Big Tech is closing in on healthcare with a surge of consumer AI tools

Is it suddenly feeling a little crowded in here? It could be because almost every household name in the tech world is racing to release a consumer-focused AI tool to assist with improving the healthcare experience. 

Following swiftly on the heels of major announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic earlier this year, the OG squad of Big Tech companies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have unveiled their own efforts to infuse a layer of continuous, personalized intelligence between the consumer and the traditional healthcare system. 

Each emerging platform or AI assistant hits a slightly different note based on their developers’ historical strengths. But all of them are designed to accelerate the overall shift from health data aggregation to basic search, from search to conversational query, and finally from natural language interface to proactive agentic assistance that can help consumers take meaningful actions with minimal friction. 

Let’s take a look at the latest moves from the consumer tech giants angling for a piece of the healthcare pie. 

Amazon goes actionable and agentic to tie into One Medical offerings

Amazon is all about fast delivery of items and experiences, so it’s no wonder that its most recent foray into healthcare is focused on getting things done.  

The company’s new Health AI Agent is designed to assist with taking specific actions within Amazon’s integrated health ecosystem, which includes virtual and in-person One Medical clinics and Amazon Pharmacy. The Health AI Agent can answer questions and help interpret test results, but it can also take charge of simple actions, such as managing prescriptions and booking appointments, to smooth out wrinkles in the consumer experience.  

“It’s designed to be a personalized health agent that knows you and your medical history so it can provide more helpful responses and take meaningful action, including connecting you to the professionals, treatments, and account services you need to get and stay well,” the company said in a blog announcing the launch. 

“When you need professional care, Health AI connects you directly to One Medical providers through message, video, or in person. It can also help manage prescription renewals with Amazon Pharmacy or your pharmacy of choice, sending requests to your One Medical provider, and will provide relevant health care product recommendations from Amazon.com when you ask for them.” 

The announcement states that users can give the Health AI Agent permission to access available medical records to provider deeper and more personalized insights.  

Weirdly, however, the company frames this in a dramatically oversimplified and somewhat misleading manner. “If you want Health AI to provide a personalized experience, you give it permission to access your available medical records such as medical history, medications, lab results, and clinical notes through the Health Information Exchange, the nationwide secure system for sharing patient medical data, by completing a clear consent process.” 

There is no single, nationwide “Health Information Exchange,” and positioning health data exchange in this manner could give consumers a false sense of how well the system will be able to gather and analyze their data. To date, Amazon hasn’t publicly disclosed which health information exchange entities they may be working with. 

The Health AI Agent was first made available to users of the One Medical app in January, but will now be available to all Amazon customers in a staged rollout. 

Microsoft focuses on aggregation and intelligence

Microsoft is staying true to its roots as an aggregator and organizer of information with Copilot Health, a new secure space within its Copilot ecosystem. 

Unlike Amazon’s goal of lifting healthcare actions out of the hands of consumers, Microsoft is more concerned with empowering those consumers to take more effective actions themselves, the company said. 

“The truth is that most people don’t need more information. They need help to make sense of what they already have,” the announcement asserted. Copilot Health brings together your health records, wearable data, and health history into one place, then applies intelligence to turn them into a coherent story.” 

It’s a space “where medical intelligence makes sense of your information and delivers personalized health insights that you can act on,” Microsoft continued. “Copilot Health doesn’t replace your doctor. It makes every minute you have with them count more. You arrive prepared, with the right questions, the right context, and the confidence that comes from better understanding your own body.” 

Unlike Amazon’s nebulous claims around health information exchange, Microsoft explicitly says it is working with HealthEx, an aggregation layer that connects to and assembles records from the patchwork of local, state, and national HIEs, as well as individual health systems. Interestingly, HealthEx also counts Anthropic among its customers, according to its website.  

The goal for Copilot Health is to become a stepping stone on the path to true “medical superintelligence,” Microsoft says, wherein AI can help solve the most complex clinical problems as well or better than human clinicians. 

Google offers up more health coaching, but leans into real-world research before pushing consumer AI

In contrast to Microsoft and Amazon’s bolder claims around their AI-powered partners in care, Google’s most recent consumer-focused announcement is a little more limited in scope and a softer on the big, futuristic promises. 

The company is keeping its hand in the game with new personal health coaching tools within the FitBit app, including a way to integrate lab results, medications, and clinical visit history for more detailed and specific insights around wellness. 

“When your coach understands your medical history, its guidance becomes safer, more relevant and more personalized,” Google said. “For example, instead of getting a generic answer about cholesterol, you can ask, ‘How can I improve my cholesterol?’ The coach can then summarize your cholesterol labs, highlighting notable values and trends, and provide personalized wellness information based on your medical history and wearable data.” 

But instead of going full-bore with an AI consumer health assistant, Google is taking its time to conduct research around how this class of tools functions in real-world settings.   

“We will be launching a first-of-its-kind nationwide study to evaluate conversational AI within real-world virtual care workflows,” the Google Research team said. “This research will move beyond simulation and retrospective data and aim to gather rigorous prospective evidence on how AI performs in clinical settings at scale.” 

“By moving from demonstrating the art of the possible in the lab to studying AI systems at scale in the real world, we are taking a critical step toward making high-quality care accessible to everyone through frontier models of medical intelligence.” 

The goal is to test how conversational AI works in real-world situations with consented patients, building on previous projects demonstrating Google AI’s diagnostic reasoning capabilities and how well the AI performs in clinical settings.  

The strong emphasis on safety and efficacy testing represents a much different approach than some of the other leading names in Big Tech, who are shipping their products first and then observing their impact retrospectively.  It’s not a bad idea in a time when consumer-grade LLMs are constantly getting flagged for health errors and AI slop is quickly becoming reviled. 

But it may position Google behind the pack when it comes to uptake and market share, depending on which niche it pursues once it’s satisfied that its AI will make the grade. 

What about Apple?

Speaking of lagging behind, where’s Apple in all of this?  Turns out, the Cupertino company might not even be on the same racetrack. 

Apple has already done much of what Google has just announced. Apple Health debuted in 2014 as a digital wellness platform and has integrated Apple Watch data, third-party apps, and EHR records since then. It has already delivered several personalized, algorithmically driven health tracking features through its Watch and phone sensors, but has taken a much slower and much more cautious approach to integrating generative AI into its ecosystem. 

That’s partly because Apple is, at its core, a device company that still makes most of its money off its widget ecosystem instead of consumer services. As a result, they have an enormous wealth of highly valuable data, but they may have less incentive to build a standalone AI service layer compared to companies more directly invested in cloud and AI platforms and services.  

That could be why there’s been little except for rumors about their activities in the AI-driven healthcare space. Apple observers have floated talk of an upcoming facelift for the Health app, with food tracking and patient education, and have also hinted at an agentic AI health coach to be unveiled at some point. 

However, it’s also possible that Apple has already scrapped that idea, or at least plans to break it up into smaller chunks to roll out in the Health app bit by bit. Nobody seems to know for sure, which isn’t necessarily a good look for the company in a time when AI is moving quickly and decisively into the consumer healthcare experience. 

Looking ahead

Taken together, these announcements clearly show that Big Tech is getting serious about moving off of the sidelines and into the fray when it comes to AI-heavy consumer healthcare experiences. AI has been the missing link between these companies’ core competencies and their ability to become the interface layer for healthcare navigation, but the technology is finally catching up with the magnitude of ongoing need. 

But these companies are going to be facing some stiff competition in the intelligent interface space, not only from AI-first competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic, but also from dozens or hundreds of healthcare-native players who might have an edge in fully understanding the complexity of the challenge in an industry that eats amateurs for lunch. 

If one or more of them finds success, however, it could be very good news for consumers who are sick and tired of fragmented, impersonal, delayed, and ineffective experiences. The real test will be if Big Tech can deliver on their promises to streamline interactions with health data, assist with getting the personalized answers to health questions, and connect consumers with solutions in a simple and seamless manner.  

Jennifer Bresnick is a journalist and freelance content creator with a decade of experience in the health IT industry.  Her work has focused on leveraging innovative technology tools to create value, improve health equity, and achieve the promises of the learning health system.  She can be reached at [email protected].