Dedalus Wants to Orchestrate, Keeping Microsoft Out, Corti’s Playbook

I didn’t have to wait long to get an answer to my question from Monday. kma.Online reported today (translated, emphasis mine):

At this year's DMEA, Dedalus and Corti presented for the first time how their future collaboration is intended to work: "We are positioning Orbis as an orchestrator for various AI agents. Corti has therefore become a technology supplier for us, rather than an application partner," said Dahlweid.

In Thuringia, Florian Schwiecker is certainly a welcome guest at Dušan Trifunović's: "We still have a lot planned," says Trifunović: "And Corti offers us the support we need to take our house to a new level." 

Corti has an Agentic Framework and Dedalus is unsurprisingly planning to use it to integrate different agents in Orbis. This makes sense for Dedalus, since the alternative path is to get demoted to something more akin to a database from which agents source their data. That’s not a very attractive place to be and Dedalus is determined to avoid it, by trying to maintain their position of control.

Keeping Microsoft Out

The article also gives a little bit of a background on the decision behind choosing Corti as a partner:

Professor Michael Dahlweid, Chief Clinical Strategy Officer at Dedalus, who has been responsible for the collaboration with Corti since its inception, also recognized the benefits of Corti. “We were looking for an ambient listening solution because our previous partner was acquired by a US company. The new owner changed the business practices and the pricing model for our existing tool, so we had to look for other options.”

What is missing from the report here is that the previous scribe was the Dragon Medical One - a simple digital dictation too - from Nuance, a US-company, which was acquired in 2022 - a year before the Dedalus partnership - by Microsoft and rebranded as Dragon Copilot.

It is that rebranding and the resulting changes - including higher pricing, adding AI features and the strategic decision to command the healthcare sector - that caused for Dedalus to look for alternatives.

Pre Nuance acquisition Microsoft was strictly focused on the enterprise process side of the hospital, providing business and administrative tools like Microsoft 365. With the Nuance acquisition they put their foot in the clinical side too and entered the HIS lane.

Corti’s Playbook

But if Dedalus is worried that Microsoft will steal their role in the value chain, then they should be equally worried about Corti doing the same. I already made the case about the possibility for Microsoft to act as an agent distribution platform - potentially owning the interface but also enabling the creation of an agent ecosystem - and from what I’ve seen so far, it seems like Corti is walking the same path.