I am glad that they are lowering costs but is this really about AI? Usually someone can sit down and quickly find ways to reduce costs but the problem is usually the power to actually implement them.
It's like dealing with consultants. The company's employees already know what's wrong but don't have the power to change. Then consultants come in with CEO backing and suddenly change gets made. Consultants (or AI) get the credit but it's really about being to implement.
The article cites a specific example of how a model spat out a positive relationship between pneumonia with existing COPD and the speed of starting nebulizer treatments, which they stated was non-obvious to staff.
This is more of a puffy PR piece for the IT supplier.
The methods they use are very advanced mathematics / graph theory. If we take the modern usage of the word "AI", then this qualifies. These methods are beyond what anyone can do in Excel. Usually data is so big and complex that a manual analysis takes months. It does not scale to sit down and find ways to reduce costs. Using unsupervised pattern detection does scale.
About the consultants vs. engineers and the power to actually implement systems: Many IT systems that call themselves "AI", are not. They require tons of labeled data, a human making assumptions, lack justification and transparency, are not embedded properly in the business (lack UI, documentation, buy-in, data processing), and don't continuously learn.
You need an entire ecosystem of processes and software tools to have the power to change (identifying problems is easy, of course engineers already know what's wrong with their daily work, if they could implement a solution, then a proper engineer would, but they really need a consultant and CEO backing to actually get something actionable).
It's like dealing with consultants. The company's employees already know what's wrong but don't have the power to change. Then consultants come in with CEO backing and suddenly change gets made. Consultants (or AI) get the credit but it's really about being to implement.
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