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Excited to be heading to Australia this week as part of a five-city talk tour organized by UBS Australia. They’ve assembled a great lineup of speakers who will be exploring the evolving global landscape in business and health tech. I'm keynoting on what's next for AI. The cities and dates for the tour include: Brisbane: February 12 Adelaide: February 13 Melbourne: February 17 Sydney: February 18 Perth: February 20 Along the way I'll also be catching up with some of my favorite AI and digital health experts who are doing great things "Down Under." Oh yeah… It’s summertime in Australia. Not so much in Seattle. T.

I’ve been pondering how many journalists and podcasters I’ve ticked off when answering this question: Where will AI be in a year? My answer has always been simple and honest: No one knows. This week the Chinese start-up DeepSeek is the latest shift in AI’s tectonic plates. Seemingly out of nowhere, it became the top-rated AI app in the United States. Deepseek’s new, open-source AI model rivals the abilities of OpenAI's most recent model—with far less investment and using reduced-capacity chips. Training costs for ChatGPT-4 were over $100 million. Deepseek’s investment was supposedly $6 million. Deepseek’s model improves energy efficiency making AI more accessible to more people and industries and could be welcomed news when it comes to AI’s environmental impact. There’s a lot to be learned about Deepseek’s capabilities. For now, it certainly ups the ante in the AI “space race” for global tech titans and governments. I can hear the hype machines starting to churn as I write this. Here’s a solid piece from Scientific American that outlines what is known. And so: Where will AI be in a year? No one knows. T.

With January comes a sea of predictions for 2025. Many are insightful, but if you're a health leader tracking AI developments, here are three emerging themes to pay attention to. The Great AI Pivot: From FOMO to Value Since the Fall of 2022, AI hasn’t been just a technological shift—it’s been a cultural phenomenon. Conversations about AI spread from the conference room to the dinner table. Organizations adopted it at breakneck speed, and the fear of missing out (FOMO) drove up to 60% of AI’s recent adoption. One study found that 63% of leaders feared their organizations would fall behind if they didn’t join the AI gold rush. In the coming year, forward-thinking leaders will pivot from pursuing limited-value AI applications to investing in ecosystems of people and processes that generate scalable, repeatable value (think innovation flywheel). This is a different mindset compared to the approach taken by many leaders in the last two years. It’s a recognition that AI is here to stay and that creating “value-at-scale” requires the adoption of a growth mindset for what’s ahead.

Welcome to 2025! I'm hopeful it's the year that we'll move from AI FOMO (fear of missing out) to focusing on driving value at scale in support of our missions and enterprises. To get started, Deloitte’s 16th annual Tech Trends report is a great quick read. AI is the common thread of nearly every trend. Moving forward, it will be part of the substructure of everything we do. The report is available here . Here's to an intelligent new year! T.

Looking forward to being back in Singapore next week to speak at/attend APACMed 2024. Healthcare across Asia Pacific is changing. Consumers are increasingly gravitating towards health organizations that provide greater convenience. This includes the use of digital and AI solutions that allow them to be more involved in managing their health.

“It's not how old you are, it's how you are old.” - Jules Renard

While Shakespeare popularized the phrase “the eyes are the window to your soul,” new research suggests that our eyes may also be a window to predicting cardiac, pulmonary, metabolic, and neuropsychiatric diseases.  Physician-researchers from Harvard Medical School, Mass Eye and Ear, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have found that they can estimate how likely a person is to develop eye and other systemic diseases by using AI to combine retinal imaging, genetics, and big data. [i ] Retinal imaging is already a commonplace procedure used by Ophthalmologists and Optometrists to evaluate eye health. However, the results of this study suggest its use could be widened. The findings focus on how the thinning of different layers of the retina correlates to an increased risk of developing ocular, cardiac, pulmonary, metabolic, and neuropsychiatric diseases. Previous studies have shown links between retinal health and health conditions, such as aging, cardiometabolic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, and neurological diseases such as dementia, stroke, and multiple sclerosis. Unlike previous studies that searched for genes associated with overall retinal health, this study delved deeper into the role of the different cell layers that make up the retina. Further research is needed to confirm actual causality, but for now, there is evidence to suggest that retinal imaging might be used in the future to predict and better manage multiple systemic health conditions including poor heart, metabolic, lung, and kidney function. While eye health is critically important on its own, imagine a time when going in for your routine eye examination could also shed light on other areas impacting your future health and well-being. The new study uncovers possibilities for preventive medicine and cross-collaboration between ophthalmology and other areas of medicine. [i] U sing Retinal Images to Predict Risk of Eye and Systemic Diseases, Harvard Medical School News and Research, February 1, 2024, https://hms.harvard.edu/news/using-retinal-images-predict-risk-eye-systemicdiseases

In 2013, the movie “Her” won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The genius of this sci-fi romance was that it took place in the not-too-distant future when the world would be dominated by Millennials (those born between 1982-1997). The movie’s main character, Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix), falls in love with an intelligent operating system named Samantha. We catch glimpses throughout the movie of a future where the Millennials’ love of intelligent technology is ingrained into every aspect of society.