Microsoft Looks Past OpenAI With Harvard Health Partnership

Microsoft is reportedly intensifying efforts to carve a space for itself in artificial intelligence.

The tech giant wants to become an AI chatbot force on its own, beyond its longtime partnership with OpenAI, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday (Oct. 9). To that end, Microsoft is focused on healthcare as an area where it believes it can provide better service than other major players, while also boosting its Copilot assistant.

A Copilot update due as soon as this month will be the first to reflect a new partnership between Microsoft and Harvard Medical School, the report said. This version of Copilot will glean information from the Harvard Health Publishing arm to respond to medical questions. Microsoft will pay Harvard a licensing fee.

Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, declined to discuss the partnership, according to the report. However, he said his company’s goal is for Copilot to provide answers more similar to the information users might get from a medical practitioner than what is now 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, per the report. “Part of that is making sure that we’re sourcing that material from the right places.”

Experts have warned about depending on chatbots for medical advice. A study led by researchers at Stanford University and published last year showed that out of 382 medical questions posed to ChatGPT, the chatbot offered an “inappropriate” answer roughly one out of every five times, the report said.

Kim Rippy, practice owner and licensed counselor at Keystone Therapy Group, told PYMNTS in July that clients have turned to ChatGPT or other AI systems for “substitute therapy,” a trend she called “helpful and dangerous at the same time.”

For those with ADHD, ChatGPT can help them summarize or organize their thoughts. Still, the chatbot can never fully understand the patient’s experience or pick up on things like nonverbal cues and tone the way a human therapist could, Rippy said.

This month also saw Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announce he is turning over some duties related to the company’s commercial business so that he and the firm’s engineering leaders can be “laser focused” on AI work.