There are moments in healthcare technology that feel genuinely different from what came before. The shift to electronic health records was one, the rise of value-based care was another. And now, according to Mac Boyter, research director at KLAS Research, ambient speech AI belongs in that same conversation.
The data KLAS Research has collected over the last year backs that up. Mr. Boyter joined Molly Gamble of Becker’s Healthcare in February for a webinar unpacking the 2026 Best in KLAS report, with a focus on its Ambient Speech AI category. The top-ranked solution: Abridge.
“Nothing since the EHR switch from paper has come with as much resounding adoption and mandate,” Mr. Boyter said. “Physicians demand it as part of their workflow.”
What KLAS measures and why it matters
KLAS Research has spent nearly 30 years providing independent, third-party research to the healthcare technology market. Its Best in KLAS report is an annual study that aggregates validated customer feedback across hundreds of categories, drawing on more than 25,000 interviews with healthcare executives, CIOs, CMIOs and CFOs. Responses are anonymous, and vendors cannot pay their way into eligibility or improve their standing.
The stakes for health system leaders’ buying decisions right have never been higher. “Healthcare leaders are making big decisions — long-term decisions — and sometimes in the absence of real data,” Mr. Boyter said. “Our goal is to provide that insight.”
Eligibility for the report requires a minimum number of live customer organizations and enough time in deployment to produce meaningful outcomes. KLAS wants feedback from organizations that have moved past the honeymoon phase, not just those who went live in the last 30 days.
Alongside numeric scores, KLAS asks four binary yes-or-no questions that Mr. Boyter describes as among the most revealing data points in the entire report: Would you buy this solution again? Is it part of your long-term plans? Does the vendor avoid charging for every little thing? And does the vendor keep all promises?
Each question, he explained, captures far more than its surface reading suggests. A “yes” to buying again, for instance, means the entire experience of clinical outcomes, change management, financial return, and partnership quality justified the investment.
A category unlike any other
KLAS has been tracking the ambient speech AI category as it has evolved from early-stage experimentation into something health systems are actively building around. What sets it apart from other AI categories, Mr. Boyter said, is that the results are real and happening now.
“With ambient speech AI specifically, we’re seeing real, empirically measurable impact — clinical, operational, financial and even patient-facing,” he said. “It’s not vaporware. It’s not ‘we hope to see longitudinal benefit.’ It really is seeing those impacts.”
He was careful to distinguish ambient speech AI from older voice technologies. This isn’t dictation or front-end speech recognition. It’s technology that captures the full clinician-patient conversation and uses generative AI to contextualize it. That’s a meaningfully different capability that has transformed the documentation experience for many clinicians.
The adoption velocity, Mr. Boyter said, has no clear parallel in KLAS’s history. “I love the word velocity. There really isn’t a better word to describe it in my opinion,” Mr. Boyter said. “We have not, at least again, in my experience at KLAS, seen any other technology develop, deploy, and critically be adopted with this level of rapidity.”
What drove Abridge to the top
In naming Abridge the Best in KLAS solution for ambient speech AI in 2026, KLAS pointed to several factors beyond the score itself.
The breadth of organizations willing to share feedback was notable — Mr. Boyter said high participation signals genuine excitement and real outcomes, not just a handful of well-managed reference accounts. Customers could point to specific clinical, operational and financial results. And performance held up consistently across health systems of different sizes and geographies, which Mr. Boyter identified as one of the clearest differentiators between the top solutions and those that perform well only in narrow circumstances.
Perhaps most significantly, the forward-looking indicators were strong. Leaders consistently said Abridge is part of their long-term plans. Mr. Boyter said that speaks to confidence in the vendor’s roadmap and staying power in a market where many solutions have come and gone.
The result carries added weight given the field. KLAS is tracking a growing number of ambient speech AI solutions, from health IT incumbents expanding into the space to startups built around it from the ground up. Mr. Boyter noted that performance varies widely across the category depending on scale, workflow integration and consistency of the customer experience. In that context, holding the top spot isn’t just about a strong score. It’s about being a solution that health systems, across sizes and geographies, say they’d choose again.
The ROI question — and a common mistake
An audience question from a CFO perspective surfaced one of the more practical tensions in this space: how do health systems justify the investment when budgets are tight?
Mr. Boyter’s answer was direct, and included a cautionary note. Early adopters sometimes tried to offset the cost of ambient tools by using the efficiency gains to add more patients to a clinician’s schedule. To a system, he said, that approach has backfired and added burden on the very people the technology was meant to help.
The better framing, he argued, is a holistic view of return: reduced burnout, lower physician turnover (replacing a physician can cost between $500,000 and $1 million), improved patient engagement and satisfaction, and operational efficiencies that compound over time. “Even in a tight budget environment,” he said, “look holistically at that ROI as opposed to just purely financial.”
On clinician satisfaction and retention specifically, Mr. Boyter was unambiguous: it is the core driver of ambient AI purchasing decisions across the organizations KLAS has interviewed. One CIO told him that having an ambient solution had become a physician recruitment tool, with candidates now asking about it before accepting positions. “This is becoming table stakes,” Mr. Boyter said.
What leaders should take away
For health system leaders still evaluating their options, Mr. Boyter offered a piece of advice about how to read the Best in KLAS report: focus less on the headline ranking and more on what the underlying signals imply about durability and partnership. In a market moving this fast, he said, what matters most is whether a vendor will be there to hold your hand over the long term — and whether the customers who’ve already made that bet would make it again.
The organizations feeding into this year’s report have largely moved beyond pilots. They’re thinking about expansion, sustained use, and what these tools can do beyond the clinical note. For Mr. Boyter, the distinction from every other AI category comes down to velocity. “With ambient, it’s almost immediate,” he said. “Clinical outcomes are improving, physicians are happier. That’s all happening very fast.”
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