Where should you focus your agentic AI: your Product or Productivity?

By Kevin Riley CEO

In healthcare and life sciences, the potential for AI isn’t just about "doing things faster"—it is about fundamentally replacing standard work with agentic work. The value is pervasive, substantial, and, quite frankly, inevitable.

But for many leaders I speak with, the challenge isn't recognizing the value; it's deciding where to start. When everything can be optimized, what should be optimized first?

At actAVA.ai, we cut through the noise using a 4-Box Model. It is a simple but powerful framework we use to help customers categorize, prioritize, and deploy agents across their ecosystem.

The Framework: Mapping Your Needs

To understand where your AI agents will have the most transformative impact, we map needs against two specific axes:

1. Who is the user? (Internal Teams vs. External Customers)

2. What is the application? (Core Product Features vs. User Productivity)

By plotting your initiatives on this grid, distinct categories of "Agents" emerge. There is no wrong answer here—only what matters most to your organization right now, and what comes next.

Here is how we break down the four quadrants of Agentic AI.

1. Internal Productivity: The "Colleague Agent."

(Internal User + Productivity Focus)

Goal: Speed up daily work.

These are the agents that sit alongside your employees—the "digital interns" or co-pilots that handle the mundane, repetitive tasks that clog up a workday. In a healthcare setting, this might look like an agent that drafts patient intake summaries, automates scheduling, or synthesizes research papers for R&D teams.

• Why start here? If your team is burning out on administrative overhead, Colleague Agents offer immediate relief and high ROI on human capital.

Here is an example from our Agent Library for a Colleague Agent. 

You are a Sales Architect Agent, a senior solutions architect at actAVA.ai with 15+ years of experience selling enterprise AI platforms into the Health Care vertical. Your primary role is to analyze lists of healthcare companies provided by the user in chat messages, along with a specified word length for report detail, conducting deep pre-sales research on each unique company to evaluate them as potential enterprise sales targets for actAVA's Blue and Red product lines only (do not reference or imply any other products). You generate detailed research reports for each company (guided by the user-specified word length per company, confident, insightful, and slightly provocative in tone, like a $400k/year sales engineer who closes 8-figure deals), followed by a ranked assessment of all companies from best to least fit as sales targets.

2. Internal Product: The "System Agent."

(Internal User + Product Focus)

Goal: Replace complex workflows.

Moving from "helping" to "handling," System Agents don't just speed up work; they take over entire backend processes. These agents act as the connective tissue between disparate systems. For example, rather than a human manually transferring data from an EHR to a billing system and checking for errors, a System Agent manages the entire pipeline autonomously.

• Why start here? If your operational bottlenecks are caused by legacy system interoperability or heavy manual data processing, this is your priority.

Here is an example from our Agent Library for a System Agent. 

You are a Healthcare Provider Search & Network Intelligence Agent operating within an AI-native healthcare platform. Your role is to deliver real-time, payer-aware provider discovery and verification using authoritative payer, health-system, and federal registry APIs. Your mission is to produce accurate, normalized, explainable provider profiles that support care navigation, referral workflows, and eligibility decisions—while meeting enterprise standards for auditability, compliance, and determinism. You are a source-of-truth broker, not a recommendation engine. Accuracy, provenance, and regulatory safety override completeness. You must never fabricate providers, affiliations, specialties, roles, or network participation.

3. External Product: The "Embedded Agent."

(External User + Product Focus)

Goal: AI-enable your features.

This is where AI becomes part of the value proposition you sell. These are Embedded Agents living inside your medical device, diagnostic software, or patient portal. It isn't just a tool; the AI is the feature. Think of an imaging platform that automatically highlights anomalies for radiologists, or a wearable that predicts cardiac events before they happen.

• Why start here? If you need to differentiate your offering in the market and drive innovation, Embedded Agents are critical.

Here is an example from our Agent Library for an Embedded Agent. 

You are a Prior Authorization Analyst with access to provider registries, Medicare coverage databases, and medical literature. Your role is to analyze prior authorization requests for medical necessity and coverage compliance, and to generate authorization decisions with complete audit documentation.

4. External Productivity: The "Guide Agent."

(External User + Productivity Focus)

Goal: Improve customer experience.

Finally, we have the Guide Agents. These focus on how your customers interact with you. They reduce friction. In life sciences, this could be an intelligent agent that guides a patient through a complex clinical trial enrollment process or offers 24/7 empathetic support for medication adherence.

• Why start here? If your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is suffering or your support costs are skyrocketing, Guide Agents bridge the gap between your brand and your user.

Here is an example from our Agent Library for a Guide Agent. 

You are a healthcare engagement specialist focused on maximizing preventive care completion rates. Your mission is to identify eligible patients, remove barriers to care access, and coordinate seamless Annual Wellness Visit experiences that improve health outcomes and program compliance.

There Is No Wrong Answer

The beauty of the 4-Box Model is that it removes the paralysis of choice.

• Need to move faster internally? Look to the top right.

• Need to fix broken back-office pipes? Look to the top left.

• Need to revolutionize what you sell? Look to the bottom left.

• Need to delight your customers? Look to the bottom right.

At actAVA, we help you identify not just where you can deploy agents, but where you must deploy them to see the results that matter most to your strategy.

So, where is your focus? Let’s find out.