ZocDoc partners with Gemini to enable AI agent booking

ZocDoc has announced a partnership with Gemini to allow AI agents to book doctor appointments directly through its platform. CEO Oliver Karaz stated that the company is making its healthcare scheduling infrastructure available to third parties, including payers and AI platforms, so they can provide seamless booking capabilities to their users. Karaz explained that ZocDoc acts as a distribution layer, allowing providers to integrate once with ZocDoc and have their availability distributed across multiple AI agents and consumer platforms. This strategy aims to solve the fragmentation of healthcare front doors by ensuring that whichever agent or platform a patient uses, the booking process works. The partnership is part of a broader shift where ZocDoc moves from being a destination website to a utility layer for healthcare access, supporting the rise of consumer AI agents that handle tasks like scheduling. Karaz argued that no single company should own the front door to healthcare and that ZocDoc's role is to ensure every door opens, positioning the company as neutral infrastructure rather than a walled garden. The company reports that patients using its platform can typically see a doctor within three days or less, compared to a national average wait time for primary care appointments that has risen from 17 days to 31 days since ZocDoc's inception. ZocDoc achieves this by surfacing last-minute capacity resulting from cancellations, no-shows, and reschedules, effectively increasing provider load factors which are currently around 70% in the wild. The company has integrated with over 175 different EHRs to maintain data accuracy above 99%. ZocDoc has also shifted its business model from a flat subscription fee to a discovery booking model, where providers are charged only when a patient finds them through a general search on the platform. Bookings where a patient seeks a specific doctor are free, lowering the financial barrier for providers to join. This model was approved by regulators after ZocDoc demonstrated its benefits to patients, providers, and payers. The company reports that 97% of providers signed up in the last 12 months joined via word-of-mouth referrals. ZocDoc supports 250 different specialties, including high-acuity areas like oncology, with tens of thousands of oncology bookings in New York City alone.