theCUBE's Coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS26 | Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud & Nneka Emegwa, Accenture

In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS 2026, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins Nneka Emegwa, managing director of US health and public services at Accenture, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight about how healthcare is shifting from AI experimentation to operational, agent-driven care delivery. Emegwa highlights the dramatic leap from last year's landscape of pilots and proofs of concept to genuine clinical and business applications powered by AI. She describes an emerging digital hybrid workforce model where agents handle execution while humans move above the loop to set strategy and expectations. Gupta emphasizes that reimagining healthcare workflows requires combining technology foundations with deep industry expertise, a convergence the Google Cloud–Accenture partnership is designed to accelerate. The conversation also explores how Google Cloud's vertically integrated AI stack — spanning TPUs, Gemini's multimodal models and Vertex AI — provides the governance, auditability and grounding that healthcare demands. Gupta underscores that trust is the prerequisite for scale, noting that agents must be controlled through role-based access and guardrails before organizations will adopt them in production. A prior authorization use case brings the discussion to life: Emegwa details how Gemini reads and interprets both structured and unstructured clinical data, accelerating approvals and getting patients to care faster. Looking ahead, both guests envision anticipatory healthcare — an always-on concierge that thinks three steps ahead of the consumer, from medication refills to provider matching. For clinicians, AI sidekicks promise to collapse documentation burdens and free caregivers to focus on patients. From building trusted multi-agent ecosystems to closing workforce gaps with digital colleagues, the discussion maps a practical path from today's operational deployments to a fundamentally reimagined healthcare experience.

Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud & Nneka Emegwa, Accenture

In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS 2026, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins Nneka Emegwa, managing director of US health and public services at Accenture, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight about how healthcare is shifting from AI experimentation to operational, agent-driven care delivery. Emegwa highlights the dramatic leap from last year's landscape of pilots and proofs of concept to genuine clinical and business applications powered by AI. She describes an emerging digital hybrid workforce model where agents handle execution while humans move above the loop to set strategy and expectations. Gupta emphasizes that reimagining healthcare workflows requires combining technology foundations with deep industry expertise, a convergence the Google Cloud–Accenture partnership is designed to accelerate. The conversation also explores how Google Cloud's vertically integrated AI stack — spanning TPUs, Gemini's multimodal models and Vertex AI — provides the governance, auditability and grounding that healthcare demands. Gupta underscores that trust is the prerequisite for scale, noting that agents must be controlled through role-based access and guardrails before organizations will adopt them in production. A prior authorization use case brings the discussion to life: Emegwa details how Gemini reads and interprets both structured and unstructured clinical data, accelerating approvals and getting patients to care faster. Looking ahead, both guests envision anticipatory healthcare — an always-on concierge that thinks three steps ahead of the consumer, from medication refills to provider matching. For clinicians, AI sidekicks promise to collapse documentation burdens and free caregivers to focus on patients. From building trusted multi-agent ecosystems to closing workforce gaps with digital colleagues, the discussion maps a practical path from today's operational deployments to a fundamentally reimagined healthcare experience.

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More from theCUBE's Coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS26

Aashima Gupta

Director, Healthcare Solutions

Google Cloud

Nneka Emegwa

Managing Director, US Health & Public Services

Accenture

play_circle_outline Accenture–Google Cloud strategic partnership accelerating healthcare digital transformation and innovation

play_circle_outline Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise: Building Trusted, Auditable, Cost-Efficient Multimodal Enterprise AI with TPUs and RAG

play_circle_outline Clinician burden reduction through AI summarization and documentation assistance

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Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud & Nneka Emegwa, Accenture

Aashima Gupta

Director, Healthcare Solutions Google Cloud

Nneka Emegwa

Managing Director, US Health & Public Services Accenture

In this interview from theCUBE's coverage of Google Cloud at HIMSS 2026, Aashima Gupta, global director of healthcare strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, joins Nneka Emegwa, managing director of US health and public services at Accenture, to talk with theCUBE's Rebecca Knight about how healthcare is shifting from AI experimentation to operational, agent-driven care delivery. Emegwa highlights the dramatic leap from last year's landscape of pilots and proofs of concept to genuine clinical and business applications powered by AI. She describes an emerging d... Read more

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How would you describe the Accenture–Google partnership and its purpose in helping clients accelerate digital transformation and innovation? add

How is Google Cloud enabling trusted, governable, multimodal AI agents for healthcare—what technologies and controls (e.g., Gemini, TPUs, Vertex, RAG, auditability, human‑in‑the‑loop) support that vision and what benefits does it bring? add

How can AI be used to empower clinicians and caregivers by reducing documentation burden (e.g., summarizing EHR notes) while ensuring the AI is trustworthy (no hallucinations) and safely constrained so agents cannot perform prohibited actions? add

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Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud & Nneka Emegwa, Accenture

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Google Cloud Partner AI series here at HIMSS 2026 in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We've got two terrific guests for this next segment. I would like to welcome back to the show. Nneka Emegwa. She is Managing Director Health and Public Services Accenture and Google Cloud. Welcome back, Nneka.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Aashima Gupta, Global Director Healthcare at Google. Thank you so much for coming on.

Aashima Gupta

>> Glad to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> We're here at HIMSS. There's incredible energy in this room. Nneka, I want to start with you because Google Cloud and Accenture have a longstanding partnership, but this really feels like a special moment. Can you describe what this partnership looks like from the Accenture side right now at this time in the agentic era?

Nneka Emegwa

>> Oh, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me again. It's great to be back here. So happy we can do this again. And I feel like this is so timely for our partnership because it's a strategic one. It's like you said, it's longstanding. But we are really designed to help our clients to accelerate their digital transformation as well as innovations. So really our shared goal and vision is bringing together Accenture's deep expertise in industry like healthcare and processes, and then merging that with Google's advanced technology so that we are solving our client's biggest problems. So we look at business values, whether it's to increase revenue or enhance customer experiences or make their operations more efficient. That's really what I think it's very timely. We're trying to leverage that goodness from data and AI right now.

Rebecca Knight

>> Aashima, and the whole point of this is to improve the care that patients receive. How do you describe this partnership from the Google side?

Aashima Gupta

>> I think if you step back, as an industry, we are leaning into this agentic moment. In the agentic moment, meaning the AI is getting advanced, the technology's moving at a pace. And yet we need to really reimagine the industry experiences. We have to look into a broader longer term transformation. Accenture brings that length from the industry perspective. What does a longer term reimagination of different experiences look like? How would patient experience healthcare longer term? What does the enterprise workflow look like? What does the operational agility look like? And to me, AI will be absorbed in every single workflow. AI agents will assist clinician, nurses, employees, revenue cycle, claims example, that you're giving. And as you reimagine those roles, as you reimagine those workflows, you need strategic partnerships like Accenture who can help reimagine the business because these are not technology conversations. These are business, business outcome conversations. So technology along with business strategies where the magic happens. So very proud to be working with partners like Accenture.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Nneka, I want to ask you about where that magic is happening right now. What is the single biggest shift that you're seeing that AI is driving in healthcare right now at this transformative moment?

Nneka Emegwa

>> Yeah. So if I think about what we did last year, so last year was, I walked around that it was a lot of questions, which is the first step in innovation. So people were asking what is AI and what's the value? It was a lot of pilots and POCs. Now the shift is really into more applications, business applications, clinical transformation. So I feel like we've actually started to move from experimentation to actually using AI to solve problems. So I think that's one of the biggest shifts. I would say another one is, to your point on transformation of the workforce, we've started to see this whole agents being a part of the workforce. So it becomes a digital hybrid model where the humans are elevated. We talk about human in the loop, but there's also human above the loop where the humans are doing more of setting the strategy, they are setting expectations, and then the agents are doing the execution. So I've seen that shift being a full reinvention where the workforce is not just the way it used to be.

Rebecca Knight

>> And that's being realized today.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Yes. Yeah. That is true.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Aashima, talk a little bit about from the technology side and how you're seeing tools like Vertex AI and Gemini help these healthcare systems piece together different disparate data to be able to use them more effectively.

Aashima Gupta

>> As Nneka has said, as the industry is being reimagined and as agents become the first part of the healthcare landscape, I often say it's not about what AI can do, it's what AI is trusted to do. And how do you build that trust? Our role from Google Cloud perspective is to provide the technology foundation. We believe in that future, discovering an agent, trusting an agent, finding an agent, all that platform plumbing is what we bring through our Gemini enterprise. That will be the front door. If you believe in the vision that every employee will have their own assistant, every function, every workflow will have an assistant like an agent, you need to be able to govern them. You need to be able to manage them. You need to be able to audit them. That's what we provide from Google Cloud perspective, a platform. Trust comes with auditability. It comes with transparency. It always also comes as grounding. If an agent is creating a response, how are you trusting the response? Where is the human in the loop guardrail? We all know AI hallucinates, how do you ground the response to the enterprise truth, is the technical term, retrieval augmented generation. So we build those frameworks so that experiences that are built on it are more trusted. They have these AI foundation. And if you think of it, Google is the only one that provides the entire from TPUs to the frontier model like Gemini, which are multimodal. Healthcare is multimodal. You're not just seeing an x-ray or an MRI, you're getting the full patient context. So we provide that with Gemini. And then of course our Vertex and search, all that provides a very different vertically AI stack, which by the way, we're the only one who provide that. So that means it translates to savings. It translates to better price performance and efficiencies and optimization as to build that AI stack from ground up.

Nneka Emegwa

>> From ground up. Yeah. I do want to say that we firmly believe in Gemini enterprise. It does really solve problems. And for us, it becomes that digital front door. So there's, right now you talked about the shifts. It's like lots of people are building agents. And then there's this sprawl of agents and there's the governance around it. So we see Gemini enterprise and then when you incorporate Vertex too, it's really providing that playground that is very secure. And then our clients can have a one-stop shop for all their digital agents.

Rebecca Knight

>> And a trusted one-stop shop, which is what was so critical. So let's bring a real example to life here. Can you talk about working with a hospital or a payer system where you really helped modernize its system and where AI made a real difference in the business itself? And I want to get to the trust in the workforce later, but I want to talk first about efficiency.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Yeah. I think I would say there are lots of examples, one of which is probably something very common like prior auth. And so in one of our-

Rebecca Knight

>> So prior authorization is...

Nneka Emegwa

>> Prior authorization, so just putting in that request to get pre-approval before a patient is seen.

Rebecca Knight

>> Something we all deal with.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Oh, gosh, it's very convoluted. It's prone to mistakes, prone to errors. And what that finally leads to is delaying care. And so even there are different processes to it, but being able to do the upfront data intake. And so we're using Gemini, we're enabling our clients to be able to read both structured and unstructured data with Gemini. I tell you, that saves a whole bunch of time. It becomes so Gemini can read the data, but also interpret the data. And it's this whole rich concept of health coding, health languages that are very, very health technical. And so having AI manage that process, it really, really gets to care faster.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes. And so, but beyond the efficiency, as you're saying, it's getting to the care faster. So what does that mean for the human, the patient on the other end, as well as the clinician or the provider who is giving the care?

Nneka Emegwa

>> I do think that previously what we had in other technologies where they gave us a faster car to ride. I feel like agentic and AI, they've given us a self-driving car. It's like the clinicians, the healthcare professionals can now just focus on the best part of the journey, which is the patient. And so you think about patient getting that personalized attention, getting access to care very quickly. It's just transformative. So that's what I would say.

Rebecca Knight

>> Aashima, one of the words we keep hearing here at HIMSS is anticipatory care because we're thinking about an agentic healthcare system where the agents are actually anticipating what needs to be done. And then being able to take action. Can you look out three to five years ahead and talk a little bit about what that actually looks like?

Aashima Gupta

>> So I would say if you think about it, Nneka talked about consumer journey today. We all know the drill. Let's say we are diagnosed with something or a loved one. You have to figure out what my health plan is? What is my copay? Who's in network? Who's out network? Which provider is available? Do they speak my language? Are they closer to where I live? All that is a-

Rebecca Knight

>> Also working your full-time job, caring for your children, caring for the person in need of the care.

Aashima Gupta

>> Exactly. That's a very burden we put on consumer. In healthcare, we keep talking about consumer empowerment. And if we want people to participate in their own health journey, we need to make health easy to navigate. So I believe in three to five years from now, how we experience healthcare from consumer perspective will be that anticipatory health. Thinking along me, thinking three steps ahead of me, guiding consumers so that they can stay on top of it. Maybe I'm running out on medication and making that order and getting that delivered. So some experiences we have imagined, some are yet to be imagined. But what doesn't change is healthcare consumer experience today is fragmented, it's broken, it's burdensome. We need to empower consumers and that's where I believe an always on concierge around care and on coverage and on context will be what we will see in three to five years. And then similarly, same empowerment theme. As Nneka said, for clinician, for nurses, we are giving them documentation, pajama time, every two hours in EHR for one hour of patient care. And sending them PDFs that are multi-page long is not how you empower caregivers. So AI will be an assistant alongside and a sidekick, helping them summarize the documentation, which is again, grounded on enterprise truth. So it's not hallucinated. Because people won't use AI, won't scale AI if they can't trust it. And I go back to, we believe that technology is advancing where agents have agency, meaning they can do stuff on your behalf. How do you control them? How do you put a wall guarding that this agent cannot do X, Y, Z, but they can do one, two, three?

Nneka Emegwa

>> The security around it. Very important too.

Aashima Gupta

>> Security access, role-based access. This is where we are putting those guardrails on our Gemini. In that anticipation that the future is not just one agent, it's multi-agentic.

Rebecca Knight

>> Nneka, same question to you. Look into the crystal ball and what's your greatest aspiration for what we'll even be talking about at HIMSS 2027? Let's just go one year ahead. You said that we started this conversation talking about how last year was about POCs and pilots. This year were really operationalizing it. What's next?

Nneka Emegwa

>> I do think that it's like... So we're now operationalizing it, right? And so there's a lot of, we have a lot of agents out there. Agents that are doing good work for us on behalf of humans. But I feel like there will be this interconnectedness that has to improve. It's that whole network of agents speaking to each other because we have different players in the ecosystems. But how do we make sure that the agents, they have a goal, but they're also sharing context and they're working towards the same goal. Okay. So I think that there will be a lot of ecosystem partnerships happening. There will also be, like we talked about the shift and making sure that agents are now filling in the gaps we have in healthcare professionals. We need to fill those gaps and skills with agents. So I think we'll see a lot more increasingly agents being part of the workforce.

Rebecca Knight

>> Alongside their human colleagues.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Absolutely, yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Nneka and Aashima, thank you both so much for a really interesting conversation.

Nneka Emegwa

>> Thank you.

Aashima Gupta

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> And thank you for tuning in to theCUBE's coverage of the Google Partner AI series here at HIMSS 2026. I'm Rebecca Knight.