A swarm of agents, you will have. Handle them, how will you? Without a solid Agentic OS underneath, hmmmm?
Agents, I see. Agents everywhere, I see. Yet bothered by the coming problem, no one seems to be.
Stop asking which agent to buy or build. Start asking what your agent layer looks like.
The model is the easy part. The layer underneath is the hard part — the one that lets agents remember, coordinate, call tools, and not lose the plot at step seven.
Call it what you want. Most are landing on Agentic OS.
Where It's Getting Tested Hardest: Healthcare
A few signals from just the last few months:
- Hackensack Meridian runs an agent named Erin for post-discharge follow-ups — symptoms, meds, appointments, escalation. Live, in production.
- Microsoft Healthcare Agent Orchestrator is being piloted at Stanford for tumor boards. Specialized agents for pathology, radiology, staging, trial-matching. A coordinator pulls it together for the oncologist.
- The UK launched TrustX Health in December — a national framework to verify and safely deploy agentic AI across the NHS.
But Reality Kicks In With Data
- 43% of health systems are piloting agentic AI.
- Only ~3–4% have it in live workflows.
"That gap isn't a model problem. It's an OS problem."
What an Agent Layer Actually Has to Do
- FHIR interoperability with legacy EHRs.
- Identity and governance for agents, not users.
- HIPAA-aware architectures that keep PHI out of the inference plane.
- Orchestration that survives a real hospital, not a demo.
The Real Question
So as I said: stop asking which agent to buy. Start asking what your agent layer looks like.
The orgs that figure out the OS layer first won't have better agents. They'll have agents that actually ship.
The model is commoditizing. The plumbing is where the edge lives.
May the source be with you. Not sure how much will be left of it from agents though. 😅
Source: A Microsoft / Health Management Academy survey, published in NEJM AI. Views are my own and do not represent any commercial entity.