“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
-Sun Tzu, Art of
War
Earlier this year, I wrote that browser automation was a bridge period.
At the time, my focus was trust. Agents could technically complete workflows, but the systems around them were not really designed to know who was behind the request, what the agent was authorized to do, or whether the interaction should be trusted.
I still think that is true.
What has changed is that we are starting to see what comes after the bridge.
In June, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that more than one billion health records had been exchanged through TEFCA, the national interoperability network. The volume grew from 10 million to more than one billion in less than a year. Healthcare is developing the infrastructure required to exchange information across the system at a scale we have not seen before.
The value of that exchange is measured by what happens after the information arrives.
A health plan, provider, pharmacy, or care-management team must understand the record, determine the next action, and carry that decision through the appropriate workflow. When the process crosses another application, department, or organization, the information can stop while the member continues waiting.
Voice AI’s next executive benchmark is inbound ability, because the voice is the interface, but the workflow is the value.
I’ve written before that voice AI’s missing piece is the ability to listen while it talks.
That’s still true. A voice agent that can speak back is no longer the interesting benchmark. The more useful question is what happens after somebody starts talking.
Can the agent verify the person? Can it access the right database? Can it know what it is allowed to divulge? Can it summarize the interaction, push it to a queue and trigger the right follow-up?
That is where voice AI moves from a private generative AI experience into an actual operating system for inbound work.
