Healthcare and life sciences organizations are rapidly expanding their use of Artificial Intelligence across clinical, research and operational domains, with adoption rising in every surveyed segment, including digital healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology, payers and providers, and medical technology and tools. Digital healthcare reported the highest adoption at 78%, followed by medical technology at 74%, as organizations apply Artificial Intelligence to medical imaging, clinical decision support and workflow optimization. The most common workload was generative Artificial Intelligence and large language models, cited by 69% of respondents, followed by Artificial Intelligence for data analytics and data science, predictive analytics and, for the first time in the survey, agentic Artificial Intelligence, which 47% of respondents said they are using or assessing.
The survey findings point to clear and growing return on investment as Artificial Intelligence becomes embedded in core functions rather than isolated pilots. For example, 61% of respondents from medical technology said they are using Artificial Intelligence for medical imaging, and 57% from pharmaceutical and biotechnology said drug discovery is being driven by Artificial Intelligence. In the medical technology segment, 57% of respondents reported seeing ROI from deploying Artificial Intelligence for medical imaging, while nearly half (46%) of pharmaceutical and biotechnology respondents said Artificial Intelligence for drug discovery and development was among their top ROI use cases. Among digital healthcare providers, the top ROI use case was virtual health assistants and chatbots, according to 37%, and 39% of respondents from payers and providers cited administrative tasks and workflow optimization as their top area of ROI. Executives reported broad business impact, with 85% saying Artificial Intelligence is helping increase revenue, and 80% saying it is helping reduce costs.
Rising investment and a strong tilt toward open source are shaping how organizations build and deploy domain-specific Artificial Intelligence systems. As a result of Artificial Intelligence’s positive impact, 85% of respondents said their Artificial Intelligence budgets would increase this year, with another 12% saying budgets would stay the same, and for almost half of respondents (46%), Artificial Intelligence spending will increase significantly, by more than 10%. Open source is now a strategic pillar, with 82% of survey respondents stating it is moderately to extremely important to their Artificial Intelligence strategy, as enterprises look to customize models for specialized tasks while balancing openness with clinical safety and accountability. Alongside generative and predictive workloads, 47% of respondents said they are using or assessing agentic Artificial Intelligence, reflecting growing interest in systems that can automate knowledge retrieval, documentation, scheduling and utilization management over the next 12-18 months.
