Epic’s annual User Group Meeting kicked off today at its massive headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin. It’s anticipated that the electronic health record giant will announce new artificial intelligence features and tools as health IT companies race to stay ahead of the competition and to keep pace with Silicon Valley.
The health tech industry was buzzing last week as rumors swirled that Epic planned to launch its own AI scribe. Politico reported that Epic will announce an ambient AI clinical documentation tool to transcribe doctors’ notes. The company posted a video on August 6 that highlighted its AI charting capabilities.
Epic’s move to offer its own AI scribe, while not entirely surprising, puts pressure on AI startups. Currently, 42% of the hospital market is on Epic’s platform, which gives the company massive leverage as it expands its AI capabilities.
Investors have poured nearly $1 billion into ambient AI companies so far in 2025, according to a Stat analysis. Ambient AI has proven to be the most successful use case for AI in healthcare, so far, and VCs are pouring money into the sector to have a horse in the race.
The dominant players in the market include Abridge and Microsoft-owned Nuance and startup Suki also is rapidly growing. The healthcare AI market is increasingly competitive as adoption grows with startups Eleos, Heidi Health, Nabla and Ambience all raising significant funding rounds this year.
Epic also partners with many of these vendors, particularly Abridge and Microsoft’s DAX, and just added Ambience to its Epic Toolbox in the ambient voice recognition category.
Currently, 71% of physician practice leaders say they use AI for patient visits, according to a recent MGMA survey. But only 39% of those practices using AI said it had reduced workload. Those not seeing workload reductions often cited added complexity or being in early stages of AI adoption, the survey found.
The company is joining the AI scribe party a bit later than its peers as ambulatory EHR company athenahealth launched its own ambient notes last year, Oracle Health offers a clinical AI assistant and Elation Health, an EHR for primary care practices, also rolled out AI tools.
As AI-powered tools become table stakes, EHR companies will increasingly offer bundled copilots, including scribing, Brendan Keeler, interoperability practice lead at HTD Health, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
As the “800-pound gorilla” in the health tech space, Epic took a cautious strategy to launch an AI scribe, noted Adam Farren, CEO of electronic medical record company Canvas Medical.
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“When you’re in that position you don’t necessarily chase the latest fad and trend. You have the opportunity to let others be the frontline,” he said.
“This is in indeed validation and a signal that this is real,” he added. Canvas Medical also has made big investments in AI, building an open-source AI-enabled clinical copilot for clinicians and developed it with the Canvas software development kit (SDK).
Epic built its competitive moat over decades with a disciplined approach, Farren noted. “They’re traditionally not a fast mover,” he said.
Partnering with many AI scribe startups has afforded Epic visibility into what use cases are working and how the end user is deploying the software, Farren noted. “It’s a tremendous asset to have that discovery happening in their ecosystem,” he said.
Rumors have circulated that Epic’s AI scribe will be priced around $80 per provider per month, far cheaper than most AI scribes on the market, Maitreyee Joshi, founder & CEO at Avon Health, posted on LinkedIn last week.
“Even if it doesn’t completely displace specialized AI scribes, it will almost certainly drive downward pricing pressure across the category,” Joshi noted in her post.
Other industry executives anticipated that the user interface for Epic’s AI scribe will likely be “clunky,” but the company’s massive reach will give it an advantage. “When 42% of the U.S. hospital market is already on your platform, user experience often takes a back seat to sheer, unadulterated network power. People will use it because they have to,” wrote Pallavi Agarwal, a product manager at a health IT company, in a LinkedIn post.
Epic’s move into ambient clinical documentation marks a major shift, but some industry executives see it as a turning point to a new phase of AI adoption and not necessarily the death of AI scribe startups. It marks the end of the “transcription wars” as companies now focus on driving downstream workflows, Farren said.
Many AI scribe startups have started to expand into other use cases like revenue cycle management and coding, and Epic’s jump into the sector means those companies will be pressured to accelerate that “land and expand” strategy.
Just last week, Abridge announced it was building an AI-based tool to speed up insurance approvals. The company is collaborating with Highmark Health to co-develop an AI-powered prior authorization solution at the point of care.
Speaking with Fierce Healthcare last week, Abridge CEO Shiv Rao, M.D., said Abridge’s approach is to “go millions of miles deep” into health systems’ clinical and operational workflows.
“It’s about being able to go deep, to generate notes, to be able to serve cues to the clinician at the point of conversation that can help them close care gaps, that can help them get a prior authorization, that can help them be better clinicians. And so the sky’s the limit in terms of what’s possible,” he said, noting that Abridge is building out capabilities for order entry, compliant documentation for revenue cycle, coding for ICDs and prior auth.
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“It’s one of those moments that, frankly, it’s just very exciting. It just feels like this industry is adopting AI or recognizing that AI just needs to be a part of the infrastructure. It’s table stakes,” he said.
Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki, asserts his company is building out a more comprehensive AI assistant for providers that goes beyond ambient documentation to include dictation, coding, order staging, patient summaries and Q&A. The company has a “widespread, diversified footprint” that is “not dependent on any EHR, any segment, any geography,” Soni told Fierce Healthcare last week in an interview.
The company’s platform is integrated with major enterprise EHRs like Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth, and Meditech, he said. Zoom also uses Suki’s AI engine to generate clinical notes and incorporate AI capabilities into its solution.
Suki also offers what it says is a robust SDK and a suite of APIs to integrate AI and ambient capabilities into healthcare applications.
“What that does is inherently creates a very significant amount of advantage because artificial intelligence depends upon many sources of data in many use cases to actually be able to build a model that can work for everybody else, and we have been able to pull that together,” Soni said.
He asserts that one EHR company’s moves to add AI features does not materially change Suki’s strategy.
“From a practical perspective, the percentage of revenue that comes from one particular EHR segment or one particular sub-segment of the market is so small in the Suki revenue stream that a decision by many or one of them doesn’t fundamentally change our overall strategy,” he told Fierce Healthcare. “The bottom line is that we’re building an AI platform for healthcare that’s much broader than building an AI feature in an EHR and and we’ll continue doing that.”
Epic’s AI scribe will give budget-constrained option providers an option to access ambient AI tech, noted Vig Chandramouli, partner at Oak HC/FT, an investor in Ambience.
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“My hope is that ultimately ambient scribing is available to 100% of the providers in the country. To the extent that Abridge and Ambience and Epic all help achieve that vision, that’s amazing,” he said. “At the end of the day, it comes down to, there will be folks who want a higher level of accuracy on coding. There might be folks who don’t need it and they just want the scribe. I think this universe allows people to have a choice in which way they want to go.”
While the startups in the AI scribe space grab a lot of headlines, Microsoft has been building out voice-enabled ambient AI tools and generative AI features for clinicians since its acquisition of Nuance Communications for nearly $20 billion in 2021.
Epic and Microsoft have been collaborative partners for several years. In 2023, the EHR company announced it was tapping Microsoft’s AI expertise to roll out generative AI-powered copilots. Last year, the two companies announced they were collaborating with several hospitals and health systems, including Advocate Health, Duke Health, Intermountain Health and Stanford Health Care, to build an AI solution using ambient technology to streamline nursing documentation.
Epic’s move into AI scribes also encroaches on Microsoft’s healthcare AI business. In March, Microsoft rolled out a new AI assistant for healthcare professionals, Dragon Copilot, that combines the natural language speech recognition capabilities of Dragon Medical One with the ambient listening of DAX Copilot.
“I think if I’m Epic, I’m sort of letting Abridge and Ambience and others in. But where do I have my eye? I probably got my eye on Microsoft too,” Farren said. “I’m thinking about, if this technology is real and gives a wedge into my clinical end user, I’m probably a lot more worried about Microsoft doing that than I am Abridge.”
“How can I move the fastest to ensure that [Microsoft] doesn’t keep encroaching. Well, let’s work with startups and see if they can build something of value. And it turns out, they built something incredibly valuable, super fast and probably exceeded Epic’s expectations and Epic likely accelerated their efforts as a result,” he noted.
