As healthcare teams face mounting workload and staffing pressures, AI is moving off the screen and into the hospital itself. In this talk, The Robot Teammate: How AI Is Changing the Healthcare Workforce, Andrea Thomaz - founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics - introduces embodied AI through the lens of real-world deployment.
Drawing on Diligent’s work with Moxi, a collaborative mobile robot used in hospitals today, the talk explores how socially aware robots can support clinical teams by taking on routine, non-clinical tasks - freeing clinicians to focus on patient care. Andrea will share practical lessons from deploying AI in safety-critical, fast-paced hospital environments: how robots fit into existing workflows, how trust and adoption are built, and what impact looks like from the perspective of healthcare staff.
The talk will also place this work in the broader context of the current embodied and generative AI landscape, highlighting what’s possible now, what remains hard, and why robotics is an emerging frontier for healthcare AI - particularly in complex care settings like cancer centers.
Free
Andrea Thomaz is a founder, Chairman, and CEO at the forefront of artificial intelligence, robotics, and healthcare. She founded Diligent Robotics and led it from inception through its acquisition by Serve Robotics in January 2026, building one of the first scaled deployments of AI-powered robots in hospitals.
Under her leadership, Diligent developed Moxi, a hospital robot now used across 25+ health systems, completing more than 1 million deliveries and helping reduce operational burden for clinical teams. The company grew to 150 employees and partnered with organizations including AWS and NVIDIA, with Moxi featured on stage at NVIDIA GTC.
Andrea has deep experience bringing advanced AI into real-world environments, leading enterprise adoption in complex healthcare systems. Prior to Diligent, she was a tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Georgia Tech, where she led the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab and published widely in human-robot interaction.
She has authored two books, delivered global keynotes, and published more than 50 research papers. She has also contributed to national science initiatives through roles with PCAST, the National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers program, and the NSF.
Andrea began her career at IBM and Microsoft Research. She holds a Ph.D. and S.M. from the MIT Media Lab and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.