Talkdesk Develops AI Agents for Healthcare, Differentiates with Industry Innovation

Talkdesk has announced AI Agents that autonomously interact with patients and resolve healthcare-specific queries without prior training.

Unveiled at HIMSS 2025, the “Talkdesk AI Agents for Healthcare” solution helps contact center leaders create multiple AI agents that automate particular queries.

So, a healthcare company may configure an AI agent to schedule an appointment, another to check authorizations, another to refill prescriptions, and so on.

However, the CX team won’t need to design a conversation tree for every customer contact reason.

Instead, healthcare organizations can describe the task in natural language. From there, they may point the AI Agent towards trusted knowledge content, data sources, and APIs to start automating queries immediately.

While many of Talkdesk’s rivals have released similar AI agents, the CCaaS stalwart may help accelerate time to value by preconfiguring sector-specific flows and tailored AI models.

Sharing more, Patty Hayward, GM of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk, said: “Agentic AI tools represent a seismic shift for the consumer experience at healthcare organizations, enabling them to drive greater value for patients and members.

Our customers are already seeing significant impact and value from AI, and Talkdesk AI Agents for Healthcare gives organizations the ability to take their automation and digital strategies much further, much faster, but with the robust guardrails that our industry needs.

In developing separate AI agents – instead of a single AI agent – Talkdesk also helps contact centers take a more modular approach to contact automation.

After all, customer service teams can cautiously ramp up their AI approach, taking on one contact reason at a time instead of letting an untethered AI agent loose on patients.

As they do so, teams can – according to Talkdesk – create an agent with a prompt as simple as:

You will help patients schedule an appointment. Always be nice, courteous, and compliant. Access account information via Epic (or an alternative CRM). Escalate to a live agent if the patient gets upset.

The Talkdesk AI Agents for Healthcare offering then designs a prototype that the contact center can test, validate, and optimize.

Yet, that contact center doesn’t have to be in the cloud. Talkdesk is making its AI agents for healthcare available for “any” cloud-based or on-premise operation.

Other notable capabilities of Talkdesk AI Agents for Healthcare include the ability to personalize engagements on trusted data and adapt to a customer’s preferred language and channel.

The release comes after the CCaaS vendor launched Talkdesk AI Agents for Retail in January 2025.

As such, expect Talkdesk to keep creating AI agents that span industries, especially as this sector-specific innovation is proving to be a significant differentiator in the broader contact center space.

Talkdesk’s Three-Pronged Approach for Contact Center Differentiation

Alongside AI agents, Talkdesk creates sector-specific CCaaS solutions. That industry-focused approach is one of three core differentiators for the vendor.

Indeed, Talkdesk is choosing to hone in on six industries: financial services, healthcare, retail, government, transportation, and hospitality.

As it does so, Talkdesk considers key applications across each, delivering pre-configured integrations and workflows for the particular vertical.

A recent example of this in healthcare comes in its recent collaboration with Epic.

The move to create AI Agents for healthcare and retail signals an expansion of the strategy that was lauded in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS.

Alongside innovation, Talkdesk aims to differentiate through right-sized tech and AI.

Indeed, while Talkdesk typically caters to the midmarket and enterprises, it launched a CCaaS solution for SMBs in November 2024 to expand its total addressable market (TAM).

That release seems smart, given how many of its market rivals focus on delivering a broad suite of applications and features geared towards larger businesses.

In making this move, Talkdesk supports a frequently underserved market segment.

Finally, there’s AI. While many competitors will claim to differentiate here, Talkdesk has shown a streak for AI-based innovation – particularly since appointing Munil Shah as its Chief Technology Officer in April 2024.

Of course, there are the new industry-focused AI Agents. However, Talkdesk Navigator – which augments routing engines with GenAI – and Mood Insights – which builds on traditional sentiment analytics – also demonstrate the vendor’s original thinking.