Commercial Adoption of AI in the Healthcare Sector: An Exploratory Analysis of S&P500 Companies

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies within the healthcare sector is growing. However, there are differences in the speed of commercial adoption of AI across sub-sectors. We employ a dataset including news mentions and executive communications of all S&P500 Health Care Index companies to explore these differences. Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing companies had the earliest AI-linked news presence, yet they appeared to be among the slowest commercial implementers of AI. Ambulatory health care services and hospitals, as well as insurance carriers, received media coverage later, but were the quickest to take AI into commercial use. From the theory perspective our results indicate that the classical innovation diffusion theory might not fully explain these differences.