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AI CONFESSIONAL
The real barriers to generative AI adoption in healthcare
Where do things break down on the road to generative AI transformation? A Chief Innovation Officer shares anonymously from behind the scenes at a Fortune 500 health system.
As CIO, what message did you get from leadership around generative AI?
F500 CIO: Executives in health systems know how to operate hospitals. They don't necessarily understand advanced technologies like AI. So, they don't ask the right questions about the technology and its potential impact on their organization to get to the unlock. It's not even analysis paralysis, because they're not analyzing things. It’s more like fear of the unknown. Especially when you're in such a regulated environment as healthcare where if anything goes wrong, it has the potential to really go wrong.
So there’s interest in bringing in generative AI, but then you start to hit roadblocks. Where does the resistance come from?
There’s little to no incentive for these systems to really do something different. Their business models aren’t akin to Apple, Amazon, or Google, where profit from one successful part of the business can be used to fund new innovations or technologies with longer payback periods.
Why would a Chief Information Officer stick his or her neck out? They have to keep the lights on with many legacy technology systems and are facing other mounting short-term ROI pressures from their Board.
Who is going to win the AI race in healthcare?
Startups have a leg up right now with the talent to build generative AI solutions quickly, but healthcare has never been thought of as a “fast” adopter of technology. I think you’ll see a few startups really land and expand to create more of a platform to support specific areas in healthcare. The ones only focused on point solutions will unfortunately fade away.
At the end of the day, it’s not the best technology that wins—which, as a technologist, hurts me to admit! Instead, it’s distribution and scale that win in enterprise healthcare. I’ve seen some of the best technology in the world, but if you have no distribution channel in this industry, it is really hard to gain any real traction.
Head here to read the full interview.
CHART OF THE WEEK
AI tools will join humans to form one massive workforce
Do you hear that? It’s the heartbeat of a new market.
US businesses spend roughly $5T on knowledge workers every year and just $230B on B2B SaaS. But as AI tools begin to automate processes and act more like individual workers—like Devin, the first AI engineer—these lines will become blurred as SaaS and the labor market converge to form one new market, according to a new position paper from NfX.
Basically, we’ll move from Software-as-a-Service to Service-as-a-Software. Instead of software being this thing you buy that needs to be operated by humans, it will increasingly mimic the behavior and output of human workers, blending software and human capital into one giant market.
Short term, NfX anticipates a labor contraction as companies adopt AI workers. (That’s code for the AI-fueled layoffs everyone is worried about.) Long term, though, they see knowledge work itself expanding as this new tech wave drives economic growth. They also see the margins of service businesses expanding.
WATERCOOLER
Devin backlash: Did they overpromise in the demo?
When Devin came out early reviewers were clear: This thing is impressive, even though it only solved about 1 in 7 GitHub issues unassisted in tests. Some articles asked: Is the beginning of the end of the software engineer?
Now, though, a fresh round of critiques is pointing out some areas where the Devin demo may have overpromised.
A YouTuber started digging into the claim from the Devin release video that the tool completed a basic coding gig on Upwork. The details are a little foggy—it seems like he’s most upset about the description of the video on the Cognition Labs website. “The company lied about what Devin could do in the video description,” he said. But in the end, it’s probably just another case of an AI demo video that made the product look cooler than it actually was.
Some amount of backlash feels inevitable because the hype around Devin was so intense—even for the already hype-intensive generative AI space. But we wouldn’t recommend ruling Devin out completely just yet. The potential is real, even if the video description was misleading.
CLIENT SPOTLIGHT
How Plato Systems brought spatial intelligence to manufacturing with a world-class A.Team
The management tools for overseeing factory floors are antiquated and overdue to be disrupted by advancements in spatial intelligence. Enter Plato Systems. They use multi-dimensional data from Internet of Things (IoT) systems to bring efficiency and safety standards into the 21st Century.
In the last few decades, manufacturing facilities have invested heavily in the digitization and instrumentation of their manufacturing processes. But a comprehensive connection between machine data and human activities has remained elusive.
Plato Systems introduces its AI-powered Spatial Intelligence Technology, a novel solution that allows operations managers to harmonize machine and human activity data, offering valuable insights for their operations teams along with streamlined root-causing tools that facilitate rapid efficient review of problematic operations.
EVENTS
Dive into the Future of Health on April 24
Building health tech in the age of AI isn’t easy—raising capital, hiring the right people, and figuring out how the fast-changing tech landscape will impact your roadmap. Then, when you're ready to scale, even bigger challenges come up.
If you’re free on April 24th, we’ll be diving into AI's transformative power in reshaping healthcare at A.Team’s Gen AI Salon: The Future of Health, with leaders from Mount Sinai, HCA, LifePoint Health, and Intelerad Medical Systems.
If you're not in New York, you can join virtually via livestream!
DISCOVERY ZONE
You can now merge any combination of your favorite LLMs. Big-AGI lets you switch between 100+ models including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, and even local models like Ollama’s.
MEME