Name: Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: What AI Means For Health
Uploaded: 2024-10-15
Duration: 18 min 46 s
Description: Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive Global Fidji Simo, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune

Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive Global Fidji Simo, Chief Executive Officer, Instacart Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Content Officer, Fortune

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: What AI Means For Health

Conferences

Good morning. That was an awesome to get to know you. Thank you all for participating and thank you both for starting us off today with the agenda. Uh I think personally one of the most exciting use cases of the A I teacher is in health and in wellness and how it can improve all of our lives, especially through um not just, you know, the drug advancements that we're going to see but through behavioral changes and hyper personalization. So excited to talk to you both about that. But first, I want to talk about a really big overarching question. Um America spends more than any other country on health care but has a lower life expectancy than any other wealthy nation. Do you think that A I can actually move the needle here? Is this something this is, do you feel hopeful when you think about all the advances you're seeing in A I and your roles in it as your companies? Maybe Fiji, we could start with you? I think, you know, fundamentally at the heart of this problem is a data problem. And I think with A I, we're going to have way more ability to collect a lot more data, to mine that data, to find better insights and then to use those insights to tell people how to change their behavior. If you look at nutrition, which is obviously the thing I know the most with Instacart, there's also really like fascinating stuff which is that the healthcare system in the US spends about a trillion dollars on diet related diseases. That is the size of the US FOOD system. So that means that for every dollar you spend on food, the health care system spends an additional dollar treating you for from all of the problems that the food creates. That's pretty mind boggling when you think about it. And in fact, there is a real business case to solving that. Theres a lot of studies that show that if insurance companies funded the cost of healthy food, they would save $180 billion down the line, which is like a massive amount. But in order to do that, you actually need technology platforms and solutions that makes that easy. You need insurance companies to have a tech platform that can scale food as medicine. You need doctors to be able to prescribe food as easily as it is to prescribe medication. And right now, that's simply not the case. And then you need patients to be able to follow these changes in behavior in a way that's really that simple for them to be able to do. So that you can see over time this number of changing and go ahead. Well, I think Fiji is so absolutely right. And actually we are excited to thrive to be working with Instacart to address that. But the truth is that right now healthcare systems everywhere, not just in the US are literally breaking under the burden of chronic diseases in America alone. We have 130 million people with chronic diseases. We are spending over $4 trillion in health care. 17% of our GDP and the numbers are getting worse every year. I mean, anybody here who is a self insured, employer knows how deep the problem is. And there is this tool that uh Fiji alluded to, which is our daily behavior. That is kind of the neglected tool in health care. And yet if you look at the science, 7% of our health is our genes. Um at most 30% is medical care and the rest is our daily behaviors. Our motor arthritis health is what happens between doctor visits. Good point. You know, people go and have their annual physical and what happens in between. How are you sleeping? What are you eating? What's your stress level? Are you moving? We don't even call it exercise, movement, stress management connection. These are the five key behaviors, sleep food movement, stress management connection. Addressing this is really a miracle drug and A I has a unique power to address this problem because of hyper personalization right now. Even if your doctor uh mentions food, they are most likely to tell you go on a Mediterranean diet. People have no clue how they go about that. Um A I will know everything about you. The A I uh health coach that we are building in partnership with open an A I collect all your data, everything you are willing to give us biometric data, lab, data, medical data, but also your preferences. What foods do you like? How do you like to move and exercise? How do you sleep? And then the nudges and recommendations are hyper personalized. I mean, it may tell you at 315, you are picking up your daughter from school, go on a 10 minute walk in the afternoon, you normally have three sodas. Can you replace one of them with sparkling water and lemon? So it's very, very detailed and very applicable to you. And therefore through what I tried, we call micro steps, tiny little incremental changes. You can begin to adopt healthier habits. That's so interesting. Yeah, and you've said that behavior changes are the miracle drug and it sounds like you think through hyper personalization behaviors can be changed. We can you can nudge us in the right direction. Maybe finally use phone notifications for as opposed to stress. Um So one thing I did want to address is, you know, I think the most high functioning ceos have feel personal about the mission that they're solving. I know health is personal for both of you. You have high powered jobs. You always have, you're doing a lot and Arian, I think you might have been the first person on the planet medically diagnosed with burnout in 2007. Um, so I wanted to chat with you both. I know, um Fiji recently launched something called Metro Dora that's personal for you. Can you just talk about your personal health journeys and why this is a personal mission? Of course, um In 2020 I was kind of falling apart from head to toe is the best way to describe it. And I was diagnosed with a new iun condition. And um I realized that the level of research on these conditions were absolutely appalling very much in the same vein as autoimmune conditions. But 80% of the patients are women. And when I asked my doctors, the researchers in the field, why are these conditions impacting women so disproportionately, the answer was, I don't know, like they had no idea and we still don't fundamentally know why like autoimmune conditions impact women more than men. And that seemed to me like very terrifying that I would be diagnosed with a chronic illness that's incurable and that there was pretty much no research being done to explain the biology behind these conditions. And so I set out to create Metro Dora, which is essentially the idea of partnering with patients to enroll them in research and gather all of the 360 data points on them very similar to what you just described. But we look at their genetics, we look at their immune profiling, we look at our reported symptoms, we look at their environment and the beauty of A I is that in the past, these data sets were very siloed. And even if you wanted to analyze a ton of genomic data, that was a huge endeavor that could take many months. Now, let alone if you wanted to do that across all of the data points I mentioned. But now because we have this tool that allows us to analyze giant data sets, we're going to be able to understand patterns we couldn't understand before. And I fundamentally believe that the chronic diseases we're dealing with are not well suited for the current health care system that we have, which is really treating you as a set of body organs, right? Like you go to the cardiologist for your heart and the gynecologist just thinks you're a giant walking uterus, but it just happens to be that we are a whole body and all of these systems interact together. And I believe that by collecting the data about this very complex biology and analyzing it all together, we're going to understand these much more complex disease processes and be able to address them at the root source in very different ways. So that that's basically the mission of Metro Dora and why that's so, you know, important and personal because I can. And I said, I don't think we're on the path to solving chronic illness or at current cost and speed. I think we just got amazing tools with A I to allow us to do that. But it's really up to us on how we're going to deploy them in our organization in new applications in order to change the course one. And Ariana, I know it's personal for you as well in your book, thrive one of your many, many books. You're talking about how the lent this pursuit of success, money and power is actually killing us. Um And that we should be focused on other things. Instead, can you talk about how you've evolved in your house as you know, Alison, for me, it, it was really a personal wake up call when I collapsed two years into building the Huffington Post and divorced mother of two little girls. And I thought I didn't have the luxury to take care of myself. And I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone. I was diagnosed with burnout. And that was actually the beginning of covering these things relentlessly at the Huffington Post. And, and realizing that we had defined what is a good life as simply a successful life based on status and money and ignored our health and well being, which is central, you know, we work with a lot of you, a lot of your companies here and sometimes CEO say, oh, you know, well being is so soft, you know, we need to focus on productivity and business metrics. Well being is a productivity multiplier if your employees are sick or stressed or depleted. Do you think they are going to perform at their best? So that's really what we are recognizing right now and that you can actually make huge changes with these micro steps. And you know, my favorite micros step um I thrive and we have thousands is the 62nd reset that I was showing you, which is the recognition again based on science. It's very important and to base all interventions on data and science so that they are not seen as warm and fuzzy and reset is based on this neuroscience that tells us that stress is unavoidable. If there is anybody here who doesn't have stress in their lives. Can you please meet me afterwards? But cumulative stress is avoidable and we can interrupt it in 60 to 90 seconds by focusing on conscious breathing on things that bring us gratitude and joy. We have hundreds of them that they are fed to, let's say employees on Microsoft teams or Slack or at contact centers and the results are absolutely amazing and it's 60 seconds. But my favorite thing is creating our own personalized resets. We have one for um Fiji, we have one for me who is people and things that give you joy quotes, music and to know that in 60 seconds you can interrupt. That cycle is really amazing because nobody can say I don't have 60 seconds. Yeah. Very efficient, very efficient stress saver. Good, good pro tip. Um, so I want to switch the topic a little bit. You both have a nice window into open A, I actually, um, the hot company of the planet, actually, 100 and $56 billion valuation. Um Fiji sits on the board, Ariana. You have uh co created thrive A I with open a sorry, thrive A I with open A I start up fund and S A. So I'm curious, you have this vantage point into the future of generative A I, you're sitting up close, you're apparently, I think there's probably you, I would assume frequent board meetings. Um What is the future of generative A I look like from your vantage points? Um Any concerns about some turnover recently or anything? We're gonna need another two hours. So I, I would say, I think we're about to witness a massive explosion in intelligence. And imagine if every single one of you had a phd level assistant in your discipline available 24 7 to help you realize anything that's on your mind. I think that we're very close to being able to realize the dream and being able to uh as a result, which is like abundance of intelligence, crack problems that we haven't cracked before I talked about biology earlier, but really cracked a variety of problems. And so that gets me incredibly excited. At the same time, I think that historically, we have seen that it's not always obvious how to translate the scientific breakthrough into people's lives and actually giving them all of the upsides and minimize the downsides of this breakthrough. If you look at scientific discovery in general, usually there is a gap of 17 years between a scientific breakthrough being discovered and that breakthrough impacting patients in the clinic 17 years is a really long time. And so my hope is that A I also helps us like really narrow that gap. But I know from experience that it is going to take a while for society to really absorb this massive innovation that's coming our way and actually turn it into applications that are really useful. I call myself a pragmatic technologist. And at Instacart, I really gave the mandate to the team. Let's not do A I for A I's sake, we're not checking a box here. Let's figure out the customer problems we've always wanted to solve and figure out if I can help us solve them. Uh And I think that's uh that's gonna be the right approach of like seeing it as a tool, seeing it as a tool that can massively accelerate solving the business and customer problems we're all solving uh so that we can put this goodness in the hands of people as, as fast as possible. Um Yes, I think um we completely agree here and that's how Sam and I came together to launch this new company because as Fiji said at the moment, the emphasis is um A I and drug development speed A I and diagnostics. But what about A I and everyday health and if A I, not just open A I, but all A I companies are going to be able to touch hearts and minds and convince people that A I can't be for good. We need to have a real impact on people's lives right now and we can do that because of the superhuman memory of A I. It can know everything about you all data points and then personalize the interventions and the micro steps. And uh and we are seeing that it can also democratize access to these behaviors because right now the 1% anybody with resources is all in on changing their behaviors. People are competing with how much sleep they got. I'm wearing my aura ring and you know, how much have you given up ultra processed foods altogether? You know, it's like it's constant, right? But millions and millions of people are being left behind and health inequities are huge and growing bigger every year. There is one statistic that I can't get out of my mind, which is that last year in America, there are 150,000 amputations of legs and toes of people with diabetes. Now we all know this is barbaric and completely avoidable uh diabetes, even if it's not preventable, it's a completely manage disease, not just with drugs, but with behavior. And the change here is not just to see behaviors as prevention, but as optimizing the management of disease. Because for millions of people, the prevention train has left the station. So we are working, for example, with Eli Lilly, they are going directly to consumers. They launch Lily Direct. You can go to Lily Direct, buy your drugs and then you are given the thrive coach for free. And you can say, why do they care? It's going to improve adherence of medication right now, 25% of people do not even fill the first prescription. So once you are engaged with people's daily behaviors, you are going to improve compliance, you are going to improve management of side effects. So the incentives are very aligned. And I actually see Pharma having a big impact here because they are directly into people's behaviors through the drugs that they, they sell. So we started this conversation talking about the health care spending in this country and, and really, um what's happening? One of the biggest fears I think people would have is hyper personalization sounds amazing, but in the wrong hands, it can be used against us. So um we're, you know, almost out of time here. But could you just give us some thoughts on how we can make sure that A I is working for us and not against us when we're giving it the information, what guard rails need to be in place. Well, I think it's all about value um that you give back to the, to the people. And um for example, at my clinic at Medora, we are asking patients to share a lot of data with us, but a lot of research studies don't actually drive results back to patients. So it's like give us your data, trust that something will happen. We actually really prioritize figuring out even though it's very complicated in jail care system. What is the return of results that can actually inform them and change their behavior? And so I think it's about clarity of how your data is going to be used and a very clear exchange of value so that you know exactly what you're getting in return and how you can change your behavior as a result. Wonderful. Thank you both so much. I would love to hear your answer, but we are getting the hook. Thank you both so much. Um And enjoy the next conversation. Thank you. Thank you all.