In an underground auditorium packed with thousands of health-care executives this week, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner stepped on stage to deliver a keynote dressed like a swan, feathers and all.
Even by the tech industry’s more casual standards (take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s trademark leather jacket, for instance), Faulkner’s costume may have puzzled some first-time attendees. But for many health-care industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual— a sign that Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting was officially underway. And one theme stood out during the health-care company’s event on Tuesday: How new artificial intelligence features can help doctors and patients.
Epic is a health-care software giant whose technology is used in thousands of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The company houses medical records for more than 280 million individuals in the U.S., though patients often have data stored across multiple vendors.
Wizards and animals
Each year, thousands of people descend on Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin to hear about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company’s largest annual on-campus events, and CNBC attended the festivities on Tuesday.
Epic’s 1,670-acre campus is sprinkled with farm animals, statues of wizards and buildings themed like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year’s conference is “storytime” themed, and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke while dressed as characters inspired by various children’s books.
There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates across Epic’s major products, including its offerings like MyChart, an app patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research.
Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, speaking at UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
Epic’s Artificial Intelligence announcements
Many of Epic’s announcements centered around how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the company has more than 100 AI features in the works, though many of the tools are still in the early stages of development.
For instance, by the end of this year, Epic said its generative AI will help doctors revise message responses, letters and instructions into plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will be able to use AI to automatically queue up orders for prescriptions and labs, the company said.
Many physicians have to carry out time-consuming tasks like drafting insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it is working to introduce AI tools that can streamline those processes this year.
By the end of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will be able to pull in the results, medications and other details that a doctor might need when responding to a patient’s message through MyChart, the company said. Other specific functions, like using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, are also coming next year.
Epic announced plans for a new staff scheduling application for physicians and nurses called “Teamwork” that’s coming soon. Additionally, Faulkner said Epic is “investigating” how it could facilitate claims submissions directly through its software, without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major change in the way that insurance claims are processed throughout the health-care industry.
Whether these features will all come to fruition — and whether health systems will actually use them — isn’t yet known. Even so, Epic closed its presentation Tuesday by showcasing a lofty demo about where the company believes its technology can go.
The future
Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic, facilitated the demo. He spoke to an AI agent through the MyChart app about his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery and answered questions about his pain. The agent instructed Hain to open his camera and bend his wrist back so it could evaluate the progress of his healing. The agent said Hain’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, which meant his recovery was ahead of schedule, compared to data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database.
Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and it told him that he “should still wait a little longer” before doing so.
In a meeting with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo was happening in real-time without human intervention. However, that capability is so new that Epic doesn’t even have a name for it yet, and Hain said it will likely be a few years before it’s more widely available.
“It is very, very, very early in regards to how and where the community, the broader medical community, will adopt that type of thing, but it’s viable,” he said.
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.”
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.
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.