Epic's Ambient Bombshell

The surprising partnership with Microsoft for their anticipated AI scribe offering

So the biggest bombshell coming out of UGM yesterday was ambient, but of course not the way we expected. They couldn't just do what's expected, right?

Epic announced their ambient functionality, as part of "Art", Epic's fuller clinical AI copilot, would be powered by Microsoft Nuance/Dragon. This is somewhat shocking and makes for some great drama (kingmaking, choosing the goliath over the AI upstarts, etc, etc)

Here are the two narratives I think make sense for that mess.