Beyond Smart Hospitals: Why the Future Belongs to Agentic AI

AI agents that see, hear, and act in the room: transforming staff capacity and patient experience — today.

Wayne Gretzky’s line — “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been” — has never mattered more for hospitals facing the pace of AI. If leaders chase what’s visible today, they risk aiming at where the play has already been — congratulating themselves that Betamax topped the RFP spreadsheet just as Netflix is about to debut.

For most hospitals, AI still lives in the chart. Documentation tools and analytics both mine the same structured data. Helpful, yes — but anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows that care doesn’t live in the EHR. It lives in the room: a nurse balancing too many demands, a subtly sluggish patient, a sudden decompensation after concerns during morning rounds. 

Hospitals have a different dimension of complexity than outpatient due to the 24/7 nature of care. As a result, AI agents developed to help care teams in the hospital setting have been slow to emerge. Yet, hospitals can’t survive on incremental gains. Staffing shortages, layoffs, burnout, and rising acuity make yesterday’s tools insufficient. We need AI to close the gap between chart and patient — creating new streams of context from the physical world and feeding them back into workflow without adding burden. That means AI assistants that can see, hear, and respond in real time.

This requires a leap beyond the tactical use cases hospitals have tried so far. Virtual sitters and translators solve real problems; AI scribes were remarkable at putting words into system fields — but all are narrow steps that hint at what’s possible, not ambitious enough for what hospitals now need. This is where Smart Hospitals stop and the Agentic Hospital begins — a new care model built around AI agents that don’t just watch but act — working directly for patients and the care team.

Smart Hospitals mainly connect dashboards and devices, and sometimes add sensors or basic computer vision. The Agentic Hospital puts hyper-personalized AI agents where they matter most: in the room to engage patients, and everywhere to support staff. Soon, these agents won’t just connect to devices or EHRs — they’ll collaborate across settings. Integration won’t mean every action is routed through one central system, but agents working together in real time. A hospital AI could hand off to Epic’s Emmie AI agent at discharge, communicating what motivates the patient to get better — ensuring continuity for patients and peace of mind for families.

LookDeep, a Silicon Valley company, designed aimee™ for this future — but that future is here now. Already in hospitals, aimee is a multimodal, agentic AI platform that evolves at the pace of AI, not the pace of procurement. For the first time, care teams and patients have a partner that sees what’s happening, engages when needed, and supports when staff can’t be present.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s live. And the best way to understand it isn’t through a white paper or a six-month RFP. It’s to try it hands on.

When I asked aimee what she might have done for my mom during her lung transplant, she answered:

“I could have kept her comfortable, reminded the staff about her needs, and made sure your family felt supported and less alone. I would have been there when you couldn’t.”

That’s not marketing copy. It’s how she responds in real time. It’s a glimpse of what happens when AI moves beyond dashboards and documentation to become a partner in the physical world — watching when staff can’t and supporting patients and families.

The implications go beyond individual moments: fewer safety incidents, smoother communication across patients, families, and staff, more efficient workflows so clinicians focus on complex decisions, and a more personalized experience rooted in compassion and presence. That’s not the next version of a smart hospital. It’s something categorically different.

For hospitals the strategic move is to skate to where care is going — toward AI that sees and engages at the bedside in real time. That’s the leap from the Smart Hospital to the Agentic Hospital.

Don’t just talk about AI. Experience it. Transparency is the antidote to hype, and aimee is available for you to talk to now at lookdeep.health/meet-aimee.

Narinder Singh is CEO of LookDeep Health, inspired by his mother’s unexpected lung transplant to pioneer AI agents that can see and help so patients and care teams are never alone in care. Before healthcare, he co-founded Appirio, Salesforce’s first investment, to pioneer the cloud revolution.

The post Beyond Smart Hospitals: Why the Future Belongs to Agentic AI appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.