Balancing AI Expertise and Industry Acumen in Vertical Applications

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Sep 13, 2024

Nikhil Buduma, co-founder and chief scientist of Ambience, shares his deep insights on integrating AI in healthcare. He discusses the essential balance between technical expertise and industry knowledge for creating valuable applications. Nikhil recounts his experiences with AI advances, including the impact of transformer architecture. He emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs and developing tailored models, advocating for close collaboration to enhance patient care and streamline processes in healthcare technology.

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ANECDOTE

Healthcare Calling

Nikhil Buduma's childhood heart conditions and parents' healthcare struggles inspired his healthcare career.
Early exposure to Andrew Ng's machine learning work and the rise of deep learning further cemented this path.

ANECDOTE

Remedy Health's Origin

Nikhil and his co-founder Mike, both with personal healthcare experiences, co-founded Remedy Health in 2015.
They aimed to leverage AI to build a new care delivery model, improving quality, lowering costs, and enhancing the patient experience.

ADVICE

Big Bets & Future Tech

Founders shouldn't be afraid to take big bets on future tech, even if not fully realized today.
Focus on valuable problems and envision the ideal future, rather than limiting yourself to current possibilities.

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In this episode of AI + a16z, Ambience cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma joins Derrick Harris to discuss the nuances of using AI models to build vertical applications (including in his space, health care), and why industry acumen is at least as important as technical expertise. Nikhil also shares his experience of having a first-row seat to key advances in AI — including the transformer architecture — which not only allowed his company to be an early adopter, but also gave him insight into the types of problems that AI could solve in the future.

Here's an excerpt of Nikhil explaining the importance of understanding your buyer:

"If you believe that the most valuable companies are going to fall out of some level of vertical integration between the app layer and the model layer, [that] this next generation of incredibly valuable companies is going to be built by founders who've spent years just obsessively becoming experts in an industry, I would recommend that someone actually know how to map out the most valuable use cases and have a clear story for how those use cases have synergistic, compounding value when you solve those problems increasingly in concert together.

"I think the founding team is going to have to have the right ML chops to actually build out the right live learning loops, build out the ML ops loops to measure and to close the gap on model quality for those use cases. [But] the model is actually just one part of solving the problem.

"You actually need to be thoughtful about the product, the design, the delivery competencies to make sure that what you build is integrated with the right sources of the enterprise data that fits into the right workflows in the right way. And you're going to have to invest heavily in the change management to make sure that customers realize the full value of what they're buying from you. That's all actually way more important than people realize."

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