Health care’s AI dividend is real. The fight now is over who reaps the gains

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Good morning. Health care CEOs walked into 2026 carrying the same impossible mandate they’ve had for years: do more with less, improve outcomes, and somehow fix a system that the country can no longer afford. The difference now is that AI is actually starting to deliver—clinicians seeing on average eight more patients a week, hundreds of hours of administrative burden lifting, patient satisfaction rising. And the Future Health Index 2026, an annual global survey of more than 2,000 health care professionals and 20,000 patients commissioned by Philips, does show that AI is helping clinicians deliver better care with less stress. More than half of the patients who regularly use AI reported being positive about its impact, too. That’s a significant gain in trust and optimism from a year ago. “We’re talking about true adoption and what we call the AI dividend now because we’re actually starting to see the return,” said Jeff DiLullo, chief region leader for Philips North America.

But a dinner earlier this week—that Fortune and Philips cohosted in New York with leaders of the country’s major health systems—revealed a sharper question: Will those gains flow back into care, or disappear the way telehealth’s efficiencies did into lower reimbursements and thinner margins? After all, rising costs, reduced coverage, and labor shortages, along with regulatory challenges and a fragmented market, have put pressure on the industry to gain efficiencies while creating barriers to achieve them. Some participants expressed concern that AI gains could go the way of telehealth, where increased efficiency leads to less compensation from insurers for those delivering care.

And yet there was palpable excitement at what AI can do. “It’s truly changing the way we care for people, with better outcomes at a lower cost,” Kevin Mahoney, CEO of University of Pennsylvania Health System, told me. While it can’t fix everything, he added, “we’re in a moment where America can’t afford its health care, and we need to use every tool we can.”

Brian Donley, president and CEO of New York Presbyterian, agreed, adding that “AI is not an innovation strategy or an IT strategy. It has to be an enterprise strategy … with a constant focus on how we can expand that time where an exchange of empathy happens between a patient and provider.” That’s more likely when everyone trusts that AI is being deployed to enhance human interaction, not replace it.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com