The Two AI Strategies That Will Fail

How should healthcare leaders approach AI without getting swept up in the hype?

In our recent episode of CareTalk, "Is AI Coming for Healthcare Jobs?", hosts David E. Williams and John Driscoll break down why healthcare leaders need to stop avoiding the AI conversation and start engaging with it seriously.

Listen to the full episode here

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CareTalk is a weekly podcast that provides an incisive, no B.S. view of the US healthcare industry. Join co-hosts John Driscoll (President U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance) and David Williams (President, Health Business Group) as they debate the latest in US healthcare news, business and policy. 

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Transcript

David: 0:06

So, John, let me bring it down to healthcare and specifically the role of executives, board leaders such as yourself can play. And one is to say, you know, how should healthcare executives be communicating where their workforces right now? I mean, obviously I don't think that we, em embrace the, the block approach of saying 40% of you are gone and get rid of people and here's why. So see what happens. But what, like what, what is the right role? I mean, you see unions organizing around this point about fear of AI in healthcare, and I think that, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's right for people to be worried. What is the leader, what should leadership be doing now with all of this uncertainty?

John: 0:43

Well, as a chairman and as executive in some firms, what I'm trying to do is to make sure that everyone, even at the board level, has some. Working knowledge and use of AI and agents. If you're not playing with these tools, you don't really, it's very hard to have an opinion about it. So the first is to get comfortable with, uh, the tools themselves and really learn about it because it's as, it's as important as electricity was. It's gonna change and effect. A lot of most things we deal with on a day-to-day basis, visibly and invisibly in ways that we can measure, in ways that we can't predict. So you wanna have some working knowledge of it. And I think, again, I think that for any executive you want kind of guardrails on governance. Um, in my case, you know, one of the things we are communicating in the companies I'm working with is AI is not gonna be used to just eliminate jobs. It's going to be used to empower people who have the jobs they have today because frankly, there's more demand than there is supply of good care. And good solutions in healthcare. But that's a, that's a choice, David. I mean, I think some executives are gonna take the, um, the chainsaw Jack Dorsey approach of just hacking jobs and seeing what happens. I don't think that's a sustainable strategy in the healthcare ecosystem. And I think others are gonna try to take the ostrich strategy, which is, we'll, ignore it and see what happens. No, both of those are gonna fail. Um, this is, this is a massively important. Change in the way all work happens and the way people leverage information. And I think that, uh, and em and it and, and it, and it's gonna empower different constituencies in different ways. You gotta be playing with these tools and you gotta put up guardrails and have goals.

David: 2:32

Well, thanks for that, John. I look forward to continuing to explore these topics, uh, as, as the AI revolution unfolds.