Bob Wachter

And when Watson then tried its hand in healthcare, which was the first industry that it tried to work on, it completely flamed out.

IBM did enter Watson into some high-end partnerships with MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, for instance.

But Watson just didn't turn out to be very useful.

Some of its answers were obvious, others dubious.

And it was very expensive.

In the end, IBM dismantled Watson, keeping some parts and selling off the rest.

Again, not ready for prime time.

And then the sort of big deal in medicine was about 15 years ago, we all went from paper records to these huge software systems called electronic health records.

In 2008—

fewer than one in 10 American hospitals or doctor's offices had an electronic health record.

By 2016, fewer than one in 10 did not.

In the space of a very short amount of time, we went from basically a paper-based industry where the idea of using advanced data analytics and machine learning and all that was impossible because all the data was on pieces of paper to an industry that had its information in digital form.

What was disappointing about that was many of us, including me, naively thought that's the ballgame.

If we get our data in digital form, we'll be ready to innovate and do all this stuff like Amazon and Netflix and Apple and medicine will be better and safer and cheaper.

It didn't work.

The lesson that I took from that era was a term coined by Eric Bernoffson at Stanford called the productivity paradox of IT.

The idea that you take some fancy new information technology, you bring it into an industry and snap your fingers and you will quickly transform the industry to make it better and more productive.

But that almost never happens.

Never happens.

Does not work.