Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions

For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now “it is finally here,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors.

The findings, published Thursday in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, Science, are based on tests pitting Microsoft’s AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft compiled the cases into its own benchmark, SDBench, which it plans to open-source. Designed to function like a panel of medical experts, Microsoft’s Diagnostic Orchestrator uses multiple AI agents to reason through symptoms and medical histories, decide what tests to order, and arrive at a diagnosis, mimicking the process doctors use to investigate cases.