The AI Tipping Point: What Healthcare and Life Sciences Leaders Need to Know for 2025

AI is proving that it’s here to stay. While 2023 brought wonder and 2024 saw widespread experimentation, 2025 will be the year that healthcare and life sciences get serious about AI's applications. But it’s complicated: AI proofs of concept are graduating from the sandbox to production, just as some of AI’s biggest cheerleaders are turning a bit dour. 

How to navigate such a landscape is top of mind for me and top executives such as Snowflake’s CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy; Snowflake’s Distinguished AI Engineer, Yuxiong Xe; and other Snowflake industry-specific experts who weighed in on the “Snowflake AI + Data Predictions 2025” report. From operationalizing AI to rewriting your leadership skill set, we’re predicting what an AI-accelerated future might look like (and what might happen if organizations don’t get their foundational data strategies in place to be part of it). 

The healthcare and life sciences industry approached the gen AI hype cycle with a results-oriented mindset. While the industry is embracing AI — with pharma and research institutions grabbing headlines like “AI Gains Ground with Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Prevention” — the patient care side will continue to proceed incrementally, slowly gaining acceptance among care teams and patients.

Expect HCLS organizations to maintain a measured pace and prioritize evidence-based proof points and tangible results. With high standards of care, stringent regulatory requirements and physicians' desire to balance efficiency, safety and personal liability, they will need to see AI-driven results in other highly regulated spaces before they dive in.  

For the rest of the healthcare and life sciences predictions and more, download the report “Snowflake AI + Data Predictions 2025.”

Of all the questions surrounding AI, how to use AI ethically may be the biggest one. Healthcare and life sciences professionals operate using a series of core ethical principles to guide their decisions, so they have a better starting point than most.

But there's precedent for what this would look like if we use AI to help drive clinical decisions. An entire legal and ethical infrastructure has already been established to protect against medical malpractice. The buck has to stop with someone, and that someone is generally a licensed physician who is held liable for care decisions.

So while other industries fear that people will be replaced entirely by AI, in healthcare and life sciences people will always be involved. We just now have the added responsibility of helping to ensure that AI results are correct.

The existing ethical and regulatory frameworks within healthcare and life sciences will make transparency, reliability and explainability all the more crucial. As AI technology matures, hallucinations will become less frequent overall and businesses will choose which models to implement, based in part on their tolerance of risk. In HCLS, obviously, that tolerance will always be extremely low.

For more on what to expect in 2025, join us for our webinar focusing on the future of healthcare and life sciences in relation to data and AI. We’ll explore how these technologies are expected to shape the industry, addressing changes in clinical and operational decision-making, therapeutic development and patient care. 

If you’re not able to join us, read the full report for the rest of my 2025 healthcare and life sciences predictions, insights from six other industry leaders and the latest big-picture data and AI forecasts from leaders such as Baris Gultekin, Snowflake’s Head of AI, and Brad Jones, Snowflake’s Chief Information Security Officer.