A few weeks ago, I got to enjoy a pitch for another poorly conceived “revolutionary” radiology AI workflow and reporting tool.
Tech people: Just bring on a radiologist CMO and a couple more to work on product. Stop cheaping out. Give them stock if you can’t pay, but these mostly suck and will continue to suck.
Everyone is happy to have some radiologists as “partners” that are just customers beta testing your buggy, half-baked products for free, but not enough are using content experts to make useful software from the get-go using first principles rooted in real-world experience and expertise. I would also love to see less focus on peddling trash and more on building product.
Free advice: Maybe just build something straightforward using current capabilities that is easy to deploy integrate into current workflows that people want right now. Something that doesn’t require massive buy-in and changing your whole tech stack.
Enterprise software sucks. Build up some good will, go from there. Not everyone needs to raise a ton of money to milk the bubble of me-too “AI for X” wrappers. Make something that solves a small, specific, real pain point and enjoy a nice cash-flowing business for a few years.
Reinvest in the next product if you want—or don’t. Forget about multiple rounds of raising capital trying to build and scale a behemoth on a foundation of sand.
Now, if you really want to revolutionize everything and replace radiologists with magical AI powers, great, that’s totally fine. You may be able to skip lots of radiologist feedback (though I imagine you’d still be better off with some deeply integrated, thoughtful radiologists). Someone somewhere can revolutionize everything from farm to table, but there’s also low-hanging fruit to optimize specific parts of the workflow in the meantime. Every part of the imaging pipeline has tedious, essentially broken software tasks and inefficiencies, and in many situations, it’ll be easier to optimize them individually in the short term than try to replace everything wholesale.
In other news, if you’re a current software vendor, now is the time to improve your offerings before it’s too late.
Everyone is happy to play the enterprise software game and court big hospital systems. But no one wants to build a grassroots business working with real people doing real work—because it doesn’t scale easily and it’s hard to raise money for.
I know that getting customers is hard—but that may be because your product sucks, because of the friction involved in transitioning to an unproven solution, or because you can’t demonstrate real benefits beyond just saying “AI.”
Yes, inertia is real: your new thing needs to be way better than the incumbent or something you can plug in for a reasonable additional cost. That still leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.