Transcript
Eric Ly: It matters because there's a shortage of healthcare professionals these days, nurses, even doctors, and it's going to get worse in the coming years. The other thing that's happening is that if you look at healthcare, we all know that the industry is big, but it's also very costly. We're not talking about the drugs and the pharmaceuticals. The care itself is also very expensive. And then you have a trend where the population is getting older, so as time goes on we're going to need more and more care as a society. When you add all that together it's kind of a perfect storm that we all want to avoid. We want to have efficient healthcare, we want to have personalized healthcare. I believe AI is also going to be part of the answer here, AI-powered healthcare. But there's always going to be a need for people, for doctors, for nurses, and others in healthcare. We're trying to bring the cost down, bring the administrative cost down, and continue to help healthcare professionals get to the bedside to deliver that healthcare that people are going to need more and more of as time goes.
Matthew Mottola: Let's dive into AI. I always tell partners and buyers, I'm just so glad I'm not you. I don't really touch that sensitive a data. I built a product at Microsoft back in 2018 and everything came back to trust, data security, and data privacy. Now at Human Cloud I can ship stuff in days that used to take years. I'm glad I'm not dealing with healthcare, banking, sensitive data. You are. You are seeing the riskiest, most hypercritical applications of AI. What is your point of view when we talk about AI?
Eric Ly: There's a big question right now that everybody's trying to answer: what is going to be the impact of AI on the job market, on people going to work? Is it going to actually displace people? That's a really important question. Most certainly there are going to be certain industries that are going to be more impacted than others. For example, you have software engineers. Some of the more entry-level positions are definitely getting eliminated because of AI and what it's able to do in terms of coding. When I started as a software engineer, those jobs are starting to go away. Thankfully I'm no longer coding. I've moved onward, upward, and I'm still of value. But those jobs are going to go away. But there are certain industries where people, as far as we can see, are going to continue to be needed. What a surprise to know that some of the white-collar jobs are going to go away, but a lot of the trades, plumbers and electricians and construction workers, as far as we can tell, are not going to go away because they involve things that robots cannot do, at least not yet. And kind of the same thing in healthcare. We still feel that the care that a human can provide to a patient is sacrosanct and is going to be there for a long time. Certainly there are some aspects of that care that can be automated through AI, and that's probably going to be a good thing. In certain cases, diagnosis, things like that, makes a lot of sense. Personalized healthcare that's AI-enabled is going to do a much better job, because we simply don't have enough healthcare providers to personalize that care for everybody. So AI is going to have a part in that. It's going to be a very interesting world where we are definitely going to be displacing certain jobs and AI is going to take them, but there are certain industries where they're going to continue to exist. And one more point about AI: I think we're going to see not only some of the expected use cases, but there are also going to be some surprises that we never thought would have been possible that are literally just right around the corner, even in the next 12 months, even in the next couple of years.
