AI scribe startups’ tricky path in SEA

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In focus

• ​​Convincing doctors isn’t the hardest part of building medical AI scribe startups in SEA
• ​​Fresh off the books: Grab’s latest financial overview
• A look back at Grab’s effort to embrace AI at scale

Hello reader,

In 2000, Amazon invited third-party sellers onto its marketplace with a simple pitch: Access millions of customers. Sellers took the deal, built their businesses on the platform, and in doing so handed Amazon a detailed map of exactly what consumers wanted to buy.

The ecommerce giant then launched Amazon Basics – a line of products going up against the same bestsellers. And just like that, the partner became the competition. It’s a playbook that keeps repeating itself in tech, with medical AI scribes as the latest example.

In 2023, AI scribe startup Abridge partnered with Epic, the dominant electronic medical records (EMR) provider in the US. Two years later, Epic announced that it was building its own AI scribe with Microsoft. The tool went live in February 2026, and Abridge suddenly found itself competing with the partner that had given it scale.

For startups bringing AI scribes to Southeast Asia, the story is hard to ignore. Working with EMR providers is the fastest way to onboard hospitals. The bigger the partner, however, the more likely they are to eventually build what these startups are selling.

That’s just one of the hurdles. Our report further shows that regulatory and linguistic barriers add another layer of complexity in a region where doctors often switch between multiple languages during a single consultation. Adoption is growing, but the path is narrower than it looks.

Doctor burnout is a real problem worth addressing. Whether the startups solving it get to keep the business is an entirely different question.

Also in today’s edition: Grab just posted a strong Q1 performance, with its revenue up 24% year over year and its loan portfolio more than doubling. Feel free to dig into the charts, or you may also see this piece we pulled from our archives for the backstory on how the company thinks about AI.

Glenn Kaonang, journalist

Top Stories

1️⃣ Fixing doctor burnout with AI is harder than it looks in SEA

Image credit: Ulla

Despite their promise to address doctor burnout, medical AI scribes remain uncommon in some Southeast Asian countries. In Indonesia, doctors are unsure about the accuracy of local medical AI scribes because they often mix the Indonesian language with regional ones like Sundanese or Javanese during patient consultations.

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