Suki AI Is Everywhere—and Aims to Be Invisible

Lots of news emerged from the health tech conference HIMSS, and one company has been dominating the headlines: Suki.

Suki is establishing itself as a darling of some of the largest health care companies in the country. On March 3, Rush—the Chicago-based academic medical center—announced that it will deploy Suki's technology across its entire enterprise, spanning 28 specialties. The health system is one of the largest Epic shops in the country, and will co-develop an AI dictation feature directly within the electronic health record—merging Suki's ambient and dictation capabilities into a single solution.

The health-tech company also joined forces with Wolters Kluwer Health, parent company of the leading clinical evidence database UpToDate. The partnership (also announced March 3) will integrate UpToDate's clinical decision support content into Suki Assistant, aiming to help clinicians make informed decisions at the point of care.

In a deck of health-tech's haves, you'll draw a Suki partner in every hand. It's a longtime Google partner that has embedded in the largest electronic health records, including Epic, Athenahealth and Meditech. Zoom—the telehealth provider for more than 140,000 health care institutions around the world, used for 36 percent of virtual visits—has adopted Suki's AI solutions.

And as health AI companies scramble to differentiate themselves, Punit Soni, Suki's CEO, began our first conversation by telling me what his company is not: "We're not an AI scribing company."

Soni said that when he founded Suki in 2017, he coined the term "AI assistant," envisioning a single product that could assist clinicians with various tasks. The original product, which combined ambient scribing, voice commands and dictation features, has evolved. Today's Suki includes problem-based charting, coding, patient summarization and Q&A features.

But competition in the space is heating up. Approximately 1,000 health-tech exhibitors set up shop at last week's HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, vying for the attention of about 28,000 attendees. Many of them were selling AI solutions. On March 3, Microsoft unveiled its Dragon Copilot product, which combines the voice dictation capabilities of its DMO with the ambient listening capabilities of its DAX. The company has branded Dragon Copilot as the "first unified voice AI assistant" on the market.

When I asked Soni about that language over email, he replied unphased.

"Today's Microsoft's Dragon Copilot is a similar iteration to when it was first launched, but with a refreshed marketing strategy behind its product," he wrote. "It's great to see the space evolve, reinforcing the vision Suki has long championed. Ultimately, success in this space isn't just about marketing, it's about ensuring the product truly works for clinicians and drives meaningful adoption."

Suki may not be a household name to the general public, but it's gaining that status across health systems. Its assistant is currently used by 350 health systems; for comparison, generative AI competitor Abridge surpassed 100 health system deployments in February.

Unlike other vendors in the health care industry, Suki provides other technology and communication companies with the platform to run their own AI advancements. That is foundational to its Zoom partnership; Suki's platform will integrate AI-driven clinical notes into Zoom's Workplace for Clinicians.

The relationship between the two companies goes deeper. Zoom Ventures—which is revving up its focus on AI, Ritu Mukherjee, Zoom's VP of product management, told me at HIMSS—has also added Suki to its investment portfolio.

"We went through a process of evaluating different partners," Mukherjee said. "We talked to some of the leading vendors out there, and we had some very positive experiences with a few."

"We didn't feel like there was enough with some of the other vendors," she continued, "but Suki was a very good match."

As of the two companies' investment announcement on January 30, Suki had raised $168 million, and in 2024, it quadrupled its footprint—planting strong roots in a sector that just about everyone is trying to permeate. Since 2023, there has been a 9 percent increase in venture capital funds allotting at least $500 million to health care, according to Silicon Valley Bank—and since 2019, the number of AI deals in health care has grown at twice the rate of AI deals in the broader tech sector.

But Suki was around before 2019, and that longevity certainly doesn't hurt. Soni spent years in Big Tech, working at companies like Google, Motorola and Flipkart (which was acquired by Walmart) before breaking into the health care industry. He founded Suki in 2017 on the thesis that "AI is the new UI"—but back then, he said, "nobody was talking about this stuff."

Soni believed that AI was "going to be really spectacular in places that have repeatable work, sophisticated users, an anthology of fixed language that can be used." Sound familiar?

Yet for years, Soni said, his idea for a clinical AI assistant was shot down. People did not believe that such a tool could be built, much less sold.

"You can't build anything without everybody constantly telling you that you can't," he said.

Persistence helped Suki through the development stage, but partnerships took it to the next level, differentiating it.

When I met with Soni at HIMSS, he told me that relationships are essential for health care AI companies. To be successful anywhere in life—not just health care—you need to have strong connections, he said. However, AI benefits from partnerships in unique ways. If you have a richer network, you'll have more data and can train a more capable model. The more feedback you receive, the more you can refine and perfect it. And the more electronic health records you can situate your tool within, the easier it is to scale.

"Suki is probably the most diverse platform out there," Soni told Newsweek, speaking of collaborations and capabilities. He's confident in the product but has expressed a more cynical view of the market—in February, when I asked him what challenges he'd have to overcome this year, he asked me how much time I had.

"There's a lot of noise in this market," Soni said. "If somebody asked me about the most annoying part of my life, it's the constant lecture that happens all around me. 'This is doing that,' 'That is doing this,' 'This award,' 'This stuff,' blah, blah, blah."

"Now, to some extent," he continued, "it's a privilege, because when you're relevant, that's when the chirping happens. People only care when you actually are in the middle of things. But the truth is, the noise is insignificant. And it puts a lot of workload on us to make sure we can cut through it and simplify it."

If Suki does this right, Soni told me, it becomes a quiet presence. Your telehealth platform uses Suki in the background, and you don't even notice it. It folds into clinical workflows, fades into clinician's muscle memories. It's there when you need it and gone when you don't.

Soni understands that to achieve this goal, Suki needs to be compatible with electronic medical records, the industry's longtime showrunners. It's not always easy to accommodate and adjust for them, he said: "Having an external force that can move your strategy is never a comforting and easy thing to do."

Still, it's a fair price for seamlessness.

"Suki's number one challenge is how do we cut through the noise, focus on our identity and our mission and just do what we need to do to make health care tech assistive and invisible," Soni said. He paused, then continued, "AI platform for health care. That's who we are."