even so, he said it was easy to see the value of it from the start.

“The moment that that first document returns to you, and you see your own words and the patient’s own words being reflected directly back to you in a usable fashion, I would say that from that moment, you’re hooked,” Sharp told CNBC in an interview.

Fritz said it is still early in the product life cycle, and Stanford Health Care is still working out exactly what deployment will look like. He said DAX Copilot will likely roll out in specialty-specific tranches. 

Attendees at HIMSS in Orlando, Florida 2024.

Courtesy of HIMSS

In January, Nuance announced the general availability of DAX Copilot within Epic Systems’ electronic health record (EHR). Most doctors create and manage patient medical records using EHRs, and Epic is the largest vendor by hospital market share in the U.S., according to a May report from KLAS Research

Integrating a tool like DAX Copilot directly into doctors’ EHR workflow means they won’t need to switch apps to access it, which helps save time and reduce their clerical burden even further, Harper said. 

Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, told CNBC that more than 150,000 notes have been drafted into the company’s software by ambient technologies since the HIMSS conference last year. And the technology is scaling fast. Hain said more notes have already been drafted in 2024 than in 2023.

“You’re seeing health systems who have worked through an intentional process of acclimating their end users to this type of technology, now beginning to rapidly roll that out,” he said. 

A company named Abridge also integrates its ambient clinical documentation technology directly within Epic. Abridge declined to share the exact number of health organizations using its technology. It announced at HIMSS that California-based UCI Health is rolling out the company’s solution system-wide. 

Rao, the CEO of Abridge, said the rate at which the health-care industry has adopted ambient clinical documentation feels “historic.” 

Abridge announced a $30 million Series B funding round in October, led by Spark Capital, and four months later, the company closed a $150 million Series C round, according to a February release. Rao said tail winds like physician burnout have turned into a “tornado” for Abridge, and it will use these funds to continue to invest in the science behind the technology and explore where it can go next. 

The company is saving some doctors as much as three hours a day, Rao said, and is automating more than 92% of the clerical work it focuses on. Abridge’s technology is live across 55 specialties and 14 languages, he added. 

Abridge has a Slack channel called “love stories,” which was viewed by CNBC, where the team will share the positive feedback they get about their technology. One message from this week was from a doctor who said Abridge helped them take their least favorite part of their job away and saves them around an hour and a half each day.

“That’s the type of feedback that absolutely inspires everybody in the company,” Rao said.

Suki CEO Punit Soni said the ambient clinical documentation market is “sizzling.” He expects rapid growth to continue through the next couple of years, though, like all hype cycles, he said he thinks the dust will settle.

Soni founded Suki more than six years ago after hypothesizing that there would be a need for a digital assistant to help doctors manage clinical documentation. Soni said Suki is now used by more than 30 specialties in around 250 health organizations nationwide. Six “large health systems” have gone live with Suki in the past two weeks, he added. 

“For four to five years I’ve sat around, basically with the shop open, hoping somebody will show up. Now the entire mall is here, and there’s a line outside the door of people wanting to deploy, ” Soni told CNBC at HIMSS. “It’s very, very exciting to be here.”

Suki’s website says its technology can reduce the time a physician spends on documentation by an average of 72%. The company raised a $55 million funding round in 2021 led by March Capital. It will likely raise another round in the latter half of the year, Soni said.

Soni said Suki is focused on deploying its technology at scale and exploring additional applications, like how ambient documentation could be used to assist nurses. He said the Spanish language is coming to Suki soon, and customers should expect most major languages to follow. 

“There is so much that has to happen,” he said. “In the next decade, all of health-care tech is going to look completely different.”

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

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Microsoft AI chief Suleyman sees advantage in building models ‘3 or 6 months behind’

Microsoft owns lots of Nvidia graphics processing units, but it isn’t using them to develop state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

There are good reasons for that position, Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s CEO of AI, told CNBC’s Steve Kovach in an interview on Friday. Waiting to build models that are “three or six months behind” offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It’s “cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier,” he said. “That’s actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models.”

Suleyman made a name for himself as a co-founder of DeepMind, the AI lab that Google bought in 2014, reportedly for $400 million to $650 million. Suleyman arrived at Microsoft last year alongside other employees of the startup Inflection, where he had been CEO.

More than ever, Microsoft counts on relationships with other companies to grow.

It gets AI models from San Francisco startup OpenAI and supplemental computing power from newly public CoreWeave in New Jersey. Microsoft has repeatedly enriched Bing, Windows and other products with OpenAI’s latest systems for writing human-like language and generating images.

Microsoft’s Copilot will gain “memory” to retain key facts about people who repeatedly use the assistant, Suleyman said Friday at an event in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to commemorate the company’s 50th birthday. That feature came first to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has 500 million weekly users.

Through ChatGPT, people can access top-flight large language models such as the o1 reasoning model that takes time before spitting out an answer. OpenAI introduced that capability in September — only weeks later did Microsoft bring a similar capability called Think Deeper to Copilot.

Microsoft occasionally releases open-source small-language models that can run on PCs. They don’t require powerful server GPUs, making them different from OpenAI’s o1.

OpenAI and Microsoft have held a tight relationship shortly after the startup launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, effectively kicking off the generative AI race. In total, Microsoft has invested $13.75 billion in the startup, but more recently, fissures in the relationship between the two companies have begun to show.

Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in July 2024, and OpenAI in January announced that it was working with rival cloud provider Oracle on the $500 billion Stargate project. That came after years of OpenAI exclusively relying on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite OpenAI partnering with Oracle, Microsoft in a blog post announced that the startup had “recently made a new, large Azure commitment.”

“Look, it’s absolutely mission-critical that long-term, we are able to do AI self-sufficiently at Microsoft,” Suleyman said. “At the same time, I think about these things over five and 10 year periods. You know, until 2030 at least, we are deeply partnered with OpenAI, who have [had an] enormously successful relationship for us.

Microsoft is focused on building its own AI internally, but the company is not pushing itself to build the most cutting-edge models, Suleyman said.

“We have an incredibly strong AI team, huge amounts of compute, and it’s very important to us that, you know, maybe we don’t develop the absolute frontier, the best model in the world first,” he said. “That’s very, very expensive to do and unnecessary to cause that duplication.”

WATCH: Microsoft Copilot beginning of a seismic shift in AI integration, says Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

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AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid. 

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

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