Medicine will be AI’s Biggest Market as Expert Health Guidance Becomes More Accessible, says Microsoft AI CEO
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He also revealed that healthcare has already become one of the most common uses of Microsoft's AI services.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has said medicine is likely to become the biggest market for artificial intelligence, arguing that AI could significantly improve access to high-quality medical guidance.
He believes AI-powered health assistants will help narrow gaps in healthcare quality while making trusted medical information more affordable for millions of people.
He said advances in artificial intelligence could make expert-level medical knowledge available to people regardless of where they live or their financial circumstances.
According to Suleyman, one of healthcare's greatest challenges is the uneven quality of medical expertise available to patients.
While some individuals have access to highly experienced specialists, many others receive care with fewer resources or limited specialist support, resulting in significant differences in health outcomes.
Highlighting this disparity, he said, "The quality difference between the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent, even in the United States, let alone the rest of the world, is unbelievable. The gulf is probably an order of magnitude."
He believes artificial intelligence has the potential to reduce that gap by making sophisticated medical knowledge more widely available through AI-powered tools.
Describing healthcare as AI's most promising sector, Suleyman said, "I think by far the most exciting new market is medicine."
He also suggested that access to advanced AI-powered medical guidance could eventually become affordable for a broad population, predicting that services delivering what he described as medical superintelligence could cost about USD 20 per month.
Suleyman stressed that AI is not intended to replace healthcare professionals. Instead, he sees it as a technology that can help people better understand symptoms, prepare for consultations, interpret medical information and make more informed decisions before seeking clinical care.
He also revealed that healthcare has already become one of the most common uses of Microsoft's AI services.
"About 40% of our queries each week are health-related. Millions of people a day are asking health-related queries," he said, pointing to growing public interest in AI-assisted health information.
To improve the reliability of responses, Suleyman said Microsoft's AI models reference established medical sources. "We ground the answers in citations from Harvard Medical, the most respected health institution," he said.
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