Stanford, Logistics, and the Quiet Work That Actually Changes Healthcare

I took this photo in the atrium at Stanford Hospital shortly before walking into a set of conversations that reminded me why I love what I do.

The space itself is stunning — bright stone, giant names on the wall, the Stanford seal in view — but what struck me most wasn’t the architecture. It was the clarity.

Leaders here are thinking about patient experience the same way I think about AI:
as a vehicle for reducing friction for real human beings.

And there’s something grounding about seeing that alignment in person.

I wasn’t here to pitch some sci-fi future. No “magic algorithm.”
No algorithmic poetry.

We were talking about something deeply unglamorous: waste in transportation.
Freight. Schedule variability. How items move physically from A to B in the real world. How small inefficiencies compound like interest, and how every little bottleneck eventually hits a patient — even if indirectly.

When you spend most of your time inside one company, even a $20B one, you forget how other organizations see the exact same problems from different angles. You get used to your own “normal.” You start to believe your constraints are universal.

Then you walk into a place like Stanford Hospital and hear how they operate — the scale, the expectations, the rigor — and it snaps you awake again.

This work isn’t about “AI” as a concept.

It’s about flow.
It’s about reliability.
It’s about making better choices earlier in the chain so someone’s grandmother doesn’t have to wait longer than she should for care.

And it’s about remembering that the best AI work isn’t actually about the model.

It’s about the rooms where people like this sit down together and say:

“What if we could make this easier?”

I flew back to Chicago with a different kind of momentum.

Not hype.
Not adrenaline.

Just clarity.

Because when you sit with people who think at that scale — who live every day in the tension between precision, risk, outcomes, and time — you remember what this whole field is really about:

less friction and more dignity in the moments that matter most.

That’s the real work.

Not the deck.
Not the demo.
Not the algorithm.

The work is recognizing the hidden bottleneck…
naming it out loud…
and deciding together that “good enough” isn’t.

If we’re serious about changing healthcare with AI, then the most important breakthroughs won’t come from “the next big model.”
They’ll continue to originate in rooms like that — where people are willing to tell the truth about how things really work, and then choose to make them better.