Transcript

When I Was On The Vendor Side: The AI Demo That Skipped The Workflow Question · Medsolve Dynamics

Yoel Bakas: When I was on the vendor side, I watched a team give a customer a software demo. The tool was supposed to improve the operational efficiency of the Radiation Oncology Department. Two things happened in that meeting that I have watched a dozen times since. The first the vendor team made assumptions about what was actually broken at the customer. They walked into the demo with their own thesis of what was broken at the customer site without having validated that from anybody at the customer's program. Second, they did a generic software presentation. their features. their dashboards. their case examples. None of it tied back to what was clinically broken or operationally broken in that specific department. As the tool evolved over the next year, the vendors started to claim that it was AI enabled without really providing much detail as to what made it AI enabled. And here's the thing I wish I could have told the customer until they really understood what was broken in their own department workflow. In other words, what problem they were actually trying to solve. It didn't matter whether the tool was AI enabled or not. In fact, it didn't matter what tool it was at all. Always define what is broken first and what you are trying to solve. Then look at the tool. Never the other way around.