I think the big issue here is that from a user point of view the "AI" is mostly uninteresting unless it is really amazing and as long as it's not really bad.
As a user I want to resolve my medical issue.
If the AI is really bad, it would become a nuisance and force me to go through annoying and poorly thought through questions to get an appointment, and/or make me answer "wrong" to get to where I want to be. Babylons "AI" had few enough questions it didn't feel like a barrier, so at most it was a minor nuisance.
Had it been really good, maybe I'd have cared, but what does "really good" look like here? If what I have is ambiguous, or need tests, I still need an appointment. From a user point of view there is no happy case there, even if they get it a point where it saves them money, because it doesn't save me money, and I can't tell if it's saved me time, e.g. by routing me to a person better able to help.
So the AI was sold to investors as a means to cut costs by being able to take on more patients per expensive human resource, be it doctors or nurses or others. But you need to make really good decisions so that you don't end up with extra referrals down the line to compensate before you save enough doctors time to fund the software developers and project managers etc. to build that AI.
And it seems like they basically got drunk on the valuations mentioning AI got them, took all they money they could get, and then failed to exercise any reasonable cost control when they should have realised that even if they had something really good, the proportion of revenue per patient they could shunt towards development on a per patient basis is small.
E.g. in the UK, the NHS pays an average of around 160 pounds / $195 per patient per year to GPs to cover everything. The margin you can extract from that after paying doctors and general practice costs doesn't fund a very large development operation until you get to a very significant scale.
As a user I want to resolve my medical issue.
If the AI is really bad, it would become a nuisance and force me to go through annoying and poorly thought through questions to get an appointment, and/or make me answer "wrong" to get to where I want to be. Babylons "AI" had few enough questions it didn't feel like a barrier, so at most it was a minor nuisance.
Had it been really good, maybe I'd have cared, but what does "really good" look like here? If what I have is ambiguous, or need tests, I still need an appointment. From a user point of view there is no happy case there, even if they get it a point where it saves them money, because it doesn't save me money, and I can't tell if it's saved me time, e.g. by routing me to a person better able to help.
So the AI was sold to investors as a means to cut costs by being able to take on more patients per expensive human resource, be it doctors or nurses or others. But you need to make really good decisions so that you don't end up with extra referrals down the line to compensate before you save enough doctors time to fund the software developers and project managers etc. to build that AI.
And it seems like they basically got drunk on the valuations mentioning AI got them, took all they money they could get, and then failed to exercise any reasonable cost control when they should have realised that even if they had something really good, the proportion of revenue per patient they could shunt towards development on a per patient basis is small.
E.g. in the UK, the NHS pays an average of around 160 pounds / $195 per patient per year to GPs to cover everything. The margin you can extract from that after paying doctors and general practice costs doesn't fund a very large development operation until you get to a very significant scale.