As Teammates, our new platform for creating “virtual AI employees”, comes out of stealth, I wanted to share a bit of my own personal story about how we got here. Not the revisionist story we’ll end up with on our marketing website, but the personal (well, professional) journey I’ve been on to get here. Surprisingly, it’s a story 20+ years in the making.
For this story, we have to go waaaay back to grad school. My degree was in an unrelated field: medical image processing and computer vision. We were developing machine learning algorithms to detect and diagnose lung cancer from CT scans.
At that time, medical imaging technology was progressing at an incredible rate, evolving from 2D chest x-rays to high res 3D volumetric CT scans. What started as a single x-ray image for a radiologist to quickly screen an adult for lung cancer quickly turned into 50 digital images to review. Six months later it was 100 images. Then it was 200.
Our research lab saw a future where our most highly-trained medical professionals were going to be reduced to quality control workers, watching widgets go by on a conveyor belt and looking for rare anomalies (most people don’t have lung cancer, after all) in a sea of images.
To avoid this future, our lab developed machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and diagnose lung cancer from this ever increasing volume of 3D images. We didn’t have the terminology back then, but effectively we were building a “copilot.” Our copilot would assist radiologists by analyzing millions of images for them, searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. The software would flag suspicious findings (i.e. potential lung cancer nodules) for expert human review from a trained radiologist.
Our mission was never to replace radiologists, but rather to protect their precious time so they could focus on the highest value, most important, and most rewarding aspects of the job, not be buried in volumes and volumes of data and tedium.
And that core idea – building software to empower others and unleash their ingenuity, creativity, and expertise – is the same one that inspires us to build Teammates today. In a world of ever increasing data, processes, and opportunities, we want to let machines and AI focus on the ordinary, so humans can focus on the extraordinary!
