Iman Abuzeid, MD

At Incredible Health, our vision and mission is to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. That means understanding the conditions shaping their work, not just the bright spots, but the pressure points, the gaps, and the places where the healthcare industry has more work to do.

Today, we’re proud to release our 2026 Executive Report: AI and the Future of the Healthcare Workforce. Drawing on insights from hundreds of healthcare leaders and proprietary data from more than 1,500 healthcare employers and 1.5 million healthcare workers nationwide, this report is our most comprehensive look yet at where the industry stands heading into a pivotal year.

The challenge this year is not AI awareness. It’s execution.  

Healthcare leaders are aligned on the priorities. Retention is the top workforce concern for 67% of organizations. AI is widely understood to be critical, with more than half of leaders saying it will define their team’s success in 2026, and 47% planning to increase AI spending this year.

And yet, 76% of the same leaders say their organizations are not prepared to implement AI at the speed required. Change management is difficult. Ownership is unclear. Role-based adoption has stalled. The result is a widening gap between what leaders believe and what their organizations are able to execute, at a moment when there is very little room for delay.

This is the defining tension of 2026: plenty of vision, and a critical shortage of follow-through.

The technology hasn’t reached the healthcare workers who need it most.

AI momentum in healthcare has largely been concentrated in leadership conversations, recruitment platforms, and back-office systems. On the frontlines, the picture looks very different. Today, 70% of clinicians are not using AI tools in their daily workflows, even as 80% say they want more training on how to use them.

This disconnect is a care delivery problem as much as a technology problem. The workers experiencing the greatest pressure from burnout, staffing shortages, and rising patient demand are the same workers who have benefited least from the AI investment being made around them. Closing that gap is one of the most important things healthcare organizations can do in the year ahead.

Recruiters are overwhelmed, and qualified candidates are disappearing into the void.

The talent challenge extends well beyond the bedside. Only 16% of healthcare recruiters currently use AI in their workflows. Managing an average of 70 open roles per recruiter at a time, most teams are only able to have a live conversation with roughly 10% of applicants. The other 90% of workers who apply to open positions do not speak with anyone.

At the same time, the pool of candidates passing initial screens has dropped from 34% to 29% year over year. Hiring demand is rising, while recruitment capacity is not keeping pace. Over the past 12 months, 55% of teams stayed the same size and 21% shrank. Only 24% grew. Today, 41% of recruitment teams describe themselves as overworked.

This is a system under strain, and it is costing organizations far more than efficiency. Every unanswered application from qualified healthcare workers quietly shapes how an employer is perceived in the market. The hiring experience is an expression of organizational values, and right now, many organizations are leaving a very different impression than they intend.

Retention is the strategic lever hiding in plain sight.

As we look ahead, it is clear that retention and recruitment are not separate challenges. They are deeply connected. Organizations struggling to keep experienced clinicians face constant pressure to rehire, driving up costs and compounding strain on the teams left behind. With 33% of employers reporting that at least a quarter of their nursing workforce is within 5 years of retirement, the pressure will intensify.

The healthcare organizations that lead in 2026 will be the ones that elevate retention from an HR function to a core expression of workforce strategy. That means investing in flexible scheduling, visible career pathways, and day-to-day working conditions that make healthcare workers want to stay.

The path forward is focused action.

This report pairs diagnosis with prescription. Inside, we outline 4 specific areas where healthcare leaders can move from intent to impact: 1) phased AI implementation with clear ownership and measurable outcomes, 2) retention-first workforce design, 3) protecting recruiter capacity as hiring demand rises, and 4) building a candidate experience that earns trust from the very first interaction.

The healthcare organizations that will define this decade are the ones willing to close the gap between their stated priorities and their operational reality. The ones that move with focus this year will not just weather the pressure. They will be the ones everyone else is benchmarking against in 5 years.You can read the full 2026 Executive Report here.

I’m proud to share that Lyn, our AI voice interview agent, now integrates directly with the healthcare industry’s wide range of applicant tracking systems, transforming static candidate databases into active, always-on hiring engines. Incredible Health is also named a Workday Innovation Partner with certified integration status for Workday HCM and Workday Recruiting, and supports other major ATS, including Oracle Recruiting Cloud, iCIMS, Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite, and many others. Lyn is available to interview applicants regardless of source and is also available to healthcare employers not using the Incredible Health marketplace. 

We’ve been building towards this milestone since we first introduced Lyn in September 2025. Our vision and mission is to help healthcare professionals live better lives, and find and do their best work. Lyn was built in collaboration with the teams at Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White Health, Tenet Health, and Sutter Health, and their hiring and clinical expertise contributed to this integration. We continue to drive towards that vision: every healthcare worker who applies for a role should get a real interview, not an auto-reply, not silence. With direct ATS integration, the goal of a world-class experience for healthcare workers is a reality for every hospital, health system, surgery center, and home health organization, regardless of which ATS they use.

Why This Matters for Healthcare

Healthcare hiring has been fundamentally challenging for decades. In the midst of the largest labor shortage in the country, the first-round phone interview takes an average of 13 days to complete. In that window, in a highly competitive talent market, top candidates accept offers elsewhere, and the health systems left behind turn to overtime, incentive pay, expensive agency, and travel staff to fill the gap. These band-aid solutions exacerbate the risk of employee burnout and turnover, and also put patient care at risk. In healthcare, the first employer to interview a candidate and make hiring decisions often wins, and most health systems simply cannot interview fast enough. Most recruitment teams have limited bandwidth and cannot process 100% of their applicant flow in a timely manner.

Incredible Health built Lyn to change that equation entirely. Lyn proactively sells the employer’s unique value proposition and discusses multiple roles during a single interview, covering clinical qualifications, licensure, shift preferences, years of experience, and more. It operates 24/7, including nights, weekends, and holidays, meeting candidates on their schedule rather than forcing them to wait for a recruiter’s availability. Hospitals, surgery centers, and home health organizations using Incredible Health save an average of $5 million annually per facility by reducing vacancy rates and replacing expensive temporary labor with permanent hires, faster.

The Impact We’re Seeing

Across our employer partners, Lyn is delivering outcomes that fundamentally reshape how health systems hire:

• 87% of candidates who begin an interview with Lyn complete it, 8x higher than the 10% completion rate seen with traditional manual methods.
• 75% of candidates complete their interview within 24 hours of applying, compared to a 13-day industry average for first-round interviews.
• Interviews are completed 6.5x faster (2 days vs. 13 days), ensuring vacancies are filled before they impact patient care, employee turnover, or increased premium labor costs.
• Average hiring times reduced by 30% for permanent healthcare workers, directly reducing reliance on expensive overtime and premium pay, while ensuring quality patient care is maintained.
• 800+ hours reclaimed annually per recruiter by eliminating phone tag, voicemail follow-ups, and manual data entry
• 42% of interviews happen outside of business hours, capturing candidates that traditional methods miss entirely.
• 96% of candidates report positive sentiment, driven by the flexibility of interviewing on their own schedule.

These numbers reflect something deeper than efficiency. They reflect a hiring experience that respects both the healthcare worker’s time and the recruiter’s expertise. Lyn handles the volume and the speed so that hiring teams can focus on what they do best: building relationships, engaging hiring managers, and closing top candidates.

From Static Database to Always-On Hiring Engine

Now, AI voice agent Lyn can live inside the ATS. Here’s how it works:

• Automatic trigger: The moment a candidate reaches a designated ATS stage, Lyn initiates outreach immediately, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
• Multi-job interviews in a single call: In one conversation, Lyn interviews a candidate for multiple open roles, maximizing every touchpoint, expanding opportunities, and increasing match likelihood without additional recruiter coordination.
• Proactive selling and context-aware interviews: Using the candidate’s resume and ATS job descriptions, Lyn asks targeted questions tailored to the role, facility, and required clinical specialties, while proactively selling the employer’s unique attributes, perks, and benefits. 
• Structured write-back: After each interview, Lyn automatically pushes a structured data package to the candidate’s ATS profile: a polished summary, interview recording transcript and audit, and a status update.
• Custom field mapping: Lyn populates the specific fields hiring teams rely on, including years of experience, license status, and shift preference, keeping internal reports accurate without manual entry.
• Zero IT burden and full compliance: Incredible Health’s secure, pre-built connectors are designed for healthcare IT and set up in under one day. Workday customers benefit from Innovation Partner status, meaning pre-vetted connectors that reduce risk and accelerate deployment. The product is fully compliant with local, state, and federal AI hiring regulations nationwide.

Recruiters wake up to decision-ready candidate files instead of a backlog of unreturned calls and unaddressed applicants. There are no new dashboards to learn, no separate logins, and no extra tools.

What This Means for Workday Customers

As part of this expansion, we’re excited to announce that Incredible Health was named a Workday Innovation Partner. This means we’ve been pre-vetted by the Workday Partner Support Team for reliability, security, and fit. Our integration is listed on the Workday Marketplace, and Workday customers benefit from pre-built connectors that reduce risk and accelerate deployment, typically requiring less than one hour of active HRIS team time to set up.

For thousands of health systems, ATS integration and AI voice agents removes one of the last barriers to adopting AI-powered interviewing at scale.

What Comes Next

This integration is a foundation. As Lyn continues to evolve alongside Gale, our AI career partner for healthcare workers, we’re building toward a future where the entire journey of building impactful healthcare careers is more personalized and reliable for both healthcare workers and employers.

We believe when technology removes friction that slows down healthcare hiring, everyone benefits: healthcare workers land in the right roles sooner, recruiters spend their time on high-impact work, health systems reduce their risk of employee burnout and dependence on  premium labor, and most importantly, patients receive consistent care from stable, permanent teams.To learn more about the ways you can use our new AI tools, explore our offerings for employers and healthcare professionals. Whether you are looking to hire or be hired, we are here to help make the experience faster, more personalized, and more reliable for every healthcare worker and employer.

I’m proud to share that Incredible Health has reached a significant milestone: 1.5 million nurses (representing half of active nurses in the U.S.) now use our solutions along with more than 1,500 healthcare employers. 

Two months ago, we introduced Gale and Lyn, our purpose-built AI voice agents, specialized and trained on millions of data points from our marketplace, designed to revolutionize the hiring experience for both healthcare workers and employers. We built these agents in collaboration with the teams at Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White Health, Tenet Health, and Sutter Health, and we’re excited by the positive reception we’ve received from both healthcare workers and employers.

This growth milestone comes at a time when the industry continues to grapple with compounding pressures from persistent labor shortages and tightening budgets. The healthcare workforce is embracing AI as a tool that ensures the right candidate lands in the right opportunity faster and more effectively than ever before. 

Gale Drives Platform Adoption with 24/7 Career Support

For healthcare workers, navigating their next career move has traditionally been time-consuming, opaque, and isolating, especially for those balancing their job searches with demanding work hours. Gale, the AI voice career partner for healthcare professionals, solves for this by being available 24/7 to help nurses prepare for interviews, polish their resumes, and confidently pursue new opportunities. 

Since its launch, Gale has ushered in a completely new hiring experience for thousands of nurses: 

• 50% of sessions with Gale happen outside of business hours, on nights and weekends, when nurses have more time to focus. 
• Gale has a 5-minute average session duration, fitting seamlessly into busy schedules.
• More than 30% of nurses return to practice multiple times with Gale’s interview preparation feature, demonstrating genuine value. 
• Over 90% of nurses give Gale positive reviews, highlighting its 24/7 availability and convenience, and purpose-built specialization.

Nurses using Gale constantly share how much they appreciate the convenience of accessing career support anytime, anywhere. Gale understands the nuances of each of the 45 nursing specialties, and user reviews consistently highlight the professionalism and domain expertise that come from an AI voice agent trained specifically for healthcare. During interview preparation, Gale tailors questions based on the role or speciality a candidate is applying for, and gives personalized feedback and a summary scorecard across five key areas at the end of each session.

Michelle Richardson RN, shared: “Incredible Health has helped me secure not just one, but two positions. Working with both Gale and the Resume Wizard for my interview preparation was instrumental in helping me land my current role as a medical-surgical nurse, and I’m very grateful for the hiring tools and support the Incredible Health team provides to busy healthcare workers like me.” 

Lyn Transforms Employer Hiring with Speed and Scale

While Gale addresses the challenges healthcare workers face while searching for a job and preparing for interviews, Lyn helps healthcare employers hire top talent in a speedy and cost-effective way. It delivers a high-quality experience to all applicants, without getting stalled by typical bottlenecks such as leaky pipelines, candidate mismatching, and limited recruiter bandwidth. To help alleviate this friction for as many recruitment teams as possible, Lyn can be used directly through Incredible Health’s marketplace or as a standalone agent integrated with applicant tracking systems for healthcare employers. 

With a focus on speed, quality, and cost, Lyn’s impact is transformative:

• Employers can conduct same-day phone screens with Lyn, compared to the 4+ days it typically takes human recruiters.
• Lyn reduces overall hiring timelines by 20%.
• With Lyn, employers can interview 100% of candidates, up from just 5-10% of qualified applicants screened through traditional workflows. 
• Employers see 15% higher retention rates for nurses hired through Incredible Health with Lyn. 
• Employers save over $5 million annually per facility by reducing reliance on agency staff, travelers, and overtime. 
• Lyn saves facilities over 800 hours annually per recruiter, equivalent to one to two months per recruiter each year. 
• With Lyn and the Incredible Health marketplace, employers fill permanent roles in under 20 days, five times faster than the 86-day national average. 

Lyn conducts interviews around the clock, ensuring that qualified healthcare professionals don’t slip through the cracks. It verifies qualifications, specialties, and certifications with consistency, and proactively sells each employer’s unique value proposition, highlighting benefits, culture, and what makes their organization stand out to top candidates.

Time saved can be redirected to strategic, high-impact work, such as engaging with hiring managers, building long-term pipelines, and focusing on the human elements of talent acquisition.

Empowering Tomorrow’s Healthcare Workforce 

Reaching 1.5 million nurses and 1,500 employers signals that the healthcare industry is ready for the improved, AI-native way to hire. AI voice agents like Gale and Lyn remove friction that prevents slow hiring cycles and drive burnout for both workers and employers. 

We built our solutions to help healthcare workers find and do their best work, and with nearly half of all U.S. nurses now trusting AI for career support, that vision is becoming reality. As Gale and Lyn continue to evolve, we’re empowering an entire workforce to reach their highest potential, strengthening teams, and ultimately ensuring that patients receive exceptional care.

To learn more about the ways you can leverage our new AI tools, explore our offerings for employers and professionals. Whether you are looking to hire or be hired, we are here to help make the experience faster, more personalized, and more reliable for every healthcare worker and employer. 

I’m proud to share the next chapter in Incredible Health’s journey. In December 2023, we took a bold step and became the first healthcare career marketplace to introduce AI. Since then, we’ve moved quickly, layering in new AI capabilities that make hiring faster, more personalized, and more reliable for healthcare workers and employers. 

As the #1 and largest AI-powered healthcare career marketplace, trusted by over 1 million U.S. nurses and technicians and more than 1,500 healthcare employers, we’re pairing trustworthy AI with millions of real marketplace data points to deliver outcomes both healthcare workers and employers can rely on to expand opportunities and improve hiring. 

Today, we’re ushering in a new era in healthcare hiring powered by two purpose-built AI voice agents: Gale and Lyn. 

Meet Gale: The AI Career Partner for Healthcare Professionals

Gale is a lifelong career partner for healthcare workers, guiding professionals to the right roles, refining resumes, preparing for interviews, and opening doors to opportunities they may not have considered. Gale is now used by over 1 million US healthcare workers on Incredible Health’s career marketplace. Over 90% of nurses give Gale positive reviews and would recommend it to their peers. Gale is designed to make every healthcare worker’s job search less arduous and lonely, and more empowering and inspiring.

Gale is trained on millions of real healthcare career paths accumulated on Incredible Health’s marketplace over the last seven years. As a result, it has a deep understanding of the nuances between specialties and care settings like med-surg, ICU, and ambulatory care. Gale works with each healthcare worker to understand their previous experiences and helps determine where they’d like to take their career.

Healthcare workers care for others every day, and now Gale takes care of them:

• Interview Prep: Allows healthcare workers to practice with the Gale AI voice agent, which asks them real-world clinical questions based on their unique resumes and specialties. Gale then shares tailored feedback after each response and generates an overall scorecard, highlighting strengths and areas to improve. This ensures that healthcare workers conduct their employer interviews with competence and confidence.
• SmartStart: Healthcare workers upload their resume, and Gale instantly extracts licenses, clinical roles, hospital types, and specialties. It then fills in missing information with smart suggestions. This helps healthcare workers make a strong impression when engaging with potential employers.
• Resume Wizard: Gale transforms healthcare work history into a polished, professional resume in minutes. Each healthcare worker receives AI-generated descriptions tailored to their specialty, whether they’re a labor and delivery nurse or a surgical technician, providing them with a strong start to expand their professional opportunities.

Over time, Gale evolves with each healthcare worker to plan out their long-term career vision with tailored guidance and community-building opportunities. Gale’s upcoming features include: 

• Career Map:  Healthcare workers can visualize their future and plot out career paths based on their current interests and skills, and learn about the steps, credentials, and options to get them there.
• SmartApply: Auto-completes job applications using profile data, rather than starting from scratch every time. 
• Community Signals: Healthcare workers can see what roles their peers are saving. Gale generates real-time insights like “Popular in your community,” or “Trending among ICU nurses.” 

Meet Lyn: The AI Voice Interview Agent For Employers 

Lyn is a trusted AI copilot for employers that amplifies brand and reach nationally, engages candidates with personalized outreach, conducts interviews, and sells an employer’s unique attributes to highly sought-after healthcare workers. Lyn’s AI voice agent technology transforms how clinical teams are built and improves the economics of hiring.

We built Lyn in collaboration with the teams at Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White Health, Tenet Health, and Sutter Health. Many of our 1,500 employer partners are currently participating in the rollout, and that list is growing every day. Lyn is trained on millions of hiring interactions across Incredible Health’s marketplace and designed to help employers hire top healthcare professionals without getting stalled by typical bottlenecks in the recruitment process.  

We understand each hiring professional’s time is limited, and their day-to-day work is demanding. With manual workflows streamlined by Lyn, teams get time back to focus on strategic, high-impact functions, like engaging with hiring managers and building long-term pipelines. We envision a future where talent acquisition teams manage Incredible Health’s AI agents, instead of doing all the hiring work themselves. 

Lyn is also loved by nurses for its ability to infuse transparency into an otherwise murky process. Candidates leave interviews feeling equipped with the information they need to make confident decisions about their next steps. Experienced and specialized nurses also love the round-the-clock convenience and friendly “lower stakes” of speaking with an AI voice agent instead of a human. The end result is a win for everyone: better job matches, higher retention rates, and less back-and-forth along the way. 

As an AI-powered voice agent, Lyn helps employers: 

• Interview hundreds of candidates in days, not weeks, working around the clock and unaffected by scheduling delays.
• Reach out to top candidates with personalized messaging that resonates, leading to a 20% increase in nurses agreeing to interview.
• Showcase the range of opportunities at each employer’s organization, highlighting what makes their workplace stand out.
• Verify qualifications, specialties, and certifications with consistency across applicants.
• Present qualified and engaged candidates to advance to the next step in the interview process.

After each interview, Lyn generates an easy-to-scan interview summary tailored to each employer’s hiring criteria, so employers can spend less time screening and more time deciding.  

Setting a New Standard in Healthcare Hiring 

Incredible Health strives to be the fastest, most personalized, and reliable path to hiring top healthcare workers at scale, beating traditional approaches in each of these areas. AI voice agents further that goal by restructuring healthcare’s hiring model. While AI can’t replace the human connection at the center of healthcare, it can help ensure that the right people end up in the right roles. 

Incredible Health already delivers industry-leading hiring outcomes, with employers filling permanent roles in under 20 days compared to the national average of 86. Hospitals and health systems using the platform save more than $5 million annually per facility by reducing reliance on temporary labor, overtime, and premium costs. Healthcare professionals hired through Incredible Health average 9 years of experience and stay longer, with retention rates 15% higher than industry benchmarks.

With Gale, Lyn, and a new suite of AI-powered tools, Incredible Health is extending this track record, using intelligent agents to deliver the speed, personalization, and reliability that the healthcare workforce urgently needs.

To learn more about the ways you can leverage our new AI tools, explore our offerings for employers and professionals. Whether you are looking to hire or be hired, we are here to help make the experience faster, more personalized, and more reliable for every healthcare worker and employer.