Bob Wachter

I remember speaking to one of the early leaders at the time who was a professor at Stanford.

These are not dummies.

These are MDs and PhDs in computer science.

He said, why did you focus on diagnosis as the first thing to tackle?

He said, we weren't naive about the complexity.

It was just the most interesting problem.

You could understand that.

These were innovators.

They were at the cutting edge.

They really weren't thinking about practicality.

That was an important lesson for today.

You don't start on the hardest problem and one with the highest stakes and one if you get it wrong, you can kill somebody.

You start on low-hanging fruit.

You need to get buy-in and get trust from everybody, patients and doctors and nurses.

I think we're not making that mistake this time, but that flamed out.

Then IBM Watson beat the Jeopardy champions in 2011.

You may remember that moment when Watson, a supercomputer trained to play Jeopardy, competed against a pair of human Jeopardy champions, including Ken Jennings.

Watson won $77,000 in that competition.

That was a nice payday, but of course Watson cost billions to develop and IBM had much higher ambitions for it than winning at Jeopardy.

I remember watching that and thinking, well, we're all toast.