AI Insights from Davos

• 1 min read

Last week I joined my husband at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The annual gathering brings together heads of state, CEOs, economists, and academics to discuss major global challenges. I attended dozens of sessions across a wide range of topics, and AI came up in every single one.

One session focused on AI and the future of work. The consensus was that AI will augment humans rather than replace them. That’s because AI and humans have complementary strengths. AI excels at processing massive amounts of data quickly and performing repetitive tasks without fatigue. Humans will remain essential for understanding context, making ethical judgments, using creativity, adapting to novel situations, and building trust.

In another session, Bill Gates announced Horizon1000, a partnership between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI to bring AI tools to primary care clinics across Africa. Some African countries have just one doctor per 50,000 people. AI can help bridge this gap by helping frontline health workers with clinical decisions, record-keeping, and multilingual communication. This is a great example of AI making healthcare workers more effective, not obsolete.

There are many ways AI can improve healthcare in the US as well:

  1. Reducing administrative burden: Doctors can spend less time on documentation, insurance authorizations, and billing, and more time with patients.
  2. Improving diagnostics: AI can analyze medical images to flag potential issues and identify patterns, helping radiologists work faster and more accurately.
  3. Personalizing treatment: By combining genetic information, medical history, and treatment response, AI can predict which therapies are most likely to work for individual patients.
  4. Accelerating drug discovery: AI can identify promising drugs and predict their behavior. Shout out to my son’s company, Axiom, which is doing just this!
  5. Cutting costs: AI can make workflows more efficient, reduce errors, catch problems earlier, and improve care coordination, all helping to address the healthcare cost crisis.

AI can feel threatening. There are certainly valid concerns regarding privacy, job displacement, inequalities, and safety. Disruption is inevitable.

But AI isn’t going away. The genie is out of the bottle.

Our best option is to engage with AI intentionally and critically. Learning to use these tools effectively is a practical skill that we should all develop. There are countless ways AI can be used for good. But we also need to question where it might cause harm and advocate for guardrails to prevent misuse.