London Tech Week 2026- How do we talk about healthcare in the context of tech and AI?
This week I attended London Tech Week. Much like last year, AI remained the key focus across all sessions and high-level talks.
As Tome Hale, CEO of wearables healthtech firm Oura, jokingly said, “The mean time to AI in every conversation here is probably less than three minutes.”
Across every session I attended, one theme cut through consistently: innovation is not the bottleneck. Adoption is. One speaker put it plainly — if the NHS turned around tomorrow and said it wanted to procure every promising health AI tool in existence, the system simply couldn’t absorb it. We are building faster than healthcare systems can integrate, and the gap between innovation and implementation is where so many promising tools go to die.
The value lies in designing more integrated, end-to-end solutions. That means fitting into existing clinical workflows, winning over clinical champions early, and earning trust before asking for behaviour change.
Speakers were bullish on AI, but were also quite honest about its current limitations. I found the conversation about accountability in the context of automation particularly interesting. This was part of the session on the ‘machine layer of medicine’ which brought together founders building surgical robotics, autonomous healthcare logistics, and next-generation neurosurgical tools. The speakers were quite clear-eyed about both the opportunity and the complexity of using tech and AI.
In terms of accountability, as automation increases in the operating theatre, the consensus was clear: the surgeon remains the master of the workflow, always. Robots are tools, not decision-makers.
The session on regulatory pathways was perhaps one of the more practically useful of the day. Founders who had navigated multiple jurisdictions shared a counterintuitive lesson: get regulated early, even when it feels premature. Achieving Class 1 medical device certification quickly gets you to market, builds credibility with investors, and compounds over time. Those who treated regulation as a defensive strategy, building relationships with notified bodies, bringing in regulation consultants where necessary and investing in evidence early, consistently outpaced those who bolted it on later.
The conversation with Tom Hale, CEO at Oura, also offered a really interesting case study at the intersection of consumer technology and health. Oura targeted the healthcare market within wearables because, as Hale put it, back then, in 2015, the company saw it as a bigger, more inclusive market, when fitness wearables were becoming “all the rage.” Well predicted!
Starting with sleep, expanding into women’s health, and building a subscription model on top of hardware, the company’s journey illustrated how consumer engagement and clinical insight can reinforce each other. He delved deep into the firm’s decision to build a custom LLM trained by OB-GYNs rather than rely on off-the-shelf AI. According to Hale, owning your AI is a moat.
I also liked Hale’s emphasis on women’s health. This underserved segment seems to be picking up momentum. The topic was brought up in multiple panels, pointing to a population that has historically been underserved, whose physiology changes in ways that make continuous, personalised monitoring especially valuable. AI, several argued, may finally be what unlocks genuinely personalised care in this space.
Beyond the panels, the exhibition floor had some really interesting healthtech firms. Finnish startup Medicubix showcased a pod that delivers a full health check-up in five minutes. A Singapore-based women’s health platform focused on hormones and fertility was exploring UK expansion, while a Philippines exhibitor presented a portable molecular diagnostics device designed to detect tropical diseases such as dengue at the point of care.
Other standouts included LightHearted’s AI optical stethoscope, which looked deceptively simple, and a Chinese biotech using body scans to prescribe personalised teas based on traditional medicine. Whether that last concept has a future in the NHS is debatable, but it underscored how widely healthcare innovation is now emerging.
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