Founder and CEO Avinav Nigam discusses TERN Group’s push to create a governed, predictive operating layer for healthcare recruitment, retention, and long-term workforce planning.
Healthcare systems worldwide are grappling with an unprecedented workforce crisis, marked by chronic talent shortages, rising care demands and mounting regulatory complexity. TERN Group is positioning itself at the forefront of this disruption with an AI-powered workforce infrastructure platform designed to transform how health systems recruit, deploy, and retain clinical talent.
Rather than functioning as a traditional staffing intermediary, TERN Group is building a governed, auditable operating layer that enables faster hiring, predictive workforce planning and long-term career development, all underpinned by human oversight and regulatory alignment, custom built for the UAE’s Emirates Health Services under the leadership of H.E. Mubaraka Ibrahim (Chief AI Officer EHS) and Dr. Yousif Mohammed Al Serkal (Director General EHS).
Avinav Nigam, Founder and CEO of TERN Group, sits at the intersection of platform-building and purpose-led healthtech. A founder-investor with deep experience in fintech and large-scale marketplaces, he is now applying those same infrastructure principles to one of healthcare’s most urgent challenges: workforce continuity.
Interview excerpts:
How many healthcare professionals have been recruited across EHS assets in the UAE using your platform to date, and what scale targets have you set for the next two years?
We’re still early in the UAE journey, so it would be premature for me to quote a precise number today. What I can share is that in pilot deployments we’ve demonstrated end-to-end recruitment cycles completed in as little as three days—from screening to final interviews—with shortlist accuracy strong enough that the top candidates were hired.
“Globally, we’ve delivered thousands of placements across multiple health systems, and in the UAE, we’re seeing a strong appetite as we move from pilots toward national-level rollout with Emirates Health Services.”
Do you see AI-powered workforce infrastructure becoming as critical to healthcare systems as electronic health records and financial governance platforms?
We’re facing historic global gaps in healthcare and elderly care staffing, and the answer isn’t just recruiting faster—it’s building a long-term workforce operating layer that supports retention, career development, learning, coaching, and well-being. The goal isn’t a broker model; it’s a 30-year career companion approach, similar in importance and depth to the EHR stack, but focused on people and capacity.
How are the platform economics and network effects you built in fintech and marketplaces shaping the future of healthcare workforce intelligence?
The healthcare workforce is uniquely complex—deeply clinical, context-heavy, and regulated—so it can’t be solved with generic recruitment tech. What translates from marketplaces is the idea of building trusted infrastructure at scale: standardised processes, transparency, and removing information arbitrage and exploitation in cross-border hiring. My motivation also came from seeing the system fail close to home—both with a friend in the UK affected by care continuity issues and with exploitation in overseas recruitment—so TERN Group is built around ethical mobility and long-term support, not transactional placements.
Could predictive AI soon enable governments to forecast healthcare talent shortages years in advance rather than months?
Absolutely, and it requires connecting education, skilling and workforce demand into a faster feedback loop. The UAE is leaning into skills assessment—not just knowledge—and that’s the right direction for an AI era where empathy, communication, leadership and pattern recognition become more valuable.
“If governments align skilling programmes with real workforce needs and continuously update national frameworks, forecasting and planning can move from reactive to proactive over multi-year horizons.”
What will it take for regulators to fully trust AI-driven credential verification and competency assessment at a national scale?
Trust comes from collaboration, auditability and closing the gaps that exist today. We want to work hand-in-hand with government frameworks and approved providers—credentialing, education verification and compliance processes—while adding what AI can do uniquely well: technical and language competency assessment, identity and fraud detection, and scanning risk signals across datasets where permitted. The aim is safer, more defensible decisions with human oversight, and fewer blind spots that can lead to patient risk.
How do you see AI agents evolving in workforce planning over the next five years?
We’ve moved from basic chatbots to audio interactions, and now into lifelike two-way video agents—our nursing workforce AI agent is already live, with more agents being developed for leadership development, career coaching and staff wellbeing. The next leap is physical AI: combining human care with AI companions that support continuity between visits, especially for ageing populations and dementia care. That includes medication prompts, hydration and mobility support, tracking vital signs, and reducing loneliness—because continuity of care and continuity of connection are becoming equally important.
