Consumers Are Ready for AI-Enabled Health Care. Health Systems Need to Be, Too.

Generative AI is rapidly reshaping consumer health care experiences, with nearly 60% of consumers already using AI for personal health. Younger patients, those in higher income brackets, and consumers in emerging markets are leading adopters of the technology. Trust remains shaky among the public, with the majority of consumers wary of privacy and data misuse. To make the most of shifting patient needs, CEOs, public health leaders, and health systems can prioritize seamless integration of GenAI tools, including AI agents, into existing workflows. 

Consumers around the world have been quick to adopt GenAI—from using chat-based tools to get advice, research dinner options, draft letters, or plan itineraries to using AI agents to act on their behalf to make appointments or order services. Health care is no different.

In the first cross-nation survey of consumer use of AI in health, BCG asked more than 13,000 internet-connected adults across 15 countries questions about how they use AI for their personal health and how aware and comfortable they are with clinicians using AI in their care. We also surveyed their concerns about AI in health care and their expectations about the technology’s role in delivering care over the next two years. (See “Survey Methodology.”)

The results of the survey offer pointed insights for health care leaders grappling with how fast to use AI-enabled technologies in their workflows and client-facing digital experiences. On one hand, today’s patients are seeing firsthand the enhanced access and comprehensible advice provided by AI tools; on the other, they are accustomed to the data privacy, quality safeguards, and human touch provided by traditional health delivery models. Because people generally trust their health care system, managers and clinicians are uniquely positioned to responsibly implement AI agents that greatly enhance the patient experience—no matter the user’s income level or location—helping to break the longstanding trade-off between cost, access, and quality.

GenAI Tools Are Fast Becoming the First Step in Consumer Health Care Journeys

For now, our survey shows that consumers are turning to GenAI for general health questions. Our research found that a majority of internet-connected adults have already used GenAI tools to access information, seek advice, or complete tasks relating to their own health and the health of their loved ones. (See Exhibit 1.) The results suggest that the time is right for agentic AI to take a much deeper role in the health care system.

The survey indicates that GenAI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini are now the first destination for many patients who wish to access health advice quickly and conveniently. This is a global story: GenAI adoption has been fastest among internet-connected consumers in emerging markets such as India, Brazil, and China, where digital tools help to fill gaps in access to care. (See Exhibit 2.) And from a generational perspective, younger consumers and people on higher incomes are substantially more likely to use GenAI tools for their health care. (See Exhibits 3 and 4.)

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The rise in consumer adoption is unsurprising given that GenAI tools are free or low cost, easy to use, available 24/7, and go beyond basic queries and lists of general symptoms. Web searches about medical issues are giving way to interactions with AI, where users can receive more tailored and engaging responses.

There’s another advantage: AI technologies are providing information in several areas, offering the ability to incorporate personal medical information such as pathology or radiology reports and data from health-tracking devices or wearables to receive personalized advice. (See Exhibit 5.)

In terms of frequency, we found that AI-enabled wearables (58%) and AI sleep tracking (49%) are used several times per week or daily, with AI chatbots for health advice close behind (44%).

Agentic AI could take health care even further. These resources can be used to book appointments, check insurance coverage, or compare costs. However, an AI agent would require access to appointment data and payment eligibility tools held within health administration systems, as well as permission to disclose personal information to booking engines and other systems. Consequently, consumer use of GenAI is, for the time being, largely focused on checking symptoms, asking questions, interpreting test results, and understanding treatment options—certainly more than a web search can do.

Our survey suggests that the health care sector is only at the beginning of a path toward even more frequent and fulfilling engagements between consumers and AI. Users of AI expect tools to quickly take an integral role in health care, such as flagging potentially dangerous drug interactions for a patient or suggesting treatment options. (See Exhibit 6.) But for the industry to drive even more adoption among patients and offer enhanced care, a vital element must be in place: trust.

GenAI Offers Significant Benefits—But People Don’t Fully Trust It

While more consumers are using GenAI tools to understand their health needs, many remain cautious. The largest area of concern is privacy and data security, followed by unease over the reliability of AI-provided advice. People are also concerned that GenAI tools will not deliver advice that is personally tailored to their needs. (See Exhibit 7.) These concerns are shared by many system leaders, who worry that AI assistants fall outside of health care regulatory frameworks.

In some ways, the most interesting result is that patients don’t see using AI and human clinicians as an either/or decision. Most respondents said they would prefer to engage with either AI alone or with a human augmented by AI than with a human alone. (See Exhibit 8.)

Patients are also starting to recognize AI’s role in clinical care; 16% say they know their clinicians use AI—most commonly for reviewing test results (49%) and suggesting possible diagnoses or treatments (47%).

This hybrid approach offers an ideal blend: the patient gets the speed and personalized information of AI agents and GenAI as well as the reassurance of human oversight and empathy.

While user trust has room to mature, there are signs that AI’s buildup in the industry itself is gaining momentum. Research from OpenAI calls health care the second-fastest-growing enterprise AI segment, with an eightfold increase in customer growth from 2024 to 2025. OpenAI and Google are testing models that integrate personal medical records with privacy control and encryption. According to Menlo Ventures’ research, 22% of health care organizations in the US implemented domain-specific AI tools, a 7x increase over 2024. Compare this figure to other industries: fewer than one in 10 companies (9%) has implemented AI, and most rely on general tools like enterprise ChatGPT instead of purpose-built solutions.

What Does This Mean for Health Care Providers and System Managers?

Implementing AI in a health system is a question of addressing the specific needs of the population, whether in an emerging market or a more developed setting. (See Exhibit 9.)

Overall, there is a clear urgency for health care providers and systems to develop and deploy proprietary AI solutions to keep up with their customers’ expectations. Consumers want to use AI tools to understand their symptoms and diagnoses and get immediate, conversational advice. If health care organizations don’t provide tools that are trained on their own clinical guidelines, then consumers will continue to receive unregulated advice from generic tools and potentially be steered to the wrong level of care.

Yet there’s more opportunity at hand. If health system leaders can address concerns around trust, reliability, and personalization, then AI offers the opportunity to fundamentally reshape how health systems and clinicians provide care—delivering patient empowerment, clinician sustainability, system efficiency, improved access, and better health outcomes.

It’s early days in the GenAI transformation of health care, but we see four “no regrets” imperatives for CEOs and organizations that want to maximize adoption of GenAI tools and agents for both consumers and the industry itself. Leaders can use the next 12 to 24 months to enhance their AI implementation. Delays could result in missed opportunities.

Avoid being too cautious about AI.

While many health care organizations are embracing the use of AI, others have adopted a highly guarded stance, restricting even mild experimentation. Yet the reality is that patients are already using these tools on their own and expect health care payers and providers to use them as well. Hesitation may limit the ability of leaders to make the most of the momentum and curtail the efforts of regulators to encourage innovation.

The question is not whether AI-enabled health care is flawless or whether it is superior to the best forms of in-person care. The question is whether AI tools can help to improve the care people can access. Decision makers can experiment safely by putting strong ethical and responsible AI guardrails in place and being open with consumers about how AI is being used, while ensuring that safeguards don’t slow implementation.

Embed AI and leverage trust in the “digital front door” consumer experience.

For more than a decade, providers and system managers have invested in digital front doors to improve access, productivity, and outcomes. These interfaces are often people’s first point of contact with their health care system through national health apps, patient portals, and vital online triage tools. However, use of these touchpoints will decline if people choose to engage generic, consumer-facing GenAI tools, potentially undermining the impact of triage and journey management functions embedded in digital front doors.

The time is ideal for health care providers and systems to transform their digital front door to a next-generation digital consumer experience oriented around agents and GenAI tools. Providers and systems can offer validated tools that securely access patient data to provide trustworthy, personalized, and confidential advice. The tools can also support easy pathway navigation with automated referral and form filling. These functions provide users with compelling reasons to choose these enhanced front doors over general chat tools and agents.

Empower patients with agentic access.

The increasing use of AI-powered consumer chat tools will drive growing demands from consumers for AI agents to access their personal health data held by providers and health systems. This will enable them to merge this data with their own personal digital information, including data from wearables and health apps, to create personalized insights and plans. Digital front doors will need to become “data front doors” where patients can grant AI tools access to their data.

Similarly, patients will increasingly want their agents to perform simple tasks such as scheduling appointments and checking insurance coverage. Agents offer the health care world efficiency, especially in administrative tasks that have long been slow and frustrating for patients and time-consuming for providers. Imagine consumer agents and health system agents collaborating to schedule appointments based on doctor availability and patient need. The system would avoid tying up both patients and administrative staff in multiple calls while freeing up staff to handle more complex patient concerns and care journeys.

Health care organizations will need to think through how they manage complex patient identity and access management issues, including how they restrict provision of data to organizations that cannot demonstrate safe handling of patient information. Providers will also need to design access to manage the risk of uncritically compliant agents seeking inappropriate services for patients who tend to overutilize care. One option is for health care systems or providers to establish app stores where consumers can access approved AI tools.

Decide how and where to partner with consumer-facing GenAI services.

The reality is that many consumers are starting their health system engagement with a commercial generative AI service and will continue to do so. The question for health systems and providers is how to work most effectively within this context. For example, health care marketing teams are moving from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization to make sure their brands and services are surfaced by the major GenAI tools. Organizations can also consider creating applications that are native inside popular search engines. A user could install and enable these tools to ask the provider or health system questions, request services, or make appointments.

System managers need to think through what actions consumers should be able to complete through a third-party AI agent and what actions should be completed directly in the health provider’s environment—where the organization can control the brand experience and messaging.

When leading this transition, health system leaders and CEOs can follow four principles that help organizations move fast.

• Be agile. Don’t let caution stall the deployment of AI. Agility when engaging new technologies requires an awareness of the strategy’s benefits—so place digitally-literate colleagues on the board and executive committee. They’ll see the benefits of transformation and support ethical rollouts and initiatives.
• Be confident. Trust is a key variable. Patients have a lot of faith in their health providers. If these trusted providers are bringing them into contact with AI, this trust can be utilized to accelerate their uptake of the technology. To personalize their experiences, it will be vital to unlock patient data—but be sure to allow for system control and patient consent.
• Be focused on speed to value. Agents bring speed, so deploy them widely to transform operations with faster capabilities and access. For example, such technologies are already being used to deliver benefits with ambient voice technology, intelligent triage, and ambulatory settings. Deploy these assets at scale now.
• Be ambitious. The true shift in health care will come by transforming the patient pathway end-to-end. This type of wide-scale change is happening in other industries and is just beginning in health care. To drive this transformation forward, focus not only on quick wins but look well ahead to big prizes beyond consumer use. AI could eventually reinvent management of cardio-renal-metabolic disease, frailty, mental health, musculoskeletal issues, and more. It’s not too early to begin reaching for those use cases.

Adoption of GenAI across health care is just beginning, and consumers are already showing the way forward with significant engagement. Concerns about data privacy, reliability of advice, and personalization all remain barriers to greater use. But by moving now, leaders could unlock substantial improvements in consumer access to care, enhanced patient empowerment, and greater health system productivity.