Becker’s recently asked the CIOs and chief digital officers of the 200 largest U.S. health systems two questions: What is the most overhyped trend in healthcare IT, and what are you truly most excited about?
For a notable number of the 25 who responded to the anonymous poll, the answer to both was the same: AI.
Nineteen pointed to AI or a specific application of it as the most overhyped trend. Twenty named AI or an AI-enabled capability as what excites them most. Sixteen did both.
Does that make the survey moot? Not necessarily.
Very few executives said the technology itself is overhyped; instead, they pointed to the behaviors around it.
They mentioned AI pilots that never reach production, generative tools deployed without redesigning the workflows they aim to improve, homegrown models built while vendor capabilities paid for sit unadopted, and the reflexive habit of relabeling ordinary software as AI.
Several railed against the belief that deploying AI is a strategy in and of itself: that momentum without governance produces chaos, while governance without momentum produces stagnation. The hype is in assuming the capability takes the place of the hard work of operational change.
In recent months, health systems have moved from asking whether to adopt AI to asking how to govern it — building intake processes, tiering tools by risk and demanding evidence of value before deployment. The CIOs calling AI overhyped are not dissenting from that shift. They are describing the problem it exists to solve.
Which is why their enthusiasm is not in tension with their skepticism.
When respondents described what excites them, they named specific projects — and results: ambient documentation that pulls clinicians out of their charts, image analysis in radiology and pathology, clinical decision support drawn from large bodies of outcomes data, predictive analytics that let systems intervene earlier, and the steady removal of administrative burden that has driven so many clinicians toward burnout.
These examples represent AI absorbed into health system operations to the point of near-disappearance — the opposite of pilots and press releases. What the survey captures is not ambivalence but a distinction: between AI as a thing a health system can be seen to be doing, and AI as a thing that quietly changes how the work gets done.
The executives are betting heavily on the second while losing patience with the first. Their skepticism and their enthusiasm point in the same direction — toward the moment the technology stops being a headline and starts being infrastructure. Most of them expect that payoff to be larger than the current hype suggests. They also expect it to take longer to arrive.
At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14–17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health. Apply for complimentary registration now.