Insights from Weave’s SVP of Technology, Abhi, on scaling AI-driven healthcare solutions, improving patient experience, and transforming practice workflows.
Welcome to AITechPark, Abhi! To start, can you share a bit about your professional journey and what led you to your role as SVP of Technology at Weave?
I’ve spent two decades building enterprise-grade solutions with AI at their core. My journey at Microsoft began by leading R&D teams across Search, Ads, Cloud, and Operating Systems. That experience in scaling services taught me to build for millions—a skill I carried to Amazon, where I led AI-driven retail solutions for a vast customer base. At Salesforce, I built the next generation of Commerce Cloud experiences growing the business from a few hundred million to over a billion dollars. Most recently at Twilio, I spearheaded AI-powered omnichannel personalization and routing while scaling the platform to handle hundreds of billions of interactions a year.
Each chapter sharpened my ability to ship AI at internet scale, build resilient multi-tenant architectures, and bring innovative products to market. Today, at Weave, I’m applying that playbook to deliver enterprise-grade AI that empowers healthcare practices to do more with less and transform patient care every day.
Weave has a unique approach that sets it apart, particularly in Silicon Slopes. What makes your team’s setup different, and how does it contribute to Weave’s success?
Our customers are busy, and depending on the size of their practice they may see dozens or even a hundred patients each day. That’s why our approach to AI has always been focused on practical impact, not just checking a box. We’re committed to building solutions that offload time-consuming tasks and automate our customers’ daily workflows. Each cross-functional product pod is responsible for identifying where AI can automate and enhance the user experience across the platform, and owns the entire AI lifecycle, from discovery through delivery to post-launch optimization, ensuring features launch swiftly and iterate continuously.
Since launching our first AI solution in the spring of 2023, Weave has led the way in administrative AI for healthcare practices. The AI-powered Weave Assistant is now embedded throughout our platform, helping teams save time and work smarter. Our competitive edge is more than a decade’s worth of fully-consented and de-identified patient interactions, which includes billions of phone calls, voicemails, and SMS messages, and serves as a uniquely rich training dataset for our models.
As AI continues to evolve, basic models and chatbots risk becoming commoditized. How do you see Weave ensuring its AI tools remain innovative and seamlessly integrate into existing healthcare workflows?
Our goal is to automate front- and back-office workflows so that our customers can focus on what matters most to them—providing care to their patients and clients. With AI-powered tools, Weave helps practices craft personalized review responses, write professional branded emails, and automate routine tasks like message tagging and voicemail transcription. In 2023, we introduced Call Intelligence, which analyzes every call and voicemail to surface missed opportunities for appointment booking and provides sentiment insights to support staff training and coaching. Most recently, Weave acquired TrueLark, an agentic AI solution purpose-built for appointment-based businesses with strong product-market fit in dental offices and medspas. TrueLark expands Weave’s platform with 24/7 missed call texting, AI-driven appointment scheduling, and automated responses to common patient questions, bringing always-on support to our capabilities.
Healthcare SMBs are facing significant staffing shortages. How can AI help alleviate the burden on employees and enable them to focus on higher-value tasks that drive growth?
An aging population and a growing number of pets are driving an unprecedented demand for healthcare services, at a time when practices across all verticals struggle to staff adequately. Staffing shortages are one of the biggest challenges facing healthcare providers today. In fact, the healthcare industry is projected to face a shortage of up to 139,000 physicians by 2033, with 50% of workers reporting feeling burned out, exacerbated by heavy administrative workloads and bottlenecks. AI solutions enable healthcare SMBs to mitigate both the staffing shortage and staff burnout through improved efficiency that doesn’t compromise patient experience. AI tools allow SMBs to concentrate on providing care and automate repetitive tasks to improve both employee and patient satisfaction. Weave enables practices to accomplish more with their existing teams.
Fields like medspa, veterinary clinics, and orthodontics are seeing rapid innovation. What role does AI play in transforming these sectors, and what trends are you most excited about?
Healthcare sectors like medspas, veterinary clinics, and orthodontics are uniquely positioned to benefit from AI. Weave’s AI platform allows these specialized practices to engage patients faster and more effectively through automated features and real-time updates designed to drive consistent practice growth while helping them stay agile, responsive and much more efficient. AI can allow practices to analyze calls, detect patient sentiment, and identify potential revenue opportunities, enabling SMBs to create more positive experiences to retain customers and grow practices.
You’ve spoken about the growing healthcare crisis in middle America. How can AI-driven solutions help bridge the gap for underserved communities, particularly in rural areas?
The healthcare crisis in rural America is severe. Healthcare providers are finding themselves overworked, with not enough time available for new clients. According to research, “91% of all rural counties face a shortage of primary care physicians,” which harms the health and economic well-being of these communities. AI-driven solutions like telehealth and automation can help alleviate issues within rural healthcare, and AI tools like Weave’s platform can help bridge this gap.
Technology is reshaping healthcare accessibility. Can you share any real-world success stories of Weave’s impact on practices serving vulnerable populations?
Thousands of locations have already migrated to the new Weave and are experiencing the benefits of streamlined processes and more impactful patient interactions through our AI-enhanced platform. These benefits extend to practices serving vulnerable populations who particularly benefit from improved communication and access. Weave brings together a world-class phone system and a suite of communication tools that allow practices to connect with patients anywhere using the methods they prefer, whether it’s phone, text or email. This multichannel approach is particularly valuable for vulnerable populations who may face barriers with traditional healthcare communication methods.
On a personal level, how do you approach building technology that not only meets current industry needs but also anticipates future challenges in healthcare?
My approach to building forward-looking healthcare technology centers on deep customer understanding combined with a strategic vision. We have reimagined the Weave platform based on extensive feedback, bringing a more powerful and flexible experience to our customers. Healthcare is observing rapid advancement in areas like ML, NLP, and predictive analytics. These technologies are increasingly being applied to improve disease diagnostics, resource allocation, and patient care coordination. Our development roadmap incorporates these technologies to solve immediate problems while building toward more comprehensive future solutions.
What advice would you give to healthcare professionals looking to integrate AI into their practice without disrupting patient care?
For healthcare professionals that are looking to integrate AI into their practices, I recommend starting with solutions that address specific pain points rather than implementing technology broadly for its own sake. It’s important to be transparent with your team about the role of AI, emphasizing that these tools will assist rather than replace staff, and focus on using them for repetitive tasks like appointment scheduling and intake processing. It’s also important to partner only with HIPAA and SOC 2-compliant platforms to ensure patient data security, implement proper data encryption and access controls, and maintain transparency with patients about how their information is being handled. Weave prioritizes security and compliance in all our AI implementations to protect both practices and their patients.
Looking ahead, what’s your vision for the future of AI in healthcare, and how do you see it redefining patient-provider interactions?
AI will continue to improve and provide specialty-level knowledge and decision support to primary care physicians. This evolution will make quality healthcare more accessible and equitable, particularly for underserved populations. Over the next decade, predictive ML models will enable providers to anticipate patient needs before symptoms arise, allowing for truly proactive care plans. And by embedding real-time conversational assistants into telehealth and in-office workflows, practices can maintain continuous patient engagement improving adherence, reducing no-shows, and freeing clinicians to focus on the most complex cases.
Abhi Sharma
SVP of Technology at Weave
Abhi Sharma is the SVP of Technology at Weave. He is an experienced technology leader with a track record of scaling high-performing engineering and product teams to drive AI-powered innovation. He has held leadership roles at Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft, and most recently led R&D efforts for Twilio’s communications business, advancing AI-driven omnichannel experiences and scaling infrastructure for hundreds of billions of messages annually. Abhi holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.