In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight to discuss the shift from AI that suggests to AI that acts across healthcare workflows. Gupta explains why every role in healthcare — from clinicians to claims processors — is ripe for reinvention through agentic AI that strips away repetitive tasks and restores time for meaningful, patient-centered work. She frames this transformation as eliminating "healthcare homework," the layers of friction patients and staff navigate before they even see a doctor.
Key themes include real-world deployments already delivering measurable results. At Humana, an AI Agent Assist handles 80 million calls annually, surfacing real-time member summaries and guidance for 20,000 associates. Quest Diagnostics recently launched an AI Companion that gives patients an always-on, empathetic resource for understanding lab results, grounded in authoritative enterprise data to maintain trust. Highmark's Sidekick tool generated $27 million in ROI during 2025 alone, scaling from one million to six million prompts as the organization moved beyond pilot to enterprise-wide transformation. Gupta underscores that healthcare will move at the speed of trust, advising organizations to adopt a platform approach with consistent guardrails, human-in-the-loop validation and clinician co-design rather than rushing deployments. She shares a personal story of navigating a medical condition and receiving imaging records on a CD drive, illustrating why interoperability and patient data access remain urgent priorities. From reclaiming lunch breaks for burned-out nurses to building always-on patient concierges, Gupta provides a practical vision for how AI can restore empathy and human connection to healthcare.
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Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud
In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight to discuss the shift from AI that suggests to AI that acts across healthcare workflows. Gupta explains why every role in healthcare — from clinicians to claims processors — is ripe for reinvention through agentic AI that strips away repetitive tasks and restores time for meaningful, patient-centered work. She frames this transformation as eliminating "healthcare homework," the layers of friction patients and staff navigate before they even see a doctor.
Key themes include real-world deployments already delivering measurable results. At Humana, an AI Agent Assist handles 80 million calls annually, surfacing real-time member summaries and guidance for 20,000 associates. Quest Diagnostics recently launched an AI Companion that gives patients an always-on, empathetic resource for understanding lab results, grounded in authoritative enterprise data to maintain trust. Highmark's Sidekick tool generated $27 million in ROI during 2025 alone, scaling from one million to six million prompts as the organization moved beyond pilot to enterprise-wide transformation. Gupta underscores that healthcare will move at the speed of trust, advising organizations to adopt a platform approach with consistent guardrails, human-in-the-loop validation and clinician co-design rather than rushing deployments. She shares a personal story of navigating a medical condition and receiving imaging records on a CD drive, illustrating why interoperability and patient data access remain urgent priorities. From reclaiming lunch breaks for burned-out nurses to building always-on patient concierges, Gupta provides a practical vision for how AI can restore empathy and human connection to healthcare.
In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS26 in Las Vegas, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight to discuss the shift from AI that suggests to AI that acts across healthcare workflows. Gupta explains why every role in healthcare — from clinicians to claims processors — is ripe for reinvention through agentic AI that strips away repetitive tasks and restores time for meaningful, patient-centered work. She frames this transformation as eliminating "healthcare h...Read more
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How is the shift from suggestion-based AI to agentic AI expected to change roles and workflows—especially in healthcare—by reducing repetitive administrative drudgery and enabling agents for every employee?add
How did Google Cloud work with Humana to implement AI Agent Assist, and how did that solution give associates time back and improve real-time handling of calls?add
How should healthcare organizations involve clinicians in building and deploying AI tools, and what can you tell me about the Highmark Sidekick tool and its ROI?add
>> Hello everyone. We are here with Google Cloud at HIMSS in Las Vegas 2026. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm here with Aashima Gupta. She is the Director of Healthcare Solutions at Google Cloud. Aashima, what a moment this is. It's really incredible to be here in this room.
Aashima Gupta
>> I believe this is the best time to be in the intersection of healthcare and technology. It's very exciting what's happening in healthcare and next three to five years will be even amazing.
Rebecca Knight
>> So you have talked about this shift from digitization to a system of action, but I'm curious if you could describe how you see this really looking like for a doctor or a nurse who arrives at their shift on a Monday morning in the ER.
Aashima Gupta
>> It's a great question. Over the past two years, we moved from AI that suggests like a chatbot or summary to an AI that acts. That's a system of action. So I believe, I think there are two trends out I would like to call out. It's agent for every employee, not just nurses, not just clinician. Think of revenue cycles, think of claims, think of case manager, think of contracting, HR. I believe in any job today, there's a drudgery. There's a chore of the job and there's a purpose of the job. We believe AI and agentic AI is coming to really help with the chore of the job, the mundane, the drudgery, the repetitive, high frequency ties that we do day after day. And that take the time away from the meaningful, purposeful part of the job. So I believe every role will be re-imagined where, what if there was a less drudgery, less reputation, less the raw task is what AI will take away. And that's the agentic AI moment. Healthcare is leaning into it because healthcare, as we know, has a lot of burden, burnout, paperwork, documentation. It's ripe for that.
Rebecca Knight
>> In the past, you've described that tedium, that drudgery as healthcare homework. I'm curious about that framing for you. And what's the most frustrating example that you've seen of healthcare homework?
Aashima Gupta
>> I mean, just be in the shoe of a consumer. Let's say you're diagnosed with something, you need to see a doctor. The homework is, A, you first have to figure out who's your in-network provider is. Second, what's your copay? Third, what is a provider's appointment? Do they take it off the phone? Do I need to go to the mobile app or website? And then do they speak my language? Are they close to where I live? This is even before we even make the first appointment, then you figure out, "Oh, it's months up." Access is a huge issue. And sometimes, I may just have a simple question. To me, we talk about patient empowerment and patient participating in their own health, but we don't make it easy. So I do see a vision where AI agent is an always on concierge, helping people navigate healthcare, that dysfunction or the hurdles after hurdles. Can AI take some of that pain away so people can truly take care of their own health and participate in their health journey in a meaningful way?
Rebecca Knight
>> And Google Cloud is already doing that. I mean, I know that you worked with Humana. And talk a little bit about that project and what you actually did in terms of helping give people their time back and changing these real calls in real time.
Aashima Gupta
>> So Humana is a great example. They have 20,000 associates. We launched AI Agent Assist and is handling 80 million calls annually. So when this calls in an agent, they are working with a member, they need to understand what your plan is, what are your benefits, and it's real time summarizing that for them. Again, not spending time on five, seven different systems. AI is doing that and bringing forward what is more important, the summary of the patient, what in that context and real time guidance, like how should you tackle this and pointing out helpful nudges along the way. That's a great example. The second one is Quest Diagnostics. Last week they announced their Quest Diagnostic Companion. Now, if you've seen your lab result, sometime you have question and oftentimes you get either a cold email back, your results are back and you need to book an appointment. And you need a safe space to ask multiple different times. What does test result mean for me for my ethnicity, for my age group? Is it in order, not in order? And how should I interpret for it? That Quest Diagnostics AI Companion, imagine that's always on. It's telling you about your labs. It's making you understand it better with that empathy. And you can ask it one time, 10 times, 100 times. It's not going to get annoyed. And the beauty there is this grounded on authoritative quest data. So I think the worst thing from AI will be the AI that you can't trust. So in this case, that enterprise truth is going to be important, and those are kind of two examples there.
Rebecca Knight
>> Well, you bring up a really good point about trust, because the healthcare industry is really built on caution and trust and for good reason, because this is a vulnerable time in people's lives when they are sick and they need care. So how do you make the case to say a skeptical hospital CIO that moving quickly into AI is actually a less risky move than waiting on it?
Aashima Gupta
>> I believe this healthcare will move at the speed of trust. And actually, we don't advise to move quickly. We'd say doing it right is better than doing it fast, so have a strategy first. Think about a platform, because you're not doing AI on one department, a second department is doing it in a different way. So have a platform, thinking a platform approach because those guardians are same, regardless of whether you're solving a consumer experience or an operational or a clinical experience. How are you going to validate that? What is your human in the loop guideline? And then security and privacy, access management, all that, what we provide through Gemini. So our advice to them is think platform, think in longer term. It's not just one pilot. Think about how you're going to scale it. Think about how you're going to operationalize it. And then one of the most important part we often talk to them is healthcare is known for this, that you build a technology and then you threw it over the fence to a nurse or a clinician. So invite them early. So do it with them, not to them. And in cases where we've seen like Etsy as a good example where when we build a nurse handoff, nurses are on the table, they design what the workflow should look like for nurse handoff, and that's a very important part as well. And to me, it's a new level of engineering. Some parts of technology are new to the industry and we bring the forward deployment engineering team to help you all the way from engineering. These people are embedded within your team to build it up. So doing it right versus doing it fast, I think there's a balance and that's what we can advise them.
Rebecca Knight
>> Another example is the Highmark Sidekick tool, which gave staff nearly $28 million worth of their time back. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Aashima Gupta
>> So I think the big question, I think what's exciting about Highmark is the ROI of 27 million, they're seeing in just 2025 alone. The question being also asked at the CEO of the board levels are, are we seeing the ROI? Is juice worth the squeeze? Because this is an investment, right? When you're thinking about AI platform investment, they are really looking into those use cases. Although this is a good example where the vent ... I think they have six million prompts. Last year, they had one million. So they're really re-imagining not just a pilot, but an enterprise transformation. The training, their workforce, I talk about bringing the people along and designing, but also training them on AI literacy. Highmark is a great example there, and they were able to bring the organization along and in that reducing some of the manual task is where they saw the savings.
Rebecca Knight
>> So how do you though make sure that the workers are actually getting that reclaimed time back and spending it on patients or spending it in meaningful ways rather than just one more administrative task?
Aashima Gupta
>> So this is one good story that came from Highmark as well, and we were talking about giving the time back to the nurses and how that will be perceived. And the executive at the time told me, which was pretty incredible and sobering to hear. Some of our nurses don't even get time to have a lunch. Or if you think about nurse shift handoff, you're asking after the shift to document what happened in the shift. So this is where the empathy comes in. Clinician nurses want to be taking care of the patient, the healing, the human connection. And sometimes, as we build the systems, that technology and the paperwork got in the way and they are looking forward to that. When you think of bringing joy back to the medicine, taking that drudgery out so that they can do a meaningful conversation, a meaningful experience with the patient is more kind of healing and empathetic.
Rebecca Knight
>> Well, also having a little time for nourishment during their workday too, which is really important and important for their burnout too and job satisfaction. So you are steering this globally, which is a massive undertaking. Is there a moment or a patient story that keeps you connected to this work and reminds you every day why this really matters?
Aashima Gupta
>> I'll share my personal story. Like 2017, I was looking into getting a second opinion from my imaging. And I remember getting my medical records in a CD drive in this day and age. And at that time, none of my even ... I was dealing with a medical condition. I was trying to navigate and I got the CD drive from our patient records and my computer didn't even have the CD drive. I remember going to FedEx, crying tears and just trying to get access to my own data. So when you think about interoperability, we've been talking about interoperability for a long time, but when you deal with patients in the most vulnerable moment, when they're dealing with healthcare, that is sometimes lifesaving decision for them. And to me, as an industry, that notion about patient owning their own data, having electronic access too. We don't need CD drive. I need electronic access so I can, A, get a second opinion or have my own journey. I think that empathy is, I believe, AI will bring in bridging that connection, modernizing the infrastructure and making it real that keeps me grounded that people within the health industry are deeply mission driven. It's deeply personal to many of us, because we've had those experiences that keep us grounded, that keep us real, that at the end, it's human and the other side. We're clearly talking about health, which is deeply personal and can we build the helpful tools to really help people take care of their own health?
Rebecca Knight
>> The technology will solve for the human. I love it.
Aashima Gupta
>> Yes.
Rebecca Knight
>> Aashima, thank you so much. A really, really interesting conversation.
Aashima Gupta
>> Thank you for having me. Thank you.
Rebecca Knight
>> And thank you for tuning in to the Google Cloud Partner AI series here at HIMSS 2026. I'm Rebecca Knight.
Rebecca Knight