The AI agent will see you now

Welcome to Runtime! Today: AWS and Google Cloud are pushing AI deeper into the healthcare industry, Anthropic is now officially considered a supply-chain risk by the U.S. government, and the latest enterprise moves.

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In network

Silicon Valley executives have been trying to come up with ways to use technology to improve the completely dysfunctional U.S. health care system for decades, and they have little to show for those efforts. On Thursday, AWS and Google Cloud announced new plans to roll that rock back up the hill by helping doctors and health-care organizations use AI agents to automate busywork and focus on patient care.

AWS introduced Amazon Connect Health, a version of its call-center software designed for medical professionals. "It integrates with the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) clinicians use for patient verification, appointment management, patient medical history reviews, clinical documentation, and medical coding, while keeping humans in control at every step," the company said in a blog post.

AWS said Amazon Connect Health can understand voice messages from patients looking to book appointments or other routine questions and take action, escalating that call to a real person if the patient has a specific health-related question.
Doctors can use it to create a summary of a patient's medical history before an appointment, and, if the patient approves, record the appointment and generate notes for review.
It also can summarize those notes and automatically generate billing codes for the type of examination or any procedures conducted during the visit, which AWS said would make it much faster and easier for medical offices to submit billing requests to insurance companies.
AWS has been trying for years (with mixed results) to build specific applications for customers rather than directing them to its massive array of application building blocks, and it said Amazon Connect Health is "the first purpose-built AWS solution for health care providers."

Meanwhile, CVS announced the launch of Health100, a new subsidiary that has plans to develop consumer-facing tools for managing health care. Those tools will be built on Google Cloud using its Cloud Healthcare API and Gemini models to help patients manage their health data and get access to services.

Health100 "works by combining a robust health care interoperability infrastructure to fully connect the health care partner ecosystem with advanced multimodal AI that is fine-tuned for an end-to-end integrated experience," CVS Health said in a press release, achieving new levels of corporate buzzword density in a single sentence.
In other words, it's a chatbot, but one that can reach across multiple types of healthcare organizations — primary-care physicians, specialists, pharmacies and urgent-care clinics — to help patients access their data and book appointments as needed.
“We’re going to go very broad, working with anybody who wants to work with us,” said CVS Health's Tony Ambrozie, according to Healthcare Dive. “Including competitors. We need to compete with service, not on hoarding data.”

AWS and Google Cloud are taking a more pragmatic approach to marrying enterprise tech with healthcare after watching Oracle stumble through its disastrous $28 billion acquisition of Cerner Health over the last several years. Last week Bloomberg reported that five executives have left Oracle Health in recent weeks as the division's market share has declined drastically alongside an embarrassing security breach last year.

Still, as the median age of the Baby Boomer generation pushes into the 70s, there will be increasing demand for health care services over the next decade from a system that is already being pushed to the breaking point.
And younger generations that have grown up around the internet and smartphones will want to manage their health care with digital tools.
But as anybody watching this season of HBO's The Pitt knows, the intersection of information technology and health care can be a dangerous place.

Risky business

The U.S. Department of Defense (I don't care what they call it) formally notified Anthropic Thursday that it has been designated as a supply-chain risk, according to Bloomberg. That label could have enormous ramifications for enterprise software companies that use Anthropic's Claude models in their products and work with the military.

The decision comes after Anthropic told the Pentagon last week that it was unwilling to have its models used for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, which are apparently super vital capabilities that America's "warfighters" need to have even though they're using Claude as we speak to wage war against Iran. OpenAI signed some sort of deal with the military last week to allow its models to be used in those situations, but it's not clear where or if it drew any similar lines.

"This designation has never been used in a domestic context, so that’s completely unprecedented. And it’s unprecedented because it’s illegal,” University of Minnesota professor Alan Rozenshtein told Pitchbook. An Anthropic representative did not respond to a request for confirmation of Bloomberg's report, but it said last week that it would challenge any such designation in court.

Enterprise moves

Eric Shoemaker is the new CEO of Keebo, joining the data-warehouse optimization company after serving as chief revenue officer at Device42.

Alex Au Yeung is the new chief product officer at Trellix, following security-product leadership roles at Axiad and Symantec.

Ian Colle is the new senior vice president and chief product officer at Penguin Solutions, joining the high-performance computing company after leading similar teams at AWS.

Thomas Saueressig is the new chief customer officer at SAP, a newly created role for the 22-year veteran of the company following the consolidation of two sales organizations.

Ian Tickle is the new chief revenue officer at Freshworks, which is also a newly created role for the former head of Freshworks' chief of global field operations following a revamp of the company's sales organization.

Chad Reese is the new senior vice president and global channel chief at Vectra AI, joining the security company after channel leadership roles at Solarwinds and VMware.

The Runtime roundup

Seven hyperscalers signed an agreement with the Trump Administration Wednesday to pay for the electricity and any associated upgrades to power infrastructure needed to accommodate new data center construction, but as Ars Technica noted, "the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies."

Oracle plans to lay off "thousands" of employees as it scrambles to find ways to pay for its data-center expansion plans, according to Bloomberg.

Broadcom beat Wall Street expectations for revenue and profit and raised guidance for the current quarter, sending its stock up nearly 5% Thursday.

Salesforce announced plans to retire Quip, the document app that it acquired along with former heir apparent Bret Taylor in 2016, as of March 2027.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!