Epic Systems closed its 2026 Users Group Meeting in Verona, Wisconsin on August 20 with CEO Judy Faulkner announcing that AI Charting — an ambient documentation feature built in collaboration with Microsoft — is now live across its customer base, and that 85% of Epic’s healthcare customers are using at least one of the company’s generative AI copilot tools, known internally as Art, Emmie, and Penny. The four-day conference, themed “Meet Me at the Midway,” drew more than 20,000 attendees and nearly 500 sessions, according to coverage from Healthcare IT Today and Becker’s Hospital Review.
What AI Charting adds to Epic’s EHR
AI Charting ambiently listens during a patient visit and drafts the clinician’s note automatically, similar in concept to third-party ambient scribes like Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, but built natively into Epic’s own electronic health record rather than layered on top through an integration. Epic said the feature also queues up relevant orders based on the conversation it transcribes — for example, suggesting a lab order or medication refill directly tied to something discussed during the visit — a workflow step that goes beyond what most standalone ambient scribe vendors currently offer. The company’s Insights feature, which summarizes a patient’s medical history to help a clinician prepare before an appointment, is now used more than 16 million times a month, Epic said.
Ergo, Agent Factory, and the rest of the 2026 AI slate
Beyond AI Charting, Epic unveiled Ergo, a new AI-native clinical interface set to arrive in November 2026, along with Agent Factory, a toolkit that lets health systems build their own custom AI agents on top of Epic’s data, and Cosmos Curiosity, an expansion of Epic’s Cosmos de-identified research dataset aimed at predictive analytics. The company also previewed expanded revenue-cycle automation tools targeting billing and claims workflows, and confirmed a debut of its platform in Germany, extending Epic’s international footprint.
The Microsoft relationship behind the scenes
Epic’s AI Charting tool builds on a multi-year partnership with Microsoft that has steadily deepened since the companies first announced generative AI collaboration in 2023, with Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot — the successor to Nuance’s dictation products, which Microsoft acquired in 2022 — now available to clinicians across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The tie-up gives Epic access to Microsoft’s underlying AI infrastructure while giving Microsoft a direct channel into the roughly 250 million patient records Epic’s systems touch across the country.
Why Epic’s native AI push worries independent vendors
Epic’s dominant position in the EHR market — the company holds the largest share of hospital electronic health record contracts in the U.S. — means that when it builds a feature natively rather than through a third-party integration, it can undercut standalone vendors on price and convenience simply by bundling the capability into a system hospitals already pay for. Ambient scribe startups including Abridge, Ambience Healthcare, and Suki have built substantial businesses selling documentation AI as an add-on to Epic and other EHRs; Epic’s native AI Charting rollout raises the question of whether hospitals will eventually consolidate around Epic’s built-in tools rather than continuing to pay separately for best-of-breed point solutions.
The skeptical view
Health IT analysts have noted that Epic’s self-reported adoption figures — such as the 85% generative AI usage statistic — measure whether customers have activated a feature at all, not necessarily how deeply or consistently clinicians use it day to day, a distinction that matters given past research showing ambient AI adoption can be “low but highly skewed,” with physicians favoring simpler encounters and lower-acuity visits over complex ones. Some CIOs have also raised concerns about vendor lock-in: building clinical workflows around Epic’s proprietary AI tools makes it harder to later switch to a competing EHR or a specialized third-party AI vendor if a better tool emerges.
What comes next
Epic says Ergo will begin rolling out to select health systems in November 2026, with Agent Factory expected to let hospitals build custom AI agents on top of Epic data later in the year. The bigger industry question UGM 2026 leaves unresolved is competitive: whether standalone ambient AI and clinical decision-support vendors can keep differentiating fast enough to justify separate licensing fees once Epic’s native tools reach full parity, or whether the EHR giant’s scale ultimately absorbs much of the ambient AI category it did not originally build.
