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Over the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with oncologists and hem/onc specialists across different solid and liquid tumor treatment categories. Early in each of those conversations, I often ask a simple question: what does your digital ecosystem actually look like today?
We end up talking about EMRs, ambient scribes, clinical decision-support tools, and how they keep up with the literature. I wrote recently about Open Evidence after hearing it come up repeatedly. And more recently, another name has started surfacing with surprising consistency: Tempus AI.
I’m always on the lookout for emerging trends and quietly disruptive players in healthcare. My goal in writing is straightforward: to help leaders in commercial, insights, and analytics understand what’s changing and why it matters. Tempus AI is one of those companies that many in pharma may not yet know well, but probably should.
So I did what I usually do in moments like that. I dug in.
The timing feels especially relevant this week. Tempus AI presented earlier today (1/12/26) at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and after reading through the transcript of their presentation, it helped connect a lot of dots I’ve been hearing from clinicians.
Everyone in healthcare is talking about AI right now. But there’s a big difference between talking about AI and actually using it in ways that matter. Tempus’s JPM message was consistent with what’s showing up in the field: they’ve been quietly building toward this moment for years.
Tempus was founded in 2015 and is based in Chicago. At a simple level, they focus on applying AI to genomic and clinical data, primarily in oncology, to support more personalized treatment decisions.
Their business has two main components:
What stood out in their JPM presentation, and aligns with what clinicians describe, is that Tempus didn’t start with AI tools and then look for a place to deploy them. They started with diagnostics, where physicians already live, and wrapped intelligence around those workflows over time.
From the clinician perspective, Tempus AI shows up where it counts. Test results are connected to clinical context. Trial matching happens closer to the point of care. Gaps in guideline-driven care are flagged before they’re missed.
That matters, especially in academic oncology, where complexity is high and time is scarce. Precision medicine only works when insights arrive in the flow of real clinical decisions -- not as an extra step.
Tempus operates in a crowded market neighborhood alongside companies like Foundation Medicine, Guardant Health, and Natera. Many of these organizations do excellent genomic testing.
Tempus’s ambition, though, goes a step further. They’re trying to be a platform: one that connects testing, longitudinal patient data, and biopharma-grade analytics into a single learning system. That’s a harder path, but potentially a more durable one.
Their JPM presentation leaned heavily into this idea of scale and reuse: data collected for patient care also fuels research, which in turn improves future care.
This isn’t a frictionless story.
Some of Tempus’s most advanced AI-driven applications are still early in their revenue impact, largely because reimbursement for AI in healthcare is only just starting to emerge. They’ve also invested heavily over the years to build data infrastructure and software, which means profitability has taken time.
The company acknowledged these realities openly, which I found refreshing. Building platforms in healthcare is slow, capital-intensive, and rarely linear.
AI is pushing us toward a world where precision medicine can reach more patients -- but only if genomic and clinical data are actually integrated into how decisions get made across the system.
That has implications well beyond the clinic. Patient identification, segmentation, trial feasibility, evidence generation, and even launch strategy increasingly depend on platforms like this.
I’m not writing this to cheerlead. I’m writing it because Tempus AI is showing up consistently in clinician conversations and in major industry forums like JPM. That combination usually signals a company worth understanding.
If you work in pharma, biotech, or medtech -- and especially in commercial, insights, or analytics -- Tempus AI is a name you’re likely to hear more often. It’s worth knowing why.
