Seize the AI opportunity

Less than a year into his new role as Medtronic’s chief technology and innovation officer, Ken Washington was presenting on artificial intelligence to leaders of the company’s operating units.

One of the GMs stopped him and asked for help making sense of all the buzzwords and acronyms.

Perhaps you know the feeling. It’s hard to grasp how AI seems to be everywhere, with advanced computing power making sense of vast datasets. It’s in the voice assistants on our smartphones, the streaming services on our various screens, mapping systems in our cars, the chat bots who respond when we need customer service, and online services ranging from e-commerce to social media and online banking.

It can even help bring you the latest intelligence in medtech materials and manufacturing in Medical Design & Outsourcing. While we’ll never use AI to write our stories, AI powers the voice recognition service I use to rapidly turn audio recordings of interviews into written transcripts (though I always check every fact and quote I use against the recording for validation). Ironically, AI is even in the software I use to check our contributions for plagiarism and AI-generated content.

And now it’s in medtech. As an enabling technology, AI is rapidly finding new medical device applications, including imaging, monitoring, screening and surgical assistance.

With so much hype around AI, it’s helpful to learn from those who have put these technologies to work in a way that saves lives. It’s hard to come up with a better example than Medtronic’s GI Genius, which flags trouble spots that might otherwise go undetected during colonoscopies. Medtronic is using AI in many other ways, so this issue includes insights and advice from Medtronic leaders like Washington to help device developers of all sizes seize the opportunity.

“While AI technology has been around for a long time, the modern-day version of AI … has only been with us for one to two years,” Washington said. “And so we have to spend the time and take the effort to teach ourselves and to teach others about the importance of these technologies.”

“The future is bright, and we’re just getting started,” he continued.

As always, I hope you enjoy this edition of Medical Design & Outsourcing — and thanks for reading.

– Jim Hammerand, Managing Editor
Medical Design & Outsourcing
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