Microsoft has acquired Nuance Communications Inc. a provider in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across multiple industries, including healthcare.

Driven by a shared vision to build outcomes-based AI, Microsoft and its newly acquired Nuance will enable healthcare organizations to accelerate their business goals with security-focused, cloud-based solutions infused with powerful, vertically optimized AI. Customers will benefit from enhanced consumer, patient, clinician and employee experiences, and ultimately improved productivity and financial performance.

“Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance’s best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings,” says Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft. “This powerful combination will help providers offer more affordable, effective and accessible healthcare, and help organizations in every industry create more personalized and meaningful customer experiences. I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome the Nuance team to our Microsoft family.”

As digital transformation accelerates, organizations in every sector across the globe can address challenges that will have a fundamental impact on their success—from reducing clinician burnout and enhancing early detection and treatment of disease in healthcare to creating personalized customer experiences and supporting employees’ productivity and well-being in financial services, retail and telecommunications.

Microsoft with the newly acquired Nuance cloud-based AI solutions can help meet business goals and address healthcare organizations’ most pressing needs. In addition, Microsoft and Nuance can strengthen organizations’ ability across industries to scale their impact by offering the services consumers, patients and employees rely on, when or where they need them.

“Combining the power of Nuance’s deep vertical expertise and proven business outcomes across healthcare, financial services, retail, telecommunications and other industries with Microsoft’s global cloud ecosystems will enable us to accelerate our innovation and deploy our solutions more quickly, more seamlessly and at greater scale to solve our customers’ most pressing challenges,” says Mark Benjamin, CEO of Nuance. “As Microsoft and Nuance come together as one organization, we are excited about the opportunities ahead for our technology, employees, customers and partners.”

Benjamin will remain CEO of Nuance and report to Guthrie.