The Digital Executive
Mohammad Noshad: How AI Agents Are Making Hospitals Safer | Ep 1264
08 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What inspired Mohammad Noshad to enter the AI healthcare space?
Welcome to Corozant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corozant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Mohamed Nushad.
Mohamed Oshad is the CEO and co-founder of Shield AI, where he is pioneering the use of physical AI agents to bring real-time operational intelligence and automation into hospital environments. He also serves as a strategic advisor at Field AI. With a background in electrical engineering and a PhD in AI, he led cutting-edge research at Harvard University in AI and machine learning.
His work has been cited over 2,400 times and has received several Best Paper awards. His experience spans robotics and space connectivity, and he is now focused on building technology that helps save lives globally. Well, good afternoon, Mo. Welcome to the show. Awesome. Thank you, Brian. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. I really do. I know you're in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I'm in Kansas City, just a couple hours apart as far as time zones. But I know it's challenging to work through calendars. So I just appreciate you being here. And I'm totally excited to jump right in. So, Mo, your path here is fascinating. Electrical engineering, a PhD in AI, leading cutting edge research at Harvard University.
We're expanding robotics and space connectivity and now co-founding Shield AI with your brother, Morteza. Take us back to the beginning. What drew you to this AI and machine learning in the first place?
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Chapter 2: What distinguishes active AI from passive AI in healthcare?
And what were the inflection points that took you from academic research with over 2,400 citations to building a company focused on saving lives in hospitals?
Yeah, thanks Brian. Thanks for having me. So when I did my PhD, this was back in 2013. At the time, it wasn't called AI, it was mostly machine learning people were referring to. And it was one of the fascinating areas for me personally, looking at how these systems can basically predict different outcomes and work to learn different behaviors of these systems. So
That was motivation for me and my co-founder and brother Morteza when he basically did his PhD at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. And after my PhD, I moved to Harvard. I was working on a lot of exciting projects over there with an amazing team. And after a few years there in 2016, I met a program director at Department of Energy and they had a program called SBIR.
And, you know, I thought it would be interesting to build a system based on that. So that was the story of kind of like my first company. That's how I left academia and decided to start first company. which was interesting kind of like technology we were building.
And after that, it was second company, which was even more exciting using lasers in space to connect satellites in Leo orbit, which basically it's same technology that's being used with SpaceX, Amazon, Kuiper to establish the backbone of connectivity across
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Chapter 3: How does Shield AI's autonomous UV-C disinfection system work?
all of those satellites in space. And then after the exit of the second company, this was 2022, me and Morteza had a friend who passed away because of a surgical site infection.
Chapter 4: What impact does the autonomous disinfection system have on hospital safety?
So that was a moment for us to learn about kind of like this problem in healthcare. And we thought with our training in AI, there is a great opportunity to build the next company in the healthcare space.
Thank you. Appreciate the backstory. And story starts out great. Did some awesome things in academia, higher education. And then you jumped into entrepreneurship and founded a couple of companies. But the touching part of the story is obviously you lost a friend, you and your brother, from a basically side effect of a surgery.
Chapter 5: How can AI assist in managing operating room supplies effectively?
And it certainly made you think about how do we take health care more seriously? And I love this part. I worked in health care most of my life on the technology side, so I can totally appreciate that. But I appreciate you sharing the story and jumping in to try to solve a big problem in the health care space. And Mo, you've drawn a sharp distinction between passive AI and active AI.
Most healthcare AI today observes, summarizes, or predicts. Shields agents actually execute. Disinfecting rooms, tracking OR, turnover, flagging missing supplies. Why is that distinction so important? And what changes for a hospital when AI moves from advisor to operator?
Right, so in healthcare, I would say healthcare has probably one of the most complex workflows. And when you provide just information or data for the healthcare workers and you ask them to change behavior or change the workflow, you're just making it more difficult for them to adopt those technologies.
So what the transition we're seeing, not just in healthcare, but overall with agentic AI is that moving from an AI that provide just information to an AI that's actually getting a work done And that was our vision for Shield. We wanted to build an AI that is more action based. It's an active AI that gets the work done within the hospitals.
And we basically every piece of the technology we build at Shield AI
was with that kind of like philosophy mind on how we can make this adoption seamless by getting the work done, not just providing another piece of information or a dashboard data and asking the healthcare professionals, which have, you know, they have tons of things on their plate already, but how we can get a few of those items off their shoulders and let them focus on more important items and stuff.
Thank you. I appreciate that. Obviously, you in your mind, you wanted to set out and make the technology easier to adopt, yet taking off some of that workflow or workload. You did talk about the health care and I truly know this.
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Chapter 6: What are the future implications of AI in hospital operations?
They have one of the most complex workflows, of course. And so changing a workflow just because or to add a piece of technology in that process is. can really frustrate the clinicians or make it more inconvenient and potentially more unsafe.
So I really appreciate you highlighting that and taking the extra effort to make sure that you can integrate something that would actually help the clinician in the process. So thank you. Mo, the Stanford study published in the American Journal of Infection Control showed your autonomous UVC system reduced contamination by more than 93% against a backdrop of roughly 72,000 U.S.
hospital deaths annually tied to healthcare-associated infections. Walk us through how the system works, the sensors, the AI decisions. What's happening in a hospital room that a human cleaner can't match?
Right. So I would say infection control and automating disinfection is one of the important aspects of our AI and how combining it with a well-established technology, which is UV, can make it an order of magnitude more effective. So UV is a proven technology. It's being used in hospitals, but in today's workflow, it's manual.
And when it's manual, there's limitations in terms of the frequency usability of that. So what we showed in that study is that for the first time, We combine it with the AI and that AI, again, not only just learns and kind of like projects where the contamination is, but actually is taking the action and disinfecting those surfaces autonomously.
And that study showed that we're able to get over 93% reduction in contamination in those environments. which can translate to a significantly safer environment for the patients. And ideally, the outcome will be lower number of infections, procedural and surgical environments.
That's amazing. Really appreciate it. Here's honestly how the true power of AI, right?
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Chapter 7: How does Shield AI plan to evolve beyond disinfection?
Autonomous disinfectant, basically, or disinfector. But infection control and automating disinfection, I think, really goes hand in hand here. We do know that a lot of UV is great. Problem is it's done manually today. But with your platform, you're able to, again, combine those two and reduce those infections and diseases, germs, et cetera, in those rooms. So I appreciate that.
Mo, looking for maybe six years out, as physical AI agents move from disinfection or and I guess operating room optimization into broader hospital operations, as an active AI becomes standard across critical environments, how do you see the relationship between clinician staff and autonomous agents evolving internationally?
And what role does SHIELD play in shaping a future where hospitals are not just smarter, but measurably safer for every patient who walks through that door?
Right. So we started with UV disinfection and we're already seeing a great speed of adoption within hospitals because now they don't need to change anything. They don't need to change behavior. And our cell cycle is significantly fast. It's weeks. We're able to get these devices in and it's working in the background. It's not interrupting or changing any workflow.
But now with that, we are expanding to even broader areas on where we can use that active AI to take a role. And whether it's an operating room, identifying what is missing in basically an operating room before the case start, before the surgery starts.
And we have these devices that basically have speakers and they can communicate to the staff right in the room so that we notify them if there is, let's say five missing items, supplies, tools, we prevent basically interruptions during the surgery. Now that can significantly save time, reduce basically unintended delays for that case.
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Chapter 8: What are the expected benefits of integrating AI in healthcare environments?
But at the same time, it provides a safer procedure for the patients because each of those interruptions potentially can increase complication and infection risk.
that's just one example and you know when we look at a broader view one of my personally exciting kind of like aspect of this is these devices we we look at them as the brains of these rooms whether it's an operating room or now we're expanding to icus mid-surge emergency rooms And how we can leverage basically this brain, because now they have been learning, right?
So we're passing that kind of like early stages where, you know, we put these devices in, they have seen enough cases, enough procedures, and now they have become more competent in terms of understanding the environment. They now know all the tools in each case, what is kind of like the workflow like, right? So learning the workflow, learning different items that are being used.
And then, so this is the brain, how we can bring more muscles into the OR, and that could be robotics from humanoids to other forms of robotics. Shield is basically providing that connective tissue and coordination layer. right?
But now because of the knowledge we have, we know at each time what's needed in each room or what the room setup should look like and how we can leverage that, let's say human as robot to move from an area and bring an item into the room or help with that room set up before kind of like the first case during the day.
So that's a feature I'm personally very excited about and how this can transition healthcare into a much more effective and efficient environment, reducing the costs, reducing the waste and providing a much safer environment for the patients and something, an environment that's pleasant and more convenient for the staff to work within.
That's awesome. Really is. And I know that you started out with the UV disinfection, but then you kind of moved into that really accurate, the inventory and asset management piece of it, which I thought was interesting because things happen, especially with humans. We forget to put something in a room for a procedure or a case and interruptions are just the worst.
It obviously, as you said, brings potential room for error or introduce additional infections into that environment. But at the end of the day, you're reducing overall that cost and that waste and making things way more efficient. So I really appreciate it. As you know, I just love health care. It's been really where I spent most of my career.
So I'm very, very hopeful and I want to hear more about it in the future. And Mo, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
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