An Insider’s View of Humana’s AI Program

How do you deliver synthetic intelligence into a corporation that’s functioned completely nicely with out it for many years? That was the problem confronted by Humana Chief Data and Analytics Officer Slawek Kierner when he joined the Fortune 42 healthcare insurance coverage supplier in December 2018.

Kierner, who had served as Microsoft’s PowerBI, Dynamics, Cloud and AI Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Microsoft earlier than becoming a member of Humana, recounted his expertise of bringing AI to Humana in the course of the AI Summit in New York this month.

In a session on the occasion, Kierner introduced the method of introducing AI to the group, and Adam Wenchel, co-founder and CEO of machine studying monitoring startup Arthur, launched Kierner and facilitated a question-and-answer session afterward along with his personal questions plus questions from the viewers.

Wenchel identified how shortly AI within the enterprise has developed. Pointing to Wall Street Journal headlines, he famous that in 2016, folks have been nonetheless attempting to determine what it actually was. In 2017, the headlines have been about how AI would take everybody’s jobs. Then headlines targeted on the truth that extra certified professionals have been wanted to facilitate AI. The previous few years headlines have targeted on why AI initiatives fail, Wenchel stated.

“In 2022, we are starting to see this come together,” he stated. “We see the era of the AI-native enterprise.” But that is primarily for large corporations, not mid-sized or small ones.

Large Fortune 500 enterprises are already getting AI fashions deployed. One of these is Humana.

What AI appears to be like like at Humana

Humana operates conventional medical insurance coverage and Medicare, gives medical insurance coverage to US army members, and has additionally expanded to offering house healthcare, sending 50,000 nurses to take care of folks of their properties and supply care, in response to Humana’s Kierner. It additionally operates a value-based care mannequin.

“This generates a lot of data,” Kierner stated. “An important factor that attracted me to Humana from Microsoft is that there is so much data. That creates a lot of opportunities for someone interested in analytics and AI.”

But the brand new position was not with out challenges. For occasion, most of the compute was on-premises, he stated, with out entry to some of the extra trendy applied sciences.

At the start of the transformation, Kierner stated he began with folks engaged on initiatives and areas that wanted modernization.

“We knew we needed to migrate from on-premises to get all the potential the cloud could provide,” he stated. That was one of the methods Humana’s journey adopted the standard enterprise digital transformation journey over the previous couple of years. The course of additionally took classes from profitable IT mission ways of years previous.

For occasion, one of the highest methods Kierner approached the AI transformation was to decide on vital transformational use instances because the preliminary initiatives in order that he may reveal to stakeholders their worth.

The group is a hub-and-spoke mannequin, he defined, with knowledge governance, knowledge analytics, and knowledge science teams constructing horizontal platforms. But there have been additionally a quantity of vertical items, he stated, with integrators and product managers. Amid this crew construction, some of the really key crew members have been these professionals who understood the enterprise course of and will translate buyer must the info scientists and engineers.

Kierner famous that it was vital to measure the initiatives’ successes and report the worth of them, nevertheless it was not a easy job. He took it in just a few totally different levels.

First he measured what number of customers have been shifting to the brand new platforms. Next, the crew measured what number of occasions a member touched an AI-empowered “touch point.”

Finally, there was a degree the place finance and technique groups took an curiosity within the initiatives, analyzing worth in {dollars}. For occasion, they might have a look at the quantity of hospital admissions prevented as a result of higher processes have been adopted.

But don’t anticipate to get so far in a single day, in case your group is pursuing a brand new AI program. Answering an viewers query, Kierner stated that organizations ought to anticipate outcomes to take at the least a yr.

“It depends on the use case,” he stated. “In our case, small use cases have to generate monetary impact in that time frame.”

Finally, for individuals who are nonetheless apprehensive that AI will take their jobs, Kierner stated his group labored to create rather a lot of coaching for high executives and one to 2 ranges down from that.

“We are still coming back with another wave,” he stated. “We still find areas of friction. But we find the more we deploy AI, there is quite a lot of job creation.”

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