Microsoft’s annual developer conference kicks off today in Seattle, Washington, during the same week Google hosts its own I/O developer event in Mountain View, California. Build will be focused on Microsoft’s latest platform changes for developers, including new AI announcements that are bound to go head-to-head with Google’s own news.

Microsoft is streaming Build online free of charge and developers, students, and engineers will also be able to attend the in-person event at Seattle’s conference center. I’m expecting Microsoft to focus largely on AI this year, with emphasis on its push for AI agents that Microsoft envisions working alongside humans as digital colleagues.

We may also get some news on Microsoft’s plans to host Elon Musk’s Grok AI model. I revealed in my Notepad newsletter earlier this month that Microsoft is in discussions with xAI to host the Grok AI model on its Azure AI Foundry service, with a potential announcement at Build this week.

Perhaps we’ll also see OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appear at Build, just like he did last year. In Notepad earlier this year I revealed that OpenAI had been planning to launch its GPT-5 model in late May, but sources familiar with OpenAI’s plans tell me that’s less likely now due to service changes and recent delays affecting the launch of other models. Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are always keen to show that the partnership between the two companies remains strong — amid media reports of tensions — with the pair posing for a selfie earlier this month.

Nadella will kick off all of Microsoft’s AI announcements at 9AM PT / 12PM ET on May 19th, followed by a day two technical keynote hosted by Jay Parikh, Charles Lamanna, and Scott Guthrie.

How to watch Microsoft Build 2025 Keynote and Sessions

If you want to attend any sessions, then register for free here.

The keynote for Microsoft Build 2025 will start at 9AM PT / 12PM ET on May 19th.

Catch the keynote and the sessions here on the Microsoft Build 2025 page.

Stay tuned to The Verge for all the news coming out of the conference!

• Microsoft is among the latest to cut middle management jobs.
• Tech giants like Intel, Amazon, and Google are also flattening structures for efficiency.
• Experts warn that while flattening can speed decisions, it is possible to take it too far.

Companies are shedding bloated layers of management in an attempt to reduce bureaucracy. Some employees are applauding the move, known as flattening the middle, in the hopes of getting faster and boosting efficiency.

Microsoft said Tuesday it's slashing around 6,000 employees. While the days since have made it clear many of those cut were individual contributor-level engineers, executives previously told BI one motivation behind the recent cuts was to increase managers' "span of control," or the number of reports per manager.

Intel announced a great flattening last month, emphasizing more time in the office, less admin, and leaner teams.

"The best leaders get the most done with the fewest people," said the chip giant's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, in a memo to staff.

Amazon has also increased the ratio of individual contributors to managers. They call it a "builder ratio." Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff late last year that the company cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency push. Meta has been at it for years, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing in a 2023 memo, "flatter is faster."

The risk is that these companies cut too many managers, leaving the remaining folks with too many direct reports.

But for now, it appears to be a risk companies are willing to take.

Agility and expertise

The logic of cutting from the middle to speed up is sound, management experts say.

"You can't go faster and be more connected to a larger ecosystem if you're having to go up and down a hierarchy for every decision," Deborah Ancona, a professor of management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Business Insider.

While some companies have been trying for decades to zap management layers, there's a new urgency to do so. Businesses exist in "an exponentially changing world," Ancona said.

Dell executives explained this to employees earlier this month, when they began reorganizing managers to have more direct reports. The company, whose head count has dropped by 25,000 in two years, also pointed to the influx of artificial intelligence as a reason it needed to move faster.

Ideally, companies would remove layers and spread decision-making throughout the organization so that those closest to customers or technology, for example, could generate ideas and make decisions, Ancona said.

"You're kind of flipping the organization," she said. "Rather than all the ideas coming from on high, you have entrepreneurial leaders who are lower down in the organization coming up with new ideas."

Bayer CEO Bill Anderson is leery of having to run everything up the chain. After taking over the German biotech company in 2023, he began implementing what he calls a "dynamic shared ownership" setup that has cut thousands of managers. Staffers come together in "mini networks" for 90-day stretches to work on projects.

"We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy," Anderson previously told BI. "Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time."

Fewer managers, more reporting, more meetings?

When middle managers are cut and layers condensed, inevitably, more workers report to fewer managers. The logistics of that vary, and the success in terms of morale has a lot to do with the starting point.

Amazon started flattening last year. In September, CEO Andy Jassy ordered a 15% increase in the ratio of individual contributors to managers by March. BI reported that senior Amazon Web Services managers received a memo in January instructing them to restrict high-level hiring and increase their number of direct reports.

An Amazon spokesperson told BI at the time that the memo may have been intended for one team, but does not apply to the company at large. The Amazon spokesperson also referenced a September memo from Jassy on the importance of reducing management layers.

An AWS manager told BI this month that the flatter structure has since put more burden on employees on her team to report on what they're doing day-to-day, in addition to their actual work, since managers have less time to inspect individuals' work.

Plus, this manager said they are spending more time in meetings as they took on a more diverse group of direct reports. The Amazon spokesperson also emphasized that the individual employee's anecdote does not represent the company as a whole.

Yvonne Lee-Hawkins was assigned 21 direct reports when she worked for Amazon's human resources. She told BI that she had to quickly learn new skills to handle the load, like asynchronous work strategies, but her teams' performance suffered as her number of reports grew from 11 to 21 employees.

Weekly one-on-ones — the subject of much debate among tech titans — became impossible, and she had to cut them in half.

At Microsoft, a half-dozen employees who spoke to BI about the manager flattening trend generally regarded it as a positive step to eliminate inefficient and unnecessary levels of managers. Some managers have as few as one or two reports.

Microsoft ended up with many management layers, the people said, because it often tried to reward good engineers by promoting them to become managers. Often, those engineers-turned-managers still spent most of their time in the codebase and weren't very effective as managers.

Meanwhile, larger groups of direct reports often work better for senior employees, who need less one-on-one time and can do more things in a group setting.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not comment when asked about these factors.

Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at London Business School who lives in Silicon Valley, told BI that pushing managers to take on more direct reports can reduce micromanaging, a common bane of corporate existence.

When managers have a lot of people to oversee, it pushes them to hire people they trust, mentor rather than manage, and give up a "pretty big dose" of their authority.

"Those are all hugely positive things," he said, even if they require "a fairly dramatic change" in how managers see their role.

How many direct reports is too many?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously has 60 direct reports. Managers at Dell have been told they should have 15 to 20. An AWS document viewed by BI in January mandated no fewer than eight per manager, up from six. An Amazon spokesperson told BI there are no such requirements companywide.

Gallup research indicates that the quality of a manager matters more than the number of direct reports in terms of how well teams perform. That's because more engaged managers tend to lead to more engaged teams. And small teams — those with fewer than 10 people — show both the highest and lowest levels of engagement because managers can have an outsize effect, for better or worse.

That may explain why some companies seem to thrive with dozens of direct reports per manager and others fail.

The nature of the work matters, too. When work is more complex, it can be harder for managers to oversee too many people.

Managing dozens of people gets harder when "life intersects with work," Ravin Jesuthasan, the global leader for transformation services at the consulting firm Mercer, told BI.

When employees have an issue, they often need someone to talk to about it.

"As a manager, you are the first port of call," he said.

That's one reason, Jesuthasan said, that having something like 20 direct reports would likely be "really hard." For most managers, the couple of dozen direct reports that many tech companies are aiming for is probably the limit, he said.

Strong managers can powerfully boost a company's ability to develop talent and its bottom line. A 2023 analysis from McKinsey & Company, for example, found that organizations with "top-performing" managers led to significantly better total shareholder returns over five years compared with those entities that had only average or subpar managers.

While flattening schemes may be successful at reducing bulk in the middle and speeding up decision-making, they can hinder future growth if they're not well-managed.

Jane Edison Stevenson, global vice chair for board and CEO services at the organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry, told BI that removing layers from a management pyramid can help elevate those high performers. But flatter companies may fail to develop leaders who can pull together the disparate parts of an organization.

At some point, she said, "You've got to start to make a bet on the leaders that are going to have a chance to build muscle across, not just vertically."

Microsoft has quietly launched an updated Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows that provides quick access to commands, apps, and development tools. The software maker originally launched its PowerToys Run launcher for Windows 10 nearly five years ago, and the updated version — Command Palette — now includes search for apps, folders, and files, calculations, system commands, and much more.

Command Palette is available for any Windows user from the PowerToys app, but it looks like Microsoft is now targeting this particular utility at power users and developers. You use Command Palette to access Windows commands or launch command prompts and shell shortcuts. Command Palette also has the ability to quickly open websites, web searches, and search through folders and files like you’d expect from a Spotlight- or -Alfred-like interface.

Microsoft has also moved its previous Window Walker PowerToy into Command Palette so you can easily switch between open windows. The most interesting part about Command Palette is that Microsoft has made it fully customizable thanks to extensions support so you can add additional commands and features beyond what’s available by default.

The PowerToys Command Palette has been available since early April, and you can activate it using the Win+Alt+Space shortcut once it’s installed. Microsoft says “Command Palette is intended to be the successor of PowerToys Run,” but both are still available for now. Microsoft made some tweaks and changes to Command Palette this week ahead of its Build developer conference on May 19th.

Microsoft is going to allow Xbox owners to pin apps and games directly to the Home UI. The latest change to the homescreen section of the Xbox dashboard will be available to Xbox Insiders this week, alongside options to hide system apps, choose the number of apps and games listed, and modify the size of the tiled UI.

You’ll soon be able to pin up to three of your recently played games or apps to the homescreen. “These pins will stay near the front of the list as you launch other things, giving you quick access to your go-to titles,” explains Eden Marie, principal software engineering lead for Xbox experiences.

If you don’t want to see system apps listed on the homescreen, you’ll be able to disable these to focus solely on games and apps. If you really want to take customization a step further, you’ll also soon be able to reduce the number of visible tiles in the recently played games and apps list. Microsoft says it’s “refining this setting” and it’ll be available to Xbox Insiders soon.

Microsoft is making these Xbox Home interface changes because fans have requested more customizability. “We’ve heard from many of you that Home should feel more like your space,” says Marie. “Whether it’s surfacing your favorite games, hiding what you don’t use, or simply making Home feel less crowded, this update is a direct response to that feedback.”

Microsoft previously tested a big overhaul of the Xbox Home UI in 2022, before shipping it broadly to Xbox owners in 2023. The software maker made more room for backgrounds, quick access to games, the store, and settings as part of the UI overhaul.

Microsoft says it has found no evidence that the Israeli military has used its Azure and AI technology to harm Palestinian civilians or anyone else in Gaza. The software maker says it has “conducted an internal review and engaged an external firm,” to perform a review, after some Microsoft employees have repeatedly called on the company to cut its contracts with the Israeli government.

Microsoft says that its relationship with the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD) is “structured as a standard commercial relationship,” and that it has “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.” Microsoft’s AI code of conduct requires that customers use human oversight and access controls to ensure cloud and AI services don’t inflict harm “in any way that is prohibited by law.”

The review process included “interviewing dozens of employees and assessing documents,” looking for evidence that Microsoft technologies were being used to target or harm anyone in Gaza. However, the company notes that it “does not have visibility into how customers use our software on their own servers or other devices,” so the evidence to inform its review is clearly very limited in scope.

The review comes just weeks after two former Microsoft employees disrupted the company’s 50th-anniversary event, with one calling Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a “war profiteer” and demanding that Microsoft “stop using AI for genocide in our region.” A second protester interrupted Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former CEO Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later on in the event.

Both former Microsoft employees also sent separate emails to thousands of coworkers, protesting the company providing software, cloud services, and consulting services to the Israeli military. The first protester, Ibtihal Aboussad, was fired, and the second, Vaniya Agrawal, was dismissed shortly after putting in her two weeks’ notice. Both are associated with No Azure for Apartheid, a group of current and former Microsoft employees rallying against Microsoft’s contracts with Israel.

The group accuses Microsoft of “supporting and enabling an apartheid state,“ by not suspending sales of cloud and AI services to Israel, like it did to Russia when it invaded Ukraine. It has also highlighted reports from The Guardian and the Associated Press, based on leaked documents, that detail the Israeli military’s increased use of Azure and OpenAI technology to gather information through mass surveillance and use AI tools to transcribe and translate phone calls, texts, and audio messages. Microsoft also reportedly supplied 19,000 hours of engineering support and consultancy services to the Israeli military, in a deal that’s said to be valued at around $10 million.

“It is worth noting that militaries typically use their own proprietary software or applications from defense-related providers for the types of surveillance and operations that have been the subject of our employees’ questions,” says Microsoft in its blog post. “Microsoft has not created or provided such software or solutions to the IMOD.”

Hossam Nasr, an organizer of No Azure for Apartheid, has taken issue with Microsoft’s statement, saying it’s “filled with both lies and contradictions” in an interview with GeekWire.

“There is no form of selling technology to an army that is plausibly accused of genocide — whose leaders are wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court — that would be ethical,” says Nasr. “That’s the premise that we reject.” Nasr also highlighted that Microsoft’s statement mentions Israel multiple times, but “not once did they name Palestinians or Palestinian people or Palestine” in the blog post. “I think that still speaks to where Microsoft’s business interests truly lie.”

• Microsoft is working on a new "Tenant Copilot" offering, according to an internal memo.
• The company is also developing news ways for customers to manage AI agents alongside human staff.
• Microsoft at the time was planning to announce the developments at next week's Build.

Microsoft is working on a new Copilot and could unveil it at the company's Build conference next week, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

The software giant also has grand "Agent Factory" ambitions, and is developing new ways for corporate customers to manage AI agents alongside human employees, the memo shows.

The Tenant Copilot project is run by the organization behind the Microsoft 365 business. This new Copilot is designed to "rapidly channel an organization's knowledge into a Copilot that can 'talk,' 'think,' and 'work' like the tenant itself," according to an April 14 email sent by Microsoft executive Jay Parikh.

A "tenant" is the term used to describe corporate users of the Microsoft 365 suite of business applications. A Copilot that has access to these tenants would essentially be able to access customer information stored within their Microsoft 365 accounts.

Parikh explained in the email that Microsoft is using different AI techniques to power the Tenant Copilot feature. Supervised fine-tuning helps "to capture a tenant's voice." The tool will also tap into OpenAI's o3 reasoning model "to shape its thought process." Lastly, "agentic" fine-tuning will "empower real-world tasks," he wrote.

Microsoft at the time planned to offer a public preview of Tenant Copilot at Build, according to the memo. The company sometimes changes what it plans to announce at the conference.

Meanwhile, the CoreAI Applied Engineering team is also "working to launch a collaborative go-to-market plan for top-tier customers to drive successful adoption of our Al cloud," Parikh added in the memo.

Microsoft declined to comment.

Parikh's 'Agent Factory' concept

Parikh is the former head of engineering at Facebook. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hired Parikh in October and tapped him in January to run a new group called CoreAI Platform and Tools focused on building AI tools. The group combined Microsoft's developer division and AI platform team and is responsible for GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered coding assistant.

This year's Build event will be Parikh's first at the helm of this new organization. In the email to the nearly 10,000 employees in the organization, Parikh discussed a new "Agent Factory" concept. That's likely a nod to cofounder Bill Gates, who talked about Microsoft being a "software factory."

"Building our vision demands this type of culture — one where Al is embedded in how we think, design, and deliver," Parikh wrote. "The Agent Factory reflects this shift — not just in what we build, but in how we build it together. If we want every developer (and everyone) to shape the future, we have to get there first."

Parikh has been trying to work across organizations to collaborate on AI agents, through a "new type of cross-product review" combining teams such as security services like Entra and Intune with "high-ambition agent efforts" within LinkedIn, Dynamics, and Microsoft 365.

Meet your new AI agent co-worker

Part of this effort focuses on how to manage AI agents alongside human employees.

Microsoft, for example, has been working on how to handle identity management for AI agents, according to the memo. This technology usually controls security access for human users. Now, the company is trying to spin up a similar system for AI agents.

"Our hypothesis is that all agent identities will reside in Entra," Parikh wrote, although "not every agent will require an identity (some simpler agents in M365 or Studio, for instance, don't need one)."

Microsoft is taking a similar approach to M365 Admin Center, which is used by IT administrators to manage employee access to applications, data, devices, and users. Future versions of this system will accommodate AI agents as "digital teammates" of human workers, according to Parikh's memo.

Microsoft's Copilot Analytics service is also expanding into broader workforce analytics to give corporate customers a view of how work gets done both by humans and AI agents.

And Parikh aims to make Azure AI Foundry, its generative AI development hub, "the single platform for the agentic applications that you build," he wrote. "At Build, we will have the early versions of this, and we'll iterate quickly to tackle a variety of customer use cases."

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• Big Tech dominated Kantar BrandZ's most valuable global brand ranking.
• Apple topped the list for the fourth year in a row.
• Companies like ChatGPT and Chipotle made their debut.

Try as they might, brands can't take a bite out of Apple.

Kantar BrandZ, a marketing data and analytics company, published its annual ranking of the world's most valuable brands.

The global market has weathered storms in the past, but the volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting consumer expectations over the last five years have rattled the landscape. The ongoing tariff discussions between the United States and other countries have added another layer of uncertainty to the formula. While some companies succumbed to the pressure, others steamrolled ahead.

Topping the list for the fourth year in a row is Apple with a brand value of about $1.3 trillion. That's a 28% increase from 2024, according to Kantar.

After overthrowing Jeff Bezos' Amazon in 2022, the tech giant has continued to dominate the list while Google, Microsoft, and Amazon vie for second, third, and fourth place. Under CEO Tim Cook, Apple has managed to fend off international competitors like China's Huawei and South Korea's Samsung.

Another standout on this year's list is Jensen Huang's Nvidia, which saw its brand value increase 152% from 2024. The chipmaker, which reached a $3 trillion valuation after announcing a deal with a Saudi Arabian tech firm, appeared at No. 5 on the list.

Here is Kantar's top 10 most valuable global brands:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. NVIDIA
6. Facebook
7. Instagram
8. McDonald's
9. Oracle
10. Visa

Kantar's report also highlighted some "newcomers," brands making their debut on the list.

ChatGPT was the highest-ranking newcomer at No. 60, coming 25 spots ahead of financial service company Stripe and 26 spots ahead of Chipotle.

Here are the top seven newcomers:

60. ChatGPT

85. Stripe

86. Chipotle

89. Booking.com

95. Hilton

97. Uniqlo

99. DoorDash

Martin Guerrieria, head of Kantar BrandZ, said brands need to do more than differentiate themselves from competitors to stay afloat in the global market.

"The dominance of brands like Apple, Instagram, and McDonald's underlines the power of a consistent brand experience that people can relate to and remember," he said. "ChatGPT's dramatic rise shows how a brand can find fame and influence society to the extent that it changes our daily lives. But with generative AI competition accelerating, OpenAI will need to invest in its brand to preserve its first-mover momentum."

Microsoft has continued to design, manufacture, and sell new Surface hardware since longtime team leader Panos Panay left the company for Amazon in late 2023, including both Intel- and Qualcomm-powered Surface Pro tablets and Surface Laptops. New smaller versions of both of these mainstays were introduced just a couple of weeks ago.

But the weirder, more unique parts of the Surface lineup have been mostly neglected since Panay's departure. Late last year, Microsoft discontinued the Surface Studio all-in-one desktop, which was never updated consistently and started at a whopping $4,300. But it provided one of the few alternatives to the basic "monitor with a computer inside it" all-in-one design template. Now, The Verge reports that Microsoft stopped manufacturing the Surface Laptop Studio 2 earlier this month and that the PC will disappear after current retail stock is sold.

Microsoft reportedly plans to officially announce the end-of-life status of the Laptop Studio 2 in June. The company will support the Laptop Studio with driver and firmware updates as necessary through at least October of 2029, in accordance with its six-year support lifecycle for Surface hardware.

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Microsoft has been quietly killing off a number of Surface devices over the past few years. At first it was the Surface Headphones and Surface Earbuds that started to disappear, then came news of a changed "hardware portfolio" amid 10,000 job cuts at Microsoft in early 2023. A year later, Microsoft then killed off the Surface Duo and ended production of its innovative Surface Studio 2 all-in-one PC. Now, I'm hearing that another Surface device is on the way out.

Sources familiar with Microsoft's Surface plans tell me that the company stopped production of its Surface Laptop Studio 2 earlier this month. No more units are being produced, and Microsoft is planning to mark the device as end of life in June. I asked Microsoft to comment on the end of life for the Surface Laptop Studio 2, but the company declined to provide a statement.

Microsoft's official Surface resellers, however, were happy to discuss the status of Microsoft's folding laptop. "Surface Laptop Studio 2 has reached end of manufacturing and availability of supply will be limited and may vary by market going forward," confirmed one reseller when I queried about a lack of stock. "Microsoft will continue to support Surf …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is shutting off access to its Bing Search results for third-party developers. The software maker quietly announced the change earlier this week, noting that Bing Search APIs will be retired on August 11th and that “any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned completely, and the product will no longer be available for usage or new customer signup.”

This abrupt removal of the Bing Search APIs will impact third-party app developers and rival search engines that tap into Microsoft’s search results to power their services. Microsoft is now recommending that developers use “grounding with Bing Search as part of Azure AI Agents” as a replacement, which lets chatbots interact with web data from Bing.

Wired reports that some big customers of Bing’s APIs will retain access to the service after the August 11th cutoff. DuckDuckGo uses Bing to power its search engine, and it has confirmed that it will still have access. Other smaller developers won’t be so lucky, though.

Microsoft’s move to cut off access to Bing Search APIs comes after the company has been hiking prices to access the data in recent years, and just a week before Microsoft’s big Build developer conference. It also comes just days after the US Department of Justice asked a court to split up Google’s ad tech empire.

• Tech's heaviest hitters are racing to build new AI tech for healthcare.
• They're landing partnerships with health systems and Big Pharma and selling consumer health AI tech.
• Here's how tech powerhouses from Microsoft to Alphabet to Nvidia are investing in healthcare AI.

Artificial intelligence is gaining ground in healthcare, and tech's biggest players are racing to stake their claims.

Many tech giants have been building healthcare businesses long before the AI boom. Amazon, for example, invested heavily in the industry when it acquired primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion in 2022.

Now, those tech powerhouses are sharpening their healthcare strategies with AI at the center. Chipmaker Nvidia has rapidly expanded its healthcare ambitions in the past two years, aiming to tackle everything from surgical robotics to drug discovery.

Their healthcare ambitions reflect a broader shift: as AI advances, Big Tech sees fresh opportunities for transformation — and revenue — in the complex industry.

From AI-powered wearables to robotic surgery, here's how tech's most powerful companies are investing in healthcare AI.

Microsoft: Doubling down on its healthcare cloud

Microsoft first entered healthcare nearly two decades ago. Now, it's integrating AI into its cloud solutions to automate hospital operations.

Microsoft bought the ambient intelligence company Nuance in 2022 for nearly $20 billion. Nuance dominates the market for AI-powered medical scribing, though it now faces tough competition from startups like $2.75 billion Abridge. Its latest release is Dragon Copilot, a solution Microsoft announced in March that integrates the company's voice dictation tech with Nuance's ambient listening, in a move the company said would help doctors save even more time documenting patient visits.

In an October 2024 KLAS report, most healthcare organizations said they considered Nuance when purchasing a clinical documentation solution, in part due to prior contracts with Microsoft and the company's extensive healthcare software suite. The tech giant is integrating AI into those other healthcare cloud offerings to organize and analyze medical records and automate tasks like patient scheduling and paperwork.

Microsoft also partners with Nvidia to combine Nvidia's AI tech with Microsoft's cloud solutions to power advanced healthcare and biopharma research and better medical imaging.

Apple: Banking on AI-powered consumer health tracking

Apple's AI efforts have been understated compared to its peers, as have its healthcare investments.

Much of Apple's healthcare attention to date has focused on its Apple Watch, which includes several AI-powered health features for consumers, from AI-powered fall detection and irregular heartbeat tracking to sleep analysis.

After Apple released its augmented reality headset Apple Vision Pro last year, the company said multiple healthcare organizations were using the new tech for various applications, including reviewing patient surgical plans or training clinicians to use new medical devices.

Apple's next big health AI push could be on the horizon. Bloomberg News reported at the end of March that Apple was developing an AI-powered health coach to provide personalized lifestyle recommendations based on its consumers' health data, as tracked through devices like the Apple Watch and iPhone.

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Nvidia: Bringing "physical AI" to the hospital

Chip giant Nvidia is digging into a wide range of healthcare specialties, from radiology to drug discovery, primarily by partnering with other healthcare companies.

Nvidia VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell told Business Insider in April that medical imaging was one of Nvidia's entry points into healthcare. The company has notched a number of medical imaging partnerships powered by its AI platforms, most recently with GE Healthcare in March. GE Healthcare plans to use Nvidia's tech to simulate autonomous medical imaging, including autonomous X-rays and ultrasounds, to test their application in physical medical devices.

It's a similar collaboration to Nvidia's existing deal with IT solutions provider Mark III to work with healthcare systems to create simulations of their hospital environments for AI development. "Physical AI," or AI that can analyze and interact with the physical world, is a key part of Nvidia's vision for healthcare. 

"This physical AI thing is coming where your whole hospital is going to turn into an AI," Powell told BI in November. "You're going to have eyes operating on your behalf, robots doing what is otherwise automatable work, and smart digital devices. So we're super excited about that, and we're doing a lot of investments."

Nvidia is also an investor in several healthcare startups, most notably clinical documentation startup Abridge, which raised $250 million in February from investors including Nvidia's venture arm NVentures at a $2.75 billion valuation, and Hippocratic AI, which raised $141 million in Series B funding from NVentures and other firms at a $1.64 billion valuation.

It's also partnered with many of its portfolio companies, such as Moon Surgical, a robotics company that uses Nvidia's medical device AI platform Holoscan for its surgical assistant robot.

Amazon: Adding more tech to consumer care

Amazon is bringing AI to doctors, patients, and pharma companies across its healthcare businesses.

In March, Amazon announced it was testing a new chatbot feature called Health AI, which the company says can give users advice and suggest products for common medical needs. The health AI assistant can direct users to Amazon's online pharmacy or to talk to a doctor at its primary care chain, One Medical, for further care. An Amazon spokesperson told BI that the chatbot is in beta, and the retailer is collecting feedback from customers and working on new features for its AI assistant.

The retail giant also offers its own medical transcription tool, called HealthScribe, which analyzes doctor-patient conversations to create clinical notes for providers. It's one of several AI capabilities that One Medical's clinicians use, in addition to features that assist with patient messaging and care coordination.

Amazon provides a number of generative AI tools through Amazon Web Services for life sciences companies, too. Genentech and AstraZeneca, for example, have used AWS's AI tools for drug discovery research and clinical trial tasks.

Amazon has also suffered more false starts in healthcare than its peers. The retailer shut down its telehealth service Amazon Care in 2022, three years after its launch, and discontinued its wearable fitness tracker Amazon Halo in 2023. Last year, One Medical came under fire after media reports and a malpractice lawsuit raised concerns about the primary care chain's patient safety practices. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company is prohibited by law from discussing patient records, but that One Medical has extensive quality and safe measures in place for patient care.

Alphabet: Powering better health research with foundation models and search tools

Alphabet has created several healthcare AI tools that build upon Google's core search capabilities, with a focus on healthcare-specific foundation models.

Google launched MedLM, a set of healthcare foundation models, in 2023 to enable tech to summarize patient-doctor conversations, conduct clinical research, and automate insurance claims processing. In October, it announced Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a specialized search engine that gives clinicians answers to their medical questions about a patient's health records or medical documents. It's also built a research AI system designed to assist with patient diagnosis, which can analyze data such as medical images and simulate patient-provider interactions.

On the consumer front, Google has released a number of tools with health applications, such as Google Lens, which allows people to take a picture of their own skin and search for visually similar skin conditions. It's also working on personal health AI models that can interpret sleep and fitness data to offer personalized wellness suggestions.

Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI research arm spun out of Google DeepMind, has partnered with pharma giants like Novartis and Eli Lilly on more efficient drug development, building on DeepMind's AlphaFold protein structures.

Dr. Karen DeSalvo has led Google's health initiatives since 2019. At the beginning of May, she announced her retirement as chief health officer; Google Health chief clinical officer Dr. Michael Howell will replace her when she steps down in August.

Oracle: Leveling up health records with AI

Oracle's long-awaited plans to revolutionize electronic medical records with AI will come to fruition this year, according to the tech company.

In October, Oracle unveiled its "next-generation" electronic health record system, which the company said would incorporate several of Oracle's cloud and AI capabilities, including clinical AI agents, search capabilities, and patient data analytics. Its goal is to seamlessly integrate AI into providers' workflows and automate healthcare administrative tasks. The AI-powered EHR is slated for release to early adopters this year, the company said.

Oracle made its biggest investment toward this goal in 2022, when it bought EHR company Cerner for $28.3 billion and rebranded it as Oracle Health. Its efforts to transform Cerner have hit a number of snags, however. BI reported in May 2024 that flaws in Cerner's EHR rollout at the Department of Veterans Affairs led to thousands of medical orders vanishing, resulting in delayed or missed treatments for many veterans, and leaving Oracle scrambling to fix Cerner's tech after the acquisition.

Oracle is also financially backing Stargate, a joint venture with OpenAI, SoftBank, and investment firm MGX, to invest up to $500 billion in US-based AI infrastructure. Oracle cofounder and executive chairman Larry Ellison said in January that the team is working on tools for advancing disease detection, including cancer detection, with AI.

Salesforce: Selling ready-made health AI agents

Salesforce is jumping onto the AI agent trend with a range of pre-built AI assistants for healthcare organizations.

In February, the cloud-based software company announced Agentforce for Health, a library of AI agents that healthcare companies can use to automate patient tasks like appointment booking, provider tasks like summarizing a patient's medical history, and life sciences tasks like clinical trial matching. Salesforce also landed a partnership with electronic health record company Athenahealth to integrate Agentforce for Health capabilities into Athenahealth's EHR.

The agentic AI release builds on Salesforce's previous healthcare assistant tool, Einstein Copilot, which launched in March 2024 to allow providers to query patient data as consolidated in Salesforce's Health Cloud.

Salesforce is also powering new AI platforms created on its Health Cloud, such as Blue Shield of California's AI-powered prior authorization tech, which the two companies said would enter testing in early 2025.

Palantir: Partnering with health systems on AI transformation

Palantir is primarily known for its billions of dollars in defense tech contracts with the US government. But it's also spent the past four years building out a healthcare business, working with top healthcare systems to improve their operations with AI.

Palantir works with health systems including Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General, and Nebraska Medicine to automate key hospital functions, including revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient flow, co-heads of healthcare Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein told BI in April.

Palantir said in May it would work with the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that evaluates healthcare organizations for accreditation, to streamline the Joint Commission's data collection process and help hospitals manage their quality standards using Palantir's AI and analytics.

Palantir is also partnering with R1 RCM, the AI-powered revenue cycle management company acquired by TowerBrook and CD&R in an $8.9 billion take-private deal in August. Beyond its partnerships, Palantir aims to equip more healthcare startups with its AI tools through its software platform HealthStart.

Microsoft is testing a feature for Copilot Voice that will let Windows 11 users start a conversation with the app by saying “Hey Copilot!” Windows Insiders who have the updated app can try it out once they opt in and activate the feature.

Similar commands have been available for years with Siri, Google, Alexa, and even Microsoft’s now-departed Cortana assistant that Copilot has replaced. But it is a new addition for Copilot, if a dedicated key or combination of keys wasn’t making it easy enough to get into the app, and arrives following the launch of a more conversational Copilot Voice experience.

According to a blog post, you’ll need to enable the feature for it to be able to respond to the wake word. Also, the update isn’t available to all Insiders right away, but it is rolling out to testers worldwide who have English set as their display language. To find out if you have it, check your Copilot app version to see if it’s 1.25051.10.0 or higher.

Once it’s activated, you’ll see the Copilot microphone floating UI on the bottom of your screen and get a chime notification that shows it’s listening in. 

The FAQ also says that it’s using an on-device wake word spotter with a 10-second audio buffer, and isn’t sending clips to the cloud or saving them locally. It can recognize the wake word even if you’re offline, but for the Copilot Voice feature to actually do anything, you will need internet access so that it can access cloud processing capabilities.

• Microsoft is cutting about 6,000 jobs to increase the span of control per manager.
• The move aligns with similar strategies used by other tech companies to flatten management layers.
• Microsoft is investing heavily in AI while trying to optimize workforce efficiency.

Microsoft is slashing thousands of jobs to try to increase what it calls "span of control," or the number of employees who report to each manager.

The software giant on Tuesday confirmed the cuts, which Business Insider first reported in April. Microsoft said about 3% of its global workforce, roughly 6,000 employees, will be affected.

Microsoft's attempt to flatten management layers follows similar announcements from big tech peers. Amazon has been trying to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers. Google CEO Sundar Pichai in December told staff that the company cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.

Microsoft started notifying affected US employees on Tuesday. A spokesperson confirmed impacted US staff will stay on the payroll for 60 days, but that will vary globally based on local regulations.

'Too many levels and layers'

A half-dozen Microsoft insiders who spoke to BI about the changes generally consider the effort to flatten management layers as a good thing. One executive told BI there are a lot of managers who just aren't that great, while another Microsoft staffer said the company has too many levels and layers. These people asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

The company ended up with many layers, the people explained, because it often tried to reward good engineers by promoting them to become managers, sometimes with as few as one or two reports. Often those engineers-turned-managers still spent most of their time in the codebase and weren't very effective as managers. Having so many layers of management also proved to be inefficient, these people said.

Microsoft doesn't have any centralized goals for span of control, or number of reports per manager, but some leaders have their own targets, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Cloud + AI boss Scott Guthrie, for example, wants to increase the span of control in his organization to eight engineers per engineering manager, and seven project managers per manager, according to the people.

Microsoft Security chief Charlie Bell is going for nine reports per manager, though he hasn't separated goals for span of control of engineers and PMs, the people said. Bell has, however, set goals for the ratio of PMs to engineers, similar to the "builder ratio" at his previous company, Amazon, BI previously reported.

In response to a request about Bell's and Guthrie's span of control goals, Microsoft's spokesperson said there are no blanket ratio numbers.

Tuesday's job cuts also target non-coders, aiming to increase the number of coders on projects, which Microsoft internally calls its "PM ratio" BI previously reported.

Microsoft has no stated maximum for the number of reports per manager, the people familiar said, though it's generally believed that larger groups of direct reports work better with senior employees, who need less one-on-one time and can do more things in a group setting.

While some kind of flattening is generally regarded as necessary, there's uncertainty related to how Microsoft will collapse all of its management layers and make it work, the people added. One staffer told BI that managers are particularly concerned.

Why Microsoft is making cuts

The changes come as Microsoft tries to reduce costs amid significant investment in artificial intelligence.

Barclays analysts on Tuesday said the cuts are "a commitment to profitable growth and optimizing the company's workforce, particularly with AI becoming a more prominent and efficient tool within the organization."

Microsoft's culling of management layers comes after earlier performance-based cuts to its workforce this year. Microsoft beginning in January ousted 2,000 employees it deemed to be "low performers" and started a new performance improvement plan.

A recent internal email sent to Microsoft managers, viewed by BI, said this new plan was "globally consistent" with "clear expectations and a timeline for improvement."

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