At AdvaMed’s annual medical device conference, big tech companies touting artificial intelligence have had a growing presence. This year’s event featured speakers from Google Cloud, Microsoft and NVIDIA, as well as a keynote on the future of AI in healthcare.
MedTech Dive spoke with company leaders at the conference last week to hear what’s on their minds when it comes to AI in medical devices. They emphasized focusing on outcomes, privacy and a shift in the type of AI being used.
Here are five takeaways on AI from AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference:
1. Focus on outcomes over flashy tech
In a keynote discussion on Oct. 7, medtech firms emphasized the importance of purpose-driven innovation over flash-in-the-pan AI projects.
Todd Mersch, general manager of Microsoft’s U.S. life sciences business, said he noticed a lot of “sprawl” during the first few years of companies transitioning to using more AI tools. Companies would pick up use cases based on inspiration or excitement, but there wasn’t a great connection back to the business.
“It was like a bunch of candles with no cake underneath of it,” Mersch said.
During the panel discussion, company leaders described the challenge of picking which AI pilots to pursue.
“I think we’re still working on that a little bit,” said Lisa Earnhardt, Abbott’s group president of medical devices. Earnhardt said Abbott, being a large company, can have several projects in the works, while knowing that it might not want to scale up all of them.
Resmed CEO Mick Farrell said he wants to see more discussions around AI focus on results, and for companies to publish those results. Farrell would prefer to see fewer conversations focused on how much companies are investing in technology.
“Nobody cares,” he said. “What they care about is outcomes.”
Resmed CEO Mick Farrell said companies should focus AI discussions around outcomes, in a panel discussion at The MedTech Conference on Oct. 7, 2025.
Elise Reuter/MedTech Dive, data from MedTech Dive
2. Privacy standards must be stronger
Abbott’s Earnhardt said that while there’s a lot of interest in AI, the company is taking a step back and thinking about issues such as guiding principles, standards and transparency. She said it’s important to bring the same standards and trust to the technology as to Abbott’s other medical products.
Many tech companies, such as Google, Meta and Amazon, view their users as the product, but medtech should have a line separating companies from that approach, Resmed’s Farrell said. That line should include privacy protections, cybersecurity and interoperability.
“I know a lot about 33% of someone’s life — when they went to bed, when they wake up, every breath they took,” said the CEO, whose company sells equipment including CPAP machines.
People using a medical device should know they’re not the product, he added, and they should be able to access their data.
Abbott Group President of Medical Devices Lisa Earnhardt said it’s important to bring the same standards and trust to AI as other medical products.
Elise Reuter/MedTech Dive, data from MedTech Dive
3. Companies are closely watching global AI regulations
As the U.S. retools its approach to AI under the Trump administration, and the European Union implements its first AI Act, medtech companies are working to keep pace with global regulations.
“We’re trying to just keep a pulse on how policy is moving forward in general,” Shweta Maniar, Google Cloud’s global director of healthcare and life sciences, said in an interview.
In the U.S., the Trump administration pulled back the Biden administration’s AI plan, instead calling for a deregulatory approach and to “sustain and enhance America’s AI dominance.” What that means for the healthcare industry, and medical devices in particular, is still unclear.
Based on its latest priority list of guidances, the Food and Drug Administration’s device center seems to be building on previous work. The center is prioritizing a final guidance on predetermined change control plans, a framework for allowing certain changes to devices after they’re on the market, and a final guidance on lifecycle management considerations for AI-enabled devices, following a draft version published in January.
“Generative AI …. is still relatively new for the entire industry and also for the regulators,” Roland Rott, GE Healthcare’s CEO of imaging, said in an interview.
Rott said the FDA is very interested in understanding the potential and risks of these capabilities, and companies are working closely with the agency on issues such as what safeguards are needed around data quality, transparency and bias for medical devices.
“What you see is the regulators, both FDA [and] also in Europe, have stepped up their guidances and, ultimately, expectations when it comes to medical devices over the last years, and they will keep doing so,” Rott said.
4. The type of AI companies use is shifting
Some of GE Healthcare’s first AI tools used machine learning. Then, the imaging company started using deep learning, a type of tool that uses neural networks to find patterns, for image reconstruction. These initial models, which comprise the more than 100 devices GE Healthcare has taken through the FDA, were focused on targeted use cases, such as finding lesions in a structure or segmenting the brain.
This approach fits well within the current framework for medical devices because it can be validated and documented for a specific use case, Rott said. But it is also limited because there are so many different disease types and different variations in humans that might not be encompassed in these individual models.
GE Healthcare, and other medtech companies, have started testing foundation models, another type of framework where large datasets are used to build a model that can adapt to new problems.
For example, GE Healthcare is working on a full-body 3D MRI foundation model built on more than 173,000 MRI images from more than 90,000 studies, Rott said. The company is working on a similar project with X-ray images, based on 1.2 million anonymized datasets.
5. Big tech’s role in healthcare is changing
In the past, big tech companies were always on the outside, trying to play a role in the healthcare industry, Google Cloud’s Maniar said. That dynamic has shifted.
“Now, I feel that technology is the underlying foundation of the healthcare ecosystem,” Maniar said.
Tech firms have been increasingly partnering with medical device companies. Google Cloud worked with diabetes tech firm Dexcom on a weekly insights feature for its over-the-counter glucose sensors that uses generative AI. NVIDIA has been striking AI partnerships with companies including Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson and GE Healthcare. Amazon Web Services has also partnered with AI companies in the field.
“Medical devices is a very traditional industry and it is ripe for innovation,” Maniar said.
