Microsoft tries to catch up in AI with healthcare push, Harvard deal

Microsoft has a lofty goal: to become an artificial-intelligence chatbot powerhouse in its own right rather than leaning on its partnership with the ChatGPT maker, OpenAI.

- Sebastian Herrera [e-mail]

In an effort to steal a march on its more-advanced rivals, the company has seized on healthcare as a lane in which it believes it can deliver a better offering than any of the other major players and build the brand of its Copilot assistant.

A major update of Copilot scheduled for release as soon as this month will be the first to reflect a new collaboration between Microsoft and Harvard Medical School, people familiar with the matter said. The new version of Copilot will draw on information from the Harvard Health Publishing arm to respond to queries about healthcare topics. Microsoft will pay Harvard a licensing fee, one of the people said.

In an interview, Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, declined to discuss the arrangement with Harvard but said the company’s aim is for Copilot to serve answers that are more in line with the information users might get from a medical practitioner than what is currently available.

“Making sure that people have access to credible, trustworthy health information that is tailored to their language and their literacy and all kinds of things is essential,” he said. “Part of that is making sure that we're sourcing that material from the right places.”