Health systems have been largely focused on using artificial intelligence to automate work—AI scribes and revenue cycle management tools—but there’s a larger AI transformation brewing that will reshape workforce design.
The biggest AI disruption in healthcare will be the reinvention of hospital work and human-machine collaboration, according to Eric Langshur, founder of Chicago-based Abundant Venture Partners.
“AI is by all accounts a seismic technology shift that has come along that’s changing everything about the way we work and live,” Langshur said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
The massive surge in AI capital expenditures by tech giants represents an outsized concentration of private capital, dwarfing the most famous public megaprojects in United States history.
Across calendar years 2025 and 2026, the four largest U.S. technology companies are committed to spend approximately $1.12 trillion on capital expenditures, the overwhelming majority of which is dedicated to AI infrastructure, according to data compiled by eco3min, a financial editorial publication. In 2025 dollars, this 24-month figure exceeds the combined inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo Program to land humans on the moon ($189 billion), the Marshall Plan ($137 billion) for post-World War II economic recovery and the Manhattan Project ($36 billion), which developed the first atomic weapon.
With these large-scale investments, AI will drive significant labor market shifts, and this will have profound implications for healthcare as labor makes up 56% of hospital costs, according to data from the American Hospital Association.
Health systems need to find the right approaches to deploy AI in ways that safely enhance staff efficiency without compromising trust or care quality.
These aren’t just theoretical questions, Langshur noted, as health systems within the Abundant Alliance are wrestling with these transformational issues in real time. At a high level, health systems need to strategically focus on how to redesign their organizations around human-machine collaboration, Langshur said, and think through how judgment, accountability, trust and human purpose will be redistributed inside increasingly AI-enabled organizations.
The Abundant Alliance, initially launched in 2020, is a collaborative network that has grown to 22 health systems that co-develop, evaluate and safely deploy digital health and AI solutions. The health systems collaborate to tackle operational, workforce and innovation challenges, in partnership with Abundant Venture Partners. Members of the Alliance include ChristianaCare, Kettering Health, MedStar Health, Medical University of South Carolina, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, Sharp HealthCare, OSF Healthcare, Rush Health, Henry Ford Health, Northwestern Medicine and many others.
Health systems are regional in nature, but these organizations face similar challenges and often have parallel strategic priorities. Collaboration helps these health systems reach national scale and pools more than $80 billion in collective provider buying power, according to Abundant Venture Partners.
The Alliance is moving forward on several initiatives to help health system members to responsibly deploy AI to operate more efficiently while also addressing workforce constraints.
The coalition is working with the American Hospital Association on an upskilling initiative that focuses on the entire workforce, “from the board to the CEO to the C-suite and middle management, frontline doctors and nurses and finance and supply chain executives,” Langshur noted, “because we all need to develop a set of new skills to apply these tools.”
A year ago, Abundant Venture Partners launched a venture growth platform to grow high value, sustainable companies that benefit healthcare provider organizations. The Abundant Platform accelerates commercialization through the Abundant Venture Studio and ensures rapid adoption via the Abundant Alliance of healthcare providers. Health system members play a pivotal role as co-developers, early adopters and aligned owners, getting an equity share in the companies they help to build.
Health systems historically have operated in silos, with limited collaboration and information-sharing across organizations. The opportunities, and challenges, presented by rapid AI adoption is driving health systems toward more engagement and cross-sector partnership, Langshur noted.
Health system collaboratives are a growing trend as organizations can leverage the best practices and learnings from other members and shape the governance of AI in healthcare.
Aegis Ventures launched a digital collaborative in April 2024 with the backing of nine founding health systems and its now grown to 14 regional health systems. The collaborative focuses on developing and scaling AI-powered health tech solutions.
As AI-based medical coding grows, CodaMetrix formed a national council of health system leaders to advance industry standards for coding quality and accuracy.
The Abundant Alliance is on track to double its membership in the near term as a result of the surging interest in AI, Langshur noted.
The Alliance is working with The Joint Commission to create a governance system for AI to help health systems manage the growing risks and complexities of AI adoption, including operational, security and compliance challenges, according to Langshur.
Another Alliance initiative aims to leverage AI to tackle physician credentialing and privileging, typically a manual, time-consuming process, as the technology can make the process more efficient and accurate. Several members of the Alliance also were co-development partners with startup SpendRule, which uses AI to ensure health systems don’t overpay for purchased services like food and laundry services. The startup uses AI to read through complex contracts and validates invoices directly against contract terms before payment. “You can can leverage technology instead of humans to do a more rigorous and thorough job keeping track of changes and checking before invoices are paid,” Langshur noted.
Healthcare is poised to be the clearest real-world test of what AI does to modern institutions, many healthcare leaders say, and the work of the Alliance members is not just about using AI for efficiency gains. Ongoing efforts also focus on AI for human benefit. The aim is to shift clinicians and staff to higher-value work centered on patient care, decision-making and relationship-building.
“The core of all of this is the idea of trust and trust runs through everything,” Langshur said. “Work is changing and we’re not going to out-compute the machine—it’s really good at remembering everything, it’s really good at running simulations and logic. We’ve got to figure out, what are we going to delegate to the machine, and what is uniquely human, and we need to retain and then really double down on those things that are uniquely human.”
He continued, “I think for health systems to get this right, and this runs through the very fabric of what the Alliance is focused on, is understanding that trust just isn’t a soft idea, trust is a strategy.”
“It’s trust before tech,” Langshur explained. There needs to be aligned interests so staff and clinicians trust the process and see how AI directly benefits them, he noted. Ambient AI tools are one example by helping to reduce the documentation burden for clinicians.
Trust drives adoption of AI tools, which drives efficiency gains and positive culture change and that leads to increased capacity and, ultimately, improved margins.
“It’s turning things on its head. Let’s not start with margin, which is table stakes, but trust is the gateway,” he said.
Health systems are navigating “exponential change,” and health systems risk treating AI as a technology project when it is a broader organizational transformation, he noted.
AI is not simply an IT initiative but a fundamental business shift that requires health systems to rethink budgeting, workforce design and operations in order to meet growing demand without proportionally adding staff, Langshur said.
Beyond AI investments, the Abundant Alliance also is focused on initiatives to drive revenue for member health systems with a focus on “collaboration and scale,” he noted. The coalition is working to build a national direct-to-employer model for member health systems to provide care to large national employers, Langshur said.