Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
For me, it all started in undergrad. That’s when I became fascinated with cognitive psychology, information processing, how the brain works, and what motivates us. In between all of that, I was equally intrigued by computer science and how to leverage technology to help unlock greater human potential. This combination of interests gave me the opportunity to work alongside some of the greatest ed-tech and cognitive psychologists, people who were pioneering the AI space. The exposure I gained in my undergraduate years motivated me to pursue my graduate degree in computer science and doctoral degree in educational psychology at NC State, where I studied under James Lester, one of the greatest minds in AI. I then joined SAS Institute, the leader in data and analytics, to put my classroom theories into practice as an ed-tech developer. Today, though my work has shifted to focus on the healthcare industry, I’m still creating behavioral change and educational solutions that help unlock human potential.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
There is a critical need to equip patients with the information they need to take control of their own health and well-being. To do that, we first have to improve health literacy, a $235 billion problem in the U.S. alone. This is what makes our company unique. Social Cascade is not just another AI-powered tool; it’s a movement towards greater health literacy and patient empowerment. With our technology, we are able to deliver preventive patient education in an effective and scalable manner. This creates a collective impact that benefits patients, community organizations, and healthcare providers:
- Patients gain the knowledge needed to take control of their health and the health of their families, creating positive, lasting behavioral changes.
- Community organizations expand the reach and awareness of their educational content, resources, and services.
Providers strengthen the patient-provider relationships by sending a daily dose of information that’s relevant and reflective of the local community.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
It all starts with persistence and conviction. We founded Social Cascade on the strong, unwavering belief that this was the right thing to build. Creating something out of nothing is hard. Building a startup is hard. You can’t get through these hard seasons without having something bigger to motivate you, and for us, it’s the conviction we share to use technology in a way that can drive health outcomes for all patients, in all communities.
Next, I’d say resilience and ingenuity are essential to your success as a business leader. In a small startup, you’re wearing all the hats, sometimes all at once. You’re going to hear ‘no’ often, and you need the right mindset when that happens. Every no brings you one step closer to the right yes. You might not have the time, resources, or budget, but that should not stop you from creatively thinking about the resources you do have and how to make them work for you and your business.
Lastly, it’s about integrity. You have to remember your core mission. You have to make sure that everything you do, internally and externally, aligns with who you want to be in the future. We might be a small startup today, but the way we think and the decisions we make are done with a high standard and a belief that one day, Social Cascade will be the company hundreds of employees choose to work with. I actually welcomed my third baby to the family about a year ago. In addition to being one of the most joyous times of my life, his arrival came with panic and guilt–how on Earth can I keep my company going while also caring for a newborn. Self-imposed maternity leave is a difficult thing to implement. But, it was my generous and caring co-founders who reminded me that not only do I need to take leave for myself and my family, but also for our company. We want to build a company that supports and respects employees, and me taking maternity leave was an important step in setting the tone of our culture for the employees and partners.
Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?
When looking at our industry, the healthcare communications space, generative AI, and content creation are certainly disruptive, and we can’t deny that the outcomes are helping and hurting the bottom line. So, let’s start with the negative side. When we over-index on AI to generate content, we have to know the results will not be perfect. We’ve seen instances of health communications generated using AI technologies, whether text or imagery, that are medically inaccurate and biased. And when this happens, it’s not a surprise that people become cautious of AI. But that caution has also helped our industry because it’s fueled this rise of the micro-influencer. Think of it this way, if people are cautious of the information they receive, they are going to be more likely to trust the voices of influencers they know (e.g., your family pediatrician or physician in your sphere that you know by name). These physicians aren’t trying to collect millions of followers. Instead, they want to influence their own patient panel, which means the information they share is going to be relevant, targeted, and useful to the communities they serve. We are seeing this trend continue to grow, where people want to reduce their sphere of influence and focus their content on their own communities, which is helping us make a stronger argument for why we need to enable more trusted voices across all social platforms, in order to reach patients where they are.
Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?
I’m going to go with the rapid development and improvement of diffusion models–the models fueling a lot of the more recent generative AI work because of their advantages over models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In healthcare, diffusion models have significantly advanced work from medical imaging to disease forecasting. What I find particularly beneficial about the use of diffusion models in healthcare is their tolerance for missing and incomplete data. This is especially important given healthcare’s notorious data silos and the lack of data interoperability. Despite this constraint, diffusion models have shown to be more stable, flexible, versatile, and produce greater quality (e.g., generating a training set of medical images).
Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?
I’ll keep going with diffusion models. One of the most profound impacts and clear moments of AI disruption happened early in my career when I was applying AI to the education space, specifically creating intelligent tutoring systems that helped young students learn to read. The technology to build these systems was limited at the time due to the lack of training corpora. There just weren’t enough recordings of early readers’ voices–young children with their adorable, inventive pronunciations and speech patterns. More importantly, the small datasets we did have were far from inclusive and representative with various dialects and recordings from students whom English was a second language. I remember the first time I learned about the power of diffusion models for generating training sets to compensate for existing data. While this does not come without limitations, but a powerful step in the right direction for not only expediting the path to market for these assistive technologies but also a way to create technologies that are more inclusive for all students.
How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?
One of the best things you can do is to team up with AI. Create space for AI to do the things it does well, but recognize where it falls short. Those shortcomings are often where your workforce will excel, so train AI on offloading and empower your workforce to focus on higher-order thinking, the things that make humans, human.
What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?
For us, one of the biggest challenges was replacing old processes. When we launched Social Cascade, we brought our old processes and ways of working to our startup, but those processes don’t translate unless you have time, money, and people. So, we had to shift and be agile in the way we operated day-to-day. I’d tell any leader to evaluate your existing processes and consider if there is a way for AI to help deliver a better, faster solution. Look at AI as an offloading function. Our working memory is limited, so when we can offload our working memory, we create space for higher-order thinking.
What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?
We have to remember that models are trained on the data that is available. AI isn’t as familiar with the established protocols that health communicators use to develop effective messaging, and this is critically important to developing messaging for target populations, communicating about roadblocks and barriers to health, and shaping a narrative that patients are motivated by. Right now, this is not something AI can do because the data doesn’t sit in a complete database for AI to learn from. We have to be mindful of this because anytime we lean on AI for content creation, we have to know that mistakes, biases, and medical inaccuracies can exist.
Awareness of AI’s ethical considerations provides the foundational underpinnings of Social Cascade’s Collective Impact Model. Instead of using AI to generate content–a space plagued by bias and inaccuracies–Social Cascade intentionally leverages human experts to determine what to say. Then, Social Cascade employs AI to consult millions of data points to determine which piece of expertly-developed content to deliver at what time to each community.
What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?
1. Identify your AI misconceptions, gain clarity, and understand the truth of where AI is today in your industry.
2. Foster a learn-it-all culture instead of a know-it-all culture. Recognize that you don’t know everything and there are incredibly talented people who can help you reach your goals, and they can do it better than you. This is going to be incredibly helpful in this AI transition.
3. Challenge yourself and your team to think about the larger problem set. There are things AI can help with and make a positive impact on, but to determine where AI can help, you first have to identify where you have a complete understanding of the problem. To have a complete understanding, you have to have all the data a human would need to be represented in a database. If you have this, let AI help. If you don’t, let your team help.
4. Remember, we are in this together. You are not behind, and you do not have to catch up. Everything is moving at an incredible pace, and if you catch up in one area, you’ll feel like you’re following behind in another. Give yourself the space, and grace, to take a breath.
5. Integrating AI innovation will always be limited by people, not the technology. So, while it feels like the world is outpacing your capacity, even the best solutions require humans to be willing to change and try new things. This should also inform how you’re executing on your own roadmap–especially in healthcare, an industry that can be notoriously slow to adopt.
What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?
We could discuss a number of misconceptions, but the one we need to address is the idea that complete AI exists. It does not. Complete AI is the idea of fully integrated AI. It’s the kind of technology that can do everything — think, feel, talk, reason, and replicate a human. That is the integration of so many different AI technologies (e.g., computer vision, voice-to-text, speech recognition, etc.) and higher-order thinking. We are nowhere near complete AI.
Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?
As a leader and founder, I always feel like I’m moving too slowly. We’re in our startup season, so that means we have limited resources, money, users, time, and credibility. We can’t execute on everything we want to do, but that’s when I have to pause and reset. In those moments, I build a list of tasks, and start tackling the things that are going to advance our long-term vision. Focus on the bigger picture, not the immediate challenges you face. Lean into uncertainty, maintain a growth mindset, know your standards of excellence, and then leave room to test new ideas, and explore the gray area.
How can our readers further follow you online?
You can find us at SocialCascade.co or on LinkedIn.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!