Eric Lefkofsky, founder and CEO of Tempus AI, told CNBC’s “The Exchange” this week that healthcare will likely be the biggest beneficiary of artificial intelligence, a claim he’s built an entire company, and a multi-billion-dollar public listing, around proving true. In the appearance, Lefkofsky discussed AI’s expanding role in healthcare, how Tempus is applying it to cancer research, and the company’s work on personalized vaccines, part of a broader thesis that has turned Tempus into one of the most closely watched AI-in-healthcare companies on Wall Street.
Why Lefkofsky Thinks Healthcare Is AI’s Biggest Opportunity
Lefkofsky’s argument rests on the sheer scale of inefficiency inside the US healthcare system. The country spends roughly $5 trillion annually on healthcare, and by his own estimate, at least a third of that, around $1.5 trillion, is wasted. He’s previously described that wasted spending as roughly equivalent to ten companies the size of Google’s online advertising business, a comparison meant to underscore just how much room for disruption exists in a sector that has historically lagged behind other industries in adopting data-driven technology.
“The companies that bring AI to healthcare will get very, very big, regardless of any economic climate.”
— Eric Lefkofsky, Founder and CEO, Tempus AI
That framing helps explain why Lefkofsky, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Groupon, believes AI-driven healthcare companies are positioned to grow large regardless of broader economic conditions. In his view, the opportunity isn’t cyclical, it’s structural, rooted in decades of accumulated inefficiency that AI is only now equipped to address at scale.
How Tempus AI Is Built Around That Thesis
Tempus operates two main business lines: a genomics business that sequences patients, cancer, cardiac, and at-risk populations alike, and a data business that licenses de-identified patient data to researchers and drug developers. AI isn’t a separate product line sitting alongside these two businesses; it’s embedded inside both of them, powering the diagnostic results Tempus delivers and the pattern recognition that makes its licensed datasets valuable to pharmaceutical partners.
The scale behind that operation is considerable. Tempus has amassed more than 300 petabytes of multimodal healthcare data, spanning molecular, clinical, and imaging records, that its AI systems continuously mine for patterns linking patient genetics, treatments, and outcomes. That data engine underpins collaborations like the company’s work with AstraZeneca on a healthcare foundation model, and its more recent partnership with Daiichi Sankyo applying Tempus’s PRISM2 multimodal foundation model to antibody drug conjugate development in oncology.
From Cancer Diagnostics to Personalized Vaccines
Cancer research sits at the center of Tempus’s AI ambitions, a focus rooted directly in the company’s origin story. Lefkofsky founded Tempus in 2015 after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, an experience that exposed how little data and technology actually informed cancer treatment decisions at the time. That gap between the technology available for everyday consumer conveniences and the technology available to people fighting serious illness became the founding motivation behind the company.
Personalized vaccines represent a newer, related frontier discussed in this week’s interview: using an individual patient’s molecular and genomic data to design vaccines tailored to their specific cancer or disease profile, rather than relying on standardized treatments designed around population averages. It’s a natural extension of Tempus’s broader precision-medicine thesis, using AI to move healthcare away from one-size-fits-all treatment toward decisions built around each patient’s specific biology.
The Numbers Behind the AI Healthcare Boom
Lefkofsky’s optimism lines up with broader market data. According to a report from Acumen Research and Consulting, the global AI in healthcare market was valued at USD 41.84 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly USD 1,136.90 billion by 2035, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 39.1 percent, with clinical AI applications, the category Tempus’s diagnostics and precision-medicine tools fall under, already commanding the largest application share of the market. That trajectory reinforces Lefkofsky’s core argument: the healthcare AI opportunity isn’t a niche corner of the broader AI boom, it’s one of its largest and fastest-growing segments in its own right, a dynamic explored in more detail in Medgadget’s broader look at the AI in healthcare market’s growth trajectory.
A Company Still Proving Its Thesis
Tempus’s path to profitability hasn’t been without turbulence. The company has posted sustained quarterly losses since going public in 2024, and its stock has swung sharply, at one point falling nearly 20 percent in a single day after a short-seller report challenged aspects of its business. Lefkofsky has said Tempus is targeting positive EBITDA, with cash-flow and full GAAP profitability expected to follow in subsequent quarters, pointing to the company’s high gross margins, close to 60 percent in genomics and closer to 80 percent in its data business, as evidence the underlying economics work even before the bottom line turns positive.
What Comes Next
For Lefkofsky, this week’s CNBC appearance was another chapter in a now-familiar argument: that healthcare represents the single largest untapped opportunity for AI to create real value, not just efficiency gains, but genuinely better outcomes for patients. Whether Tempus specifically captures a outsized share of that opportunity remains an open question for investors watching the stock’s volatility. But the underlying thesis, that an industry spending trillions of dollars, a third of it wastefully, is overdue for the kind of data-driven transformation AI enables, continues to attract attention well beyond Tempus’s own shareholder base, as the broader market data on AI in healthcare’s growth trajectory suggests.