As healthcare continues to be a hotbed for technological innovation, Punit Soni, CEO of Suki, often reflects on his company’s founding years nearly eight years ago.
“It was crickets,” Mr. Soni said. “Nothing was going on and I remember thinking, did I make the right choice? Is this the right place? Are we going to be, okay?”
Mr. Soni — a veteran of Google and Motorola and one of the more innovative minds to emerge from Silicon Valley in recent years — soon found that his persistence, vision and belief in something more than his company’s success would pay off.
“You really can’t do this stuff without having some force of nature inside you that makes you want to barrel through things,” he said. “When you see something hard, you actually run through it rather than go through the side.”
Ambient AI scribes are on track to become one of the fastest adopted technologies in healthcare history, with some health systems reporting up to a 40% reduction in burnout among users. The technology uses voice recognition and machine learning to capture and structure clinical conversations in real time. Suki’s ambient technology helps streamline everything from note creation to order entry and is proven effective in meaningfully improving physicians’ work and personal lives, returning their attention during clinical visits to patients and conversations and cutting back on pajama time, or charting brought home.
It is one form of technology with potential to sustainably alleviate the pain points that have plagued health systems, physicians and patients for years.
Now, moving ahead, Suki is positioning itself as more than just another digital scribe in a crowded health IT space. It’s pitching itself as the “AI stack” for healthcare — a suite of AI-powered tools designed to integrate seamlessly across clinical workflows, helping physicians spend less time at keyboards and more time with patients.
What began as a single-product company has grown into a comprehensive AI platform used by more than 300 health systems, groups and clinics nationwide, including Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health, Nashville, Tenn.-based Ascension St. Thomas, St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam, N.Y., and Decatur County Memorial Hospital in Greensburg, Ind. That growth, however, didn’t happen overnight — nor without a philosophy grounded in humility, persistence and deep partnerships.
A philosophy of partnership, not deals
Mr. Soni is clear that success in healthcare isn’t just about building the best product — it’s about building trust-based relationships. Suki’s entire go-to-market strategy rests on long-term partnerships rather than transactional sales.
“I cannot be treated like a vendor selling vegetables in the market to you,” he said. “It’s not like AI by itself is going to do it. People have to get involved; we have to have joint teams. It’s not a vendor-server relationship. It’s a partnership.”
That mindset requires sharing data, aligning metrics and working toward joint outcomes. Mr. Soni also emphasizes humility in Suki’s approach — hiring people he believes are better than himself and drawing a clear line between ego and arrogance.
“There is a subtle difference between ego and arrogance,” he notes. “When you are faced with hard things to do, you do need ego to say, you know what? I’m going to do this. I can do it. Arrogance means you are condescending and have disdain for what the world’s offering to you. And the truth is, if you don’t understand what the world’s offering to you, you can’t offer anything in return,” he said.
A vision anchored in outcomes
Suki is advancing what Mr. Soni calls the next generation of AI-powered clinical assistance — moving beyond ambient documentation to a platform that supports dictation, order placement, billing data extraction and patient summary generation.
This holistic approach in creating one unified ecosystem aligns closely with Mr. Soni’s vision and goal to not limit Suki to a single function. It’s a multi-platform, deeply integrated tool designed to support every facet of the documentation process and beyond.
“We are spending a lot of time building relationships and relationships cannot be built if you don’t actually begin and end with, ‘What exactly does help, and how can we benefit you?'” he said.
That philosophy is also evident in Suki’s belief that usability is the core driver of success for AI in healthcare. Capabilities are one thing; use of them is another.
“If people don’t use the product, you can say whatever you want to say about ROI, it’s not going to happen,” Mr. Soni said. “That mindset is important because you can do a lot of marketing around ROI, but if your products are not being used, nobody cares.”
Real-world proof: Rush and beyond
One example of Suki’s evolution is its partnership with Chicago-based Rush University System for Health, which includes approximately 2,500 physicians. What began as a pilot to reduce administrative burdens is now scaling across the organization.
Because of Rush’s close ties to EHR provider Epic, it serves as a proving ground for Suki’s mission to deliver a fully integrated experience on top of existing infrastructure. During the initial trial period that started in early 2024, Rush reported a 74% decrease in burnout and 95% of users expressed a desire to continue using it. After the initial trial and deployment Rush saw a 10% increase in encounter volumes.
“You can only imagine the ROI and the revenue impact based on those numbers,” Mr. Soni said. “It also means that we can provide larger patient access. You can enable clinicians to cover a lot more patients and help and serve them. That’s the promise of AI.”
The initiative exemplifies how health systems can collaborate with technology companies to shape tools around clinical realities — not the other way around. More importantly, the numbers offer proof that AI, thoughtfully applied, can ease endemic pain points.
Toward the next generation of AI in healthcare
Mr. Soni believes AI will play a foundational role in reshaping how healthcare is delivered for decades to come. But realizing AI’s promise requires thoughtful rollouts, measured adoption and quantifiable results — all underpinned by values like persistence and humility.
If Suki succeeds in becoming the operating layer for healthcare AI, it won’t be because it had the most features — but because it embraced the most human values: listening, adapting and showing up every day to support patients and providers.
“This might be the time that healthcare will finally benefit from technology and make things better,” Mr. Soni said. “Suki will partake in that success, but I think the bigger success story is healthcare. It’s finally getting to a place where we can be proud of the work we’re all doing. And that includes me and my competition — they’re all doing amazing work.”
