Here are more reflections on the evolution of AI and its projected impact on the enterprise SaaS industry over the next five years, informed by my observations and anecdotal data gathered from my convening colleagues.
I. From Generative AI/LLMs in 2024 to Agentic AI in 2025
2024 was the year of GenAI/LLMs, highlighting ambient clinical intelligence or ambient listening. Microsoft, a Lightbeam partner, has made massive investments in AI, including Chat GPT and Copilot embedded in all Microsoft Office products, propelling AI expectations across the healthcare industry.
Given the expanding GenAI interest, investments, and hype over the last two years, I have not been surprised about the proliferation of new ambient listening solutions and apps at the various conferences this year. In the coming years, I predict that ambient listening will evolve from a monetized point solution to an embedded feature in the agentic AI-powered electronic health records (EHRs) of tomorrow.
Lightbeam AI is innovating to deliver ambient listening capabilities within its care management solution, which will capture and convert from speech to text and summarize patient notes for a care/case manager or care coordinator. This will not only improve their productivity but also alleviate administrative task fatigue and burnout. Details to come, so stay tuned.
II. AI, Healthcare, and the Enterprise SaaS Industry
Here is the roadmap we have developed at Lightbeam to track the expansion of AI in healthcare and how that will impact the enterprise SaaS industry.
A framework for the evolution of AI in Healthcare and its impact on the Enterprise SaaS industry.
The y-axis quantifies the anticipated value, ROI, and payback on AI strategy, investments, and resources in healthcare, while the x-axis is a temporal continuum tracking the evolution of AI and its impact. The graph tracks the developmental process from augmentation of current SaaS capabilities to autonomous AI, which refers to AI systems capable of performing tasks and making decisions independently without human intervention or oversight.
On the way to autonomous AI, we are witnessing AI prescriptive actioning (enabled by a combo of ML/ NLP/NLG, and LLMs vs. descriptive and predictive analytics) with a portfolio of prescriptive actions recommended for intervention and decision making. The next step in this evolution is AI automation through AI agents enabled by carefully curated LLMs or SLMs (Small Language Models) that will automate steps in a process, workflows, or eventually, entire processes, which will pave the way for autonomous AI.
III. The Advent of AI Platform-as-a-Service (AI PaaS) and DIY tradeoffs in 2025-27
AI Platform-as-a-Service (AI PaaS) solutions are proliferating from a variety of major vendors. Enterprise SaaS vendors or healthcare organizations seeking to augment their AI capabilities can now make strategic choices regarding building their own AI solutions or buying/renting an AI PaaS solution from these vendors to accelerate time-to-market at scale, which will likely happen and accelerate over the next 2-3 years. Agentic AI PaaS solutions will likely include the following:
- Self-Service Conversational AI Agents: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service
- Value-Based Care (VBC), Population Health Management, Care Management Prescriptive Analytics: Alerts, Care Management, Patient Scheduling
- Personal AI Assistants for Senior Executives: Performance Monitoring and Decision Support
- Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Clinical Trials, and Fraud Waste and Abuse (FWA): Process Monitoring & Exception Management
- Self-Service Coding for Automation and Agent Creation
The evolution of enterprise SaaS to enterprise AI PaaS over the next five years will reshape the future of enterprise software in healthcare, life sciences and every other industry.
IV. The Future of AI Platform-as-a-Service (AI PaaS)
The next significant disruption of the enterprise SaaS industry will be its reconfiguration on agentic AI platforms to enable process and workflow automation as well as decision support at scale. These will automate manual, repetitive, human-error-prone tasks, workflows, and processes initially—and eventually reconfigure many job descriptions and responsibilities.
Platform solutions like EHRs with ambient listening as an embedded feature/functionality, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as well as solutions for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Revenue Cycle Management (RCM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Clinical Trial Management (CTM), R&D, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) are being/will be re-written for agentic AI to support.
1. AI Prescriptive Actioning 2. AI Automation (tasks, workflows, and processes) and eventually 3. Autonomous AI, as illustrated in figure below.
A visionary roadmap for the evolution of AI in Healthcare enabled by agentic AI/AI agents and its impact on the Enterprise SaaS Landscape over the next 5 years (2025-2030).
This future is happening as we speak with agentic AI solutions hitting the market. The transformation is underway. Where will you start yours? Read more about Lightbeam AI, or request a demo. Access my industry thought leadership portfolio at www.AndyDe.com and on LinkedIn.
#HIMSS25 #AIinHealthcare #MachineLearning #NLP #NLG #AIagents #AgenticAI #AIPaaS #AIaaS #MedicalRobotics #EntepriseSaaSDisruption #LightbeamAI
