The future of healthcare, increasingly strained by workforce shortages and administrative overhead, hinges on intelligent automation. Ankit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Infinitus Systems, recently joined Julie Yoo, a16z Bio + Health general partner, to discuss how Infinitus is leveraging AI voice agents and large language models (LLMs) to address these critical challenges, transforming the industry from reactive to proactive.
Infinitus was founded in 2019, well before the recent explosion of public interest in generative AI. From its inception, the company aimed to use AI and voice agents to alleviate the significant burden of repetitive tasks in healthcare. "We've built a set of voice agents that are able to augment administrative and clinical teams in their aim to serve their patient populations," Jain explained, highlighting their focus on automating common, time-consuming voice interactions like benefits verification and prior authorizations.
A pivotal moment for Infinitus came during their early proof-of-concept calls. Unsure how human operators would react to interacting with a machine, Jain recounted, "The first agent hung up." Undeterred, they refined their approach, and the breakthrough came when a human agent on the other end of the line engaged, asking for patient details for "Bruce Willis." This interaction was a crucial validation: "That was proof point number one that it is possible to automate a call between a machine and a human."
The scale of Infinitus's impact is significant. The company has now handled "over 5 million phone calls, over 100 million hours of audio of conversations between machines and humans." This monumental achievement demonstrates the viability and necessity of AI in handling the sheer volume of healthcare communications. Yet, navigating the complexities of healthcare requires more than just raw processing power.
A core insight from Jain is the critical role of layered guardrails to mitigate the risks of AI errors, particularly hallucinations. While LLMs are powerful for understanding and retrieving information, Infinitus employs "a lot of small language models that go alongside those LLMs to make sure we can give safe, compliant, guardrailed conversations, which are so critical in the world of healthcare." This hybrid approach ensures accuracy and adherence to strict regulatory requirements.
Jain posited that many current healthcare problems stem from its inherent reactivity. Unlike other industries where proactive updates are standard (e.g., airline gate changes, pizza tracking), healthcare often waits for a patient to become "super anxious" and call in to check the status of their process. Infinitus aims to shift this paradigm, enabling providers to proactively communicate with patients and payers, thereby reducing avoidable medical costs and improving patient experience.
The company's journey has also influenced broader industry behavior. By demonstrating the efficacy of AI agents in handling calls, Infinitus has, in some cases, incentivized large payers and PBMs to develop their own APIs, allowing for digital data exchange rather than voice calls. This illustrates a powerful network effect: AI agents can drive the very digital transformation that ultimately reduces the need for the calls they initially automate. This evolution also highlights the dual product strategy of Infinitus, offering both fully autonomous AI agents and AI co-pilots that assist human staff. Jain believes in meeting customers "where they are," acknowledging that some tasks are best handled autonomously by machines, while others still require human nuance, augmented by AI for efficiency.
The talent landscape is equally dynamic. Jain observed a growing influx of engineers from consumer tech, drawn to healthcare by the desire to work on problems that "matter to me." This passion, combined with the increasing accessibility of foundation models, empowers companies like Infinitus to build specialized AI solutions. The core differentiation, however, lies not just in building models, but in the proprietary data used for fine-tuning and the "last-mile integration" into existing healthcare workflows. This deep integration and understanding of nuanced operational processes are what truly drive value and overcome industry inertia.
In the coming years, the ongoing convergence of disparate healthcare data and the refinement of AI agents will create unprecedented opportunities. As Jain envisions, we will witness a future of hyper-personalized communication and care, driven by context-aware AI. This transformation promises not only improved efficiency for providers but also a more proactive, transparent, and ultimately more human experience for patients.
