Aashima Gupta (Google Cloud): "Healthcare doesn't lack vision. It lacks courage."

Most conversations about agentic AI in healthcare get stuck on capability. This one is about the gap between capability and deployment — and what closes it.

Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Strategy and Solutions at Google Cloud, argues that healthcare's bottleneck isn't vision; it's courage. The processes are documented poorly or not at all, AI fluency programs reach a fraction of employees who want them, and most enterprises are running agents without the harnesses — grounding, evaluation, red-teaming — that production deployment actually requires. Meanwhile patients navigate three different "clock speeds" (annual insurance cycles, shifting provider rosters, Medicare pricing) that bear no relation to the timeline of their own health.

We cover the European vs US deployment posture, the difference between agents-with-agency and rule-based AI, why Highmark's library of one million internal prompts matters, Google Cloud's full-stack efficiency play (TPU Ironwood, Gemini, the 40% data-centre electricity reduction DeepMind delivered years ago), and the multi-agent "harnesses" — including the red/blue/green team architecture — that are starting to make production-grade healthcare AI plausible.

Video: https://youtu.be/rLtaxQLgCg0?si=JDP6kK97_tYsFoSb

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