COVER STORY
February 2026
AI Is Everywhere in Healthcare. But No One Agrees on What It’s Actually For.
Healthcare leaders are hailing AI as a transformative technology, yet what is it really transforming?
ewicklund@healthleadersmedia.com, Linkedin
COVER STORY
February 2026
AI Is Everywhere in Healthcare. But No One Agrees on What It’s Actually For.
Healthcare leaders are hailing AI as a transformative technology, yet what is it really transforming?
ewicklund@healthleadersmedia.com, Linkedin
TAKEAWAYS
- AI adoption is outpacing strategy. Hospitals are deploying AI faster than they can govern it, creating new risks around accountability, safety, and trust.
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The workforce impact is unavoidable. From data scientists to clinicians to the C-suite, AI is forcing health systems to rethink who they hire, how they train, and which roles still make sense.
- As AI becomes commonplace, the winners won’t be the fastest adopters, but rather the organizations that can control, monitor, and course-correct the technology.
TAKEAWAYS
- AI adoption is outpacing strategy. Hospitals are deploying AI faster than they can govern it, creating new risks around accountability, safety, and trust.
-
The workforce impact is unavoidable. From data scientists to clinicians to the C-suite, AI is forcing health systems to rethink who they hire, how they train, and which roles still make sense.
- As AI becomes commonplace, the winners won’t be the fastest adopters, but rather the organizations that can control, monitor, and course-correct the technology.
AI has moved faster in healthcare than leadership has been able—or willing—to keep up with. Health systems are deploying algorithms across clinical care, operations, and revenue, hailing artificial intelligence as transformational even as they struggle to define what, exactly, it should transform.
As Scott Arnold, EVP and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer at Tampa General Hospital, sees it, AI shouldn’t blur the lines between a provider and a programmer. Healthcare leaders have to understand that they are first and foremost in the business of providing care.
“We’re a healthcare company,” he says. “We’re not a software company or a technology company.”
The result is a widening gap between ambition and reality: executives racing to adopt AI while governance, workforce readiness, and strategy lag behind.
This isn’t a story about whether hospitals should use AI. That debate is over. The real conflict now is how and at what cost.
Build or buy. Innovate or regulate. Automate work or redesign it.
As AI reshapes roles from the C-Suite to the bedside, healthcare leaders are confronting a harder truth: AI’s biggest risk isn’t misuse; it’s unchecked momentum without a shared understanding of purpose, accountability, and limits.
Build Vs. Buy
But AI is a unique technology, capable of transformative outcomes. Some health systems and hospitals look at it not only as a potential revenue stream, but an opportunity to create very specific tools to address very precise healthcare concerns. They also want to keep a tight rein on the data used to create those tools.
“We’re a healthcare company. We’re not a software company or a technology company.”
—Scott Arnold, EVP and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Tampa General Hospital
AI leadership boom: More than 50 major hospitals and health systems hired C-suite AI leaders in 2025, with titles ranging from Chief AI Officer to Chief Clinical AI Officer.
Source: American Hospital Association
“If you have a little bit of time to solve it, and you have some of the internal capability to solve it, there's advantages of doing it yourself because you are now approaching this problem in a nuanced way that's specific to your environment that allows you to have the impact you want,” says Barry Stein, Chief Clinical Innovation and Medical Informatics Officer at Hartford HealthCare and founder of the Center for AI Innovation in Healthcare
Robbie Freeman, Chief Digital Transformation officer at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, says health systems who have the resources should consider developing their own AI tools. Mount Sinai, he says, has a long history of in-house development, with more than 100 use cases now live. They use Microsoft tools and Vive coding to create a platform for app development.
Freeman says their strategy is to develop one-third of new AI tools in-house, adopt another one-third through their Epic EHR platform, and secure one-third through other vendors. He says the long-term strategy is to rely on less niche products and focus on platforms that can perform multiple functions.
“I think long-term we’ll probably have a mix” of tools developed in-house and purchased through vendors, says Tommy Ibrahim, Sanford Health’s Chief Transformation Officer. “This area is moving so fast. I don’t think we have the resources to meet the demand. But there are certain things that we can do and that we have done incredibly well and have already deployed with success. And there are other things that we’re going to have to lean on the industry.”
At present, the big barrier is cost. AI vendors can still command a hefty price for their tools (as well as their monitoring services). Smaller, rural and cash-strapped organizations need to factor in those extra costs when determining ROI, while larger organizations balance those extra costs against the expenses incurred in building their own tools.
Scott Arnold
EVP and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Tampa General Hospital
AI and The Workforce Dilemma
Some executives worry that the push to develop and use AI could put a strain on a health system’s IT department. IT managers need employees with specific – and sometimes new – skillsets, from data scientists to informaticists to medical ethicists. These are positions that a health system might not have sought in the past and might not know how to hire now.
In fact, recent surveys show an increase of between 15% and 37% in demand for IT roles in hospitals, with a focus on data analytics and AI fueling that surge. This, in turn, is fueling a need for department managers and even C-Suite executives to oversee AI development and management. On average, one in every four health systems or large hospitals now has a Chief AI Officer or equivalent position.
That said, the job pool is shallow. The growing impact on AI in a wide variety of industries means those technology roles are in high demand, and large companies like Amazon, IBM, Apple and Google are in position to offer far better salaries and for more perks than a healthcare organization. As a result, healthcare leadership is forced to commit more resources – including money – to either hiring the right staff, training from within, or out-sourcing what they need from vendors.
Freeman says there’s a need for health systems to hire data informaticists to keep up with the demands for AI development and governance. But at the same time, healthcare leaders need to pair those positions with clinicians to make sure technology needs and clinical needs are addressed equally and not siloed.
As larger healthcare organizations dabble in creating their own AI tools, Freeman says he’s seeing a shift toward the agile pod approach, featuring teams of people from different departments. These cross-functional teams, he says, would need expertise in user experience, product development and data science.
Freeman says healthcare really needs designers who understand user experience, an often overlooked and underinvested skill that might mean the difference between a tool that works and one that’s cast aside and ignored.
Robbie Freeman
Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Mount Sinai Health System
Barry Stein, MD
Chief Clinical Innovation and Medical Informatics Officer, Hartford HealthCare
“If you have … the internal capability to solve it, there [are] advantages [to] doing it yourself because [you’re] approaching the problem in a nuanced way that’s specific to your environment.”
—Barry Stein, MD, Chief Clinical Innovation and Medical Informatics Officer, Hartford HealthCare.
At Tampa General, Arnold says leadership understands that AI is changing the workforce. But instead of addressing the fear that AI will take away jobs, he says it’s an opportunity to train people to take on new roles – like Ai governance.
“I do think our jobs are changing a bit,” he says. “I talk to my own technology group – ‘Hey, look, we’re going to see some shifts. You’re going to be managing AI, and accuracy and drift of those models, and making sure they work. … It’s going to change. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing new jobs for monitoring Ai and making sure they’re not going off the rails.”
There’s also some concern at the top of the management pyramid. More than 50 major hospitals and health systems in 2025 hired C-Suite executives in charge of AI, with titles including Chief AI Officer, Chief Clinical AI Officer, Chief Health AI Officer, Chief Data AI Officer and Chief AI Implementation Officer. Some of these roles are merged with the CIO or Chief Digital Health Officer, while others are new.
What happens when AI becomes commonplace in healthcare? Some executives point out that their organizations have merged technology and data management with AI governance, seeing no need to separate AI into its own department, with its own managers. With the healthcare industry struggling to stay in the black, the growing C-Suite could be prime ground for budget cutbacks.
The Changing Face of Governance
Stein says healthcare organizations can’t afford not to jump on the AI bandwagon. But they need to understand how AI can be misused before they fully embrace it.
“We all fall in love with the problem to solve, and not the technology,” he says.
So while executives can envision all the good things that AI can do to improve healthcare, they tend to gloss over the finer points of governing a technology that evolves so quickly.
“This area is moving so fast. I don’t think we have the resources to meet the demand … [without leaning on] the industry.”
—Tommy Ibrahim, MD, Chief Transformation Officer, Sanford Health
Tommy Ibrahim, MD
Chief Transformation Officer, Sanford Health
“We haven’t been able to get our arms around it yet,” he says. “And that could be very dangerous.”
“These tools need to be deployed responsibly and safely,” adds Ibrahim. “We need to make sure that they're implemented in a manner that is consistent with the standard of care that we want to deliver. And then, we have to have mechanisms in place [so] that we're constantly monitoring and auditing for the outcomes that we're looking for.”
Freeman agrees on the need for robust cybersecurity – especially penetration testing – and governance, and he anticipates that’s where the biggest budge increases will be seen in the future.
Eric Wickland, Associate Content Manager, Innovation and Technology
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