AI Conversational Chat Market Map: The robots talk back
This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
Now more than ever, hospitals and health systems have an opportunity to capitalize on AI-driven technology to both streamline common patient interactions and — perhaps counterintuitively — improve the patient experience at the same time.
Healthcare Chat 1.0
Chat solutions have been around for a while in healthcare, particularly in the context of “digital front doors.”
Historically these solutions have leveraged rule- and retrieval-based models, which worked well for some use cases but were fairly limited in scope and lacked the ability to understand context and nuance.
Healthcare Chat 2.0
With the rapid development of LLMs, however, these solutions have quickly become much more capable.
While difficult to define — both because AI chat is becoming more of a necessary mode of interaction than a product on its own, and because there’s significant overlap between this category and adjacent ones— the AI Conversational Chat category generally includes voice and text-based applications as well as both inbound and outbound communications.
Not only are these solutions driving better performance across traditional contact center use cases like appointment scheduling and intake, but we’re also seeing them play an increasing role in supporting clinical workflows, such as care management.
Here’s a quick breakdown of common use cases where AI conversational chat is being applied:
The Vendor Set
As mentioned above, this is a complicated category — there are a ton of solutions out there that incorporate AI-driven chat, addressing an ever-expanding set of use cases. Chat is also often just one part of a broader solution, such as contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms and even patient intake and engagement products. Moreover, it can be hard to differentiate the quality of the chat capabilities (a common challenge across AI-powered solutions).
We’ve covered 25+ vendors in our AI Conversational Chat category, making it a good starting point if you’re just digging into the space.