Epic’s “Cool Stuff Ahead” session is always part product showcase, part theatre, part signal to the market.

This year, the signals were unusually clear.

Epic is moving beyond the EHR.

What follows is the agenda that really mattered.

1. Opening Act: Judy Faulkner, Cowboy Theatre and a Much Bigger Strategy

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner opened the Executive Address in trademark style, dressed in Western attire and joined by a miniature Highland bull named Scotty.

The staging was playful.

The underlying strategy was not.

Across the session, Epic revealed a company increasingly positioning itself as the operating system for healthcare, spanning clinical workflows, AI, patient engagement, finance, workforce, payments, research and hospital operations.

The EHR now looks less like the destination and more like the base layer.

2. Cosmos: 320 Million People and 23 Billion Encounters

The biggest number of the day was 320 million.

That is the number of people now represented in Cosmos, Epic’s de identified data network.

Alongside that sits 23 billion clinical encounters.

That scale matters because Epic’s AI strategy increasingly depends on the ability to compare one patient against enormous populations of others.

For competitors, this may be one of Epic’s strongest advantages.

Data at this scale becomes infrastructure.

3. Ergo: Epic Gives Its AI Strategy a Name

Epic is calling its healthcare intelligence model Ergo.

The idea is deliberately broader than artificial intelligence alone.

Epic describes Ergo as AI combined with human experience, judgement, empathy, intuition and common sense.

That framing matters.

Epic is not presenting AI as something sitting outside the medical record.

It is being embedded directly into the clinical workflow.

4. Art: The Clinician AI Layer

Art is becoming one of the most important parts of Epic’s AI strategy.

Chart by Art is now live in 74 organisations.

Coming next are live patient look alikes, common diagnoses, suggested tests and best care recommendations.

Ask Art allows clinicians to question the patient chart conversationally.

Evidence in Art will bring in drug references, organisational protocols and clinical guidance.

Clinician Portrait will tailor the system according to a clinician’s background and previous use.

Nurses are also getting voice enabled Art, already live across 11 health systems.

The direction is obvious.

Epic wants AI to sit beside the clinician throughout the consultation.

5. Cosmos Curiosity: What Happens When There Is No Published Answer?

Cosmos Curiosity may be one of the more ambitious ideas presented.

It is currently being validated to offer possible answers for unusual patient conditions, even where published clinical evidence is limited.

The premise is simple.

If traditional research cannot answer the question, perhaps patterns hidden across hundreds of millions of records can.

If validated safely, that could become one of the more consequential uses of Epic’s data network.

6. Emmie: MyChart Gets Its Own AI Assistant

Patients are also getting a much more intelligent interface.

Emmie is Epic’s AI assistant within MyChart.

It can answer questions, support scheduling, assist with pre admission testing, generate risk scores and extract information from scanned documents.

It is also being developed to make post discharge voice calls and suggest follow up appointments.

That matters because patient portals are rapidly evolving from static record access into active care navigation.

MyChart is becoming a front door.

7. Penny, Cogito and the Agent Factory

Epic’s AI ecosystem is becoming crowded.

Penny is a conversational action assistant.

Cogito Assistant produces dynamic visualisations.

Agent Factory gives organisations access to around 120 AI features which customers can adapt to their own needs.

Epic’s message is increasingly clear.

Why buy dozens of separate AI tools if your core platform already provides them?

That question will be uncomfortable for a large part of the health technology market.

8. The Intelligent Exam Room

One of the more futuristic concepts was the Intelligent Exam Room.

The display adapts to the patient while they wait.

When the clinician enters, the screen shifts into the physician view.

Wearable data can appear automatically.

The significance is less about the screen itself and more about the philosophy.

Epic wants the software to understand who is in the room and what they need next.

9. MyChart Is Becoming an Ecosystem

MyChart continues to expand well beyond appointments and test results.

Around 346 organisations are now live on MyChart Central.

Epic says approximately 300,000 people have registered as organ donors through MyChart, making it the largest source of donor registrations in the United States.

MyChart Bedside also allows friends and family to send cards while hospital screens can display personalised patient information.

Patient engagement is becoming one of Epic’s most important battlegrounds.

10. AI Is Speeding Up Epic Itself

One of the most striking announcements concerned Epic’s own software development.

The company says its release cycle has accelerated from roughly 18 months to three months.

Even more remarkably, Epic says those three month releases now contain more code than the old 18 month releases.

Half of Epic’s code is now being distributed through its cloud based Nebula environment.

Healthcare organisations may soon face a strange inversion.

Software development is becoming faster than hospitals can absorb change.

11. Epic Ops: The EHR Company Moves Into ERP

This may ultimately be one of the most important parts of the agenda.

Epic Ops is the company’s developing enterprise platform for workforce, supply chain and financial management.

Teamwork handles staff scheduling and timekeeping.

Epic Ops will predict supply requirements.

Abacus supports cost accounting.

This takes Epic directly into territory historically occupied by enterprise software vendors.

The EHR is becoming the distribution platform for a much wider portfolio.

12. Autonomous Coding and Revenue Recovery

Epic is also moving deeper into revenue cycle operations.

Autonomous coding will assess confidence and automatically route uncertain cases to human reviewers.

Another capability will identify underpayments and recover lost revenue.

These are not glamorous announcements.

They may be extremely valuable.

For CFOs, automated revenue recovery may generate more interest than another chatbot.

13. Epic Savvy: Payments Come In House

Epic Savvy is the company’s native payment platform.

The idea is to reduce dependence on external payment gateways.

Pay by bank functionality is intended to reduce credit card costs.

Again, the strategy is consistent.

Epic is pulling more functions that once sat outside the platform into the platform itself.

14. AI Governance Gets a Dashboard

As organisations deploy more AI, Epic is also introducing Pulse.

Pulse will monitor AI use and cost and compare those costs with the value being created.

That may sound administrative.

It could become essential.

Healthcare organisations are rapidly accumulating AI tools without always having a clear understanding of utilisation, cost or return.

Epic wants to make that measurable.

15. Clinical Trials Move Into Epic

Epic’s clinical trials management system is expected to begin with early adopters in November.

This is strategically important.

Research has historically required separate systems, separate workflows and separate infrastructure.

Epic increasingly wants trials to sit within the same environment as routine clinical care.

That could materially change how hospitals identify, recruit and manage research participants.

16. Voice AI Is Coming Everywhere

Incoming voice AI is coming.

Voice AI referral scheduling is coming.

Post discharge AI voice calls are coming.

Clinicians can increasingly speak directly to Art.

The keyboard may not disappear from healthcare any time soon.

But Epic clearly believes voice will become one of the dominant interfaces into clinical software.

17. Care Everywhere Reaches Nine Billion Record Exchanges

Epic says Care Everywhere exchanged nine billion records over the past year.

More than half were exchanged with non Epic providers.

That is an important point.

Epic’s network is valuable partly because it increasingly connects beyond Epic itself.

Around 90 percent of Epic organisations in the US are also live on or implementing TEFCA.

Interoperability is becoming less of a side feature and more of the infrastructure underneath the platform.

18. Epic Goes International

Epic now operates across 17 countries.

Its international operation includes around one million users, 12.5 million MyChart members and approximately 820 employees.

The warning from Epic leadership was particularly interesting.

Health systems need to move quickly on AI because patients will not wait.

If hospitals do not provide intelligent digital tools, consumer technology companies will.

That may be one of the most important strategic observations from the entire session.

19. Smaller Providers Are Getting Smaller Versions of Epic

Epic is also broadening the market it can serve.

Organisations without access to Community Connect can use Sonnet, Orchard and Garden Plot.

Flower Pot is being developed for very small practices.

Garden Plot is also being extended towards smaller hospitals.

That potentially expands Epic’s reach far beyond the large academic health systems with which the company is traditionally associated.

20. The Real Takeaway

The biggest reveal from “Cool Stuff Ahead” was not Art.

It was not Emmie.

It was not Cosmos.

It was not Epic Ops.

It was the way all of these pieces now fit together.

Cosmos supplies the data.

Art supplies clinical intelligence.

Emmie supplies the patient interface.

Agent Factory supplies automation.

Epic Ops moves into enterprise operations.

Savvy moves into payments.

Clinical trials move research into the same environment.

Pulse measures whether the AI is actually worth the money.

Epic spent decades becoming healthcare’s system of record.

UGM 2026 suggested its next ambition is considerably larger.

It wants to become the system of intelligence, the system of action and ultimately the operating layer beneath the health system itself.