Microsoft announced a new tool powered by artificial intelligence that claims to be far more accurate than experienced physicians.
Microsoft AI’s chief executive, Mustafa Suleyman, told the Financial Times that the artificial intelligence is “truly transformative.”
Suleyman explained that Microsoft is nearing models that “are not just a little bit better, but dramatically better, than human performance: faster, cheaper and four times more accurate.”
The tool creates virtual panels of five AI agents serving as “doctors” that “debate” to choose a course of action for the patient.
Microsoft used leading language models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek for the medical tool.
According to a statement from the company, the AI is “benchmarked against real-world cases” published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Microsoft’s AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) “correctly diagnoses up to 85% of NEJM case proceedings, a rate more than four times higher than a group of experienced physicians,” the company said. “MAI-DxO also gets to the correct diagnosis more cost-effectively than physicians.”
“Each requested investigation also incurs a (virtual) cost, reflecting real-world healthcare expenditures,” Microsoft explained, describing its process when testing the AI. “This allows us to evaluate performance across two key dimensions: diagnostic accuracy and resource expenditure. You can watch how an AI system progresses through one of these challenges in this short video.”
The company noted that “no single physician” can “span the full complexity of the NEJM case series. AI, on the other hand, doesn’t face this trade-off. It can blend both breadth and depth of expertise, demonstrating clinical reasoning capabilities that, across many aspects of clinical reasoning, exceed those of any individual physician.”
Such reasoning has the ability to “reshape healthcare,” Microsoft asserted, as AI could “empower patients to self-manage routine aspects of care and equip clinicians with advanced decision support for complex cases.”
