LAS VEGAS — Last year, generative AI dominated the discussions at the annual HLTH conference in Las Vegas. It was seen as a transformative breakthrough for the health tech sector, promising advancements such as virtual patient diagnoses, surgical procedures, and disease cures. However, this year, key industry figures have adopted a more pragmatic perspective—favoring practicality over grand aspirations. Two prominent themes emerged at this year's HLTH, held at the Venetian Expo. The first emphasizes the need to automate routine tasks to combat escalating levels of burnout.

The second focuses on decelerating the response times of AI systems and their underlying large language models (LLMs). The latter theme aligns with a broader trend in the tech industry, referred to as "the reasoning phase. " As noted by Sequoia Capital in a recent blog post, "It’s not enough for [language] models to simply know things — they need to pause, evaluate, and reason through decisions in real time. " Gary Lynch, Verizon's (VZ) global practice leader for healthcare and life sciences, highlighted the first theme, which is addressing existing challenges. "When you walk the [conference] floor, you encounter numerous intriguing clinical applications. However, we must assist our hospital partners with operational efficiencies, or we'll never achieve remote surgeries, " Lynch stated. Companies like Verizon and Nvidia (NVDA) are crucial to laying the groundwork for technology development, while firms such as Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) provide essential services—like cloud computing and access to AI tools—that can drive industry innovation. All of these companies were present at HLTH this year and shared insights with Yahoo Finance regarding industry advancements. The concept of task automation isn't new, but experts indicated at the conference that the technology has now reached a maturity level where it can be effectively implemented. "Over the last year and a half, many of these new platforms and capabilities were nonexistent, " noted Umesh Rustogi, Microsoft’s general manager for health and life sciences data platforms.