Good morning, 

I’ve grown fond of AI tools. They’ve been great at taking the baton on certain tasks: analytical support, repetitive entry work, even new takes on old data. But these prompts still demand time, hand holding, and a human touch.  

Like, “Claude, that’s a good mockup, but you’re breaking brand standards.” Or, “No thank you, Copilot, I don’t need a summary of that one-sentence email.”

This week, we look at how the combination of thoughtful human direction and AI can improve hospital workflow and marketing strategy. 

Cut the queue

U.S. hospitals want to reduce overall waiting times and costs whenever possible, and doctors want to make sure they treat urgent cases first; a collapsed lung needs to be addressed more quickly than bronchitis. 

Hospital systems are increasingly turning to AI for help with these needs. For example, they’ve sought out algorithms that can take over triage, identifying the patients with serious issues that should be moved to the front of the line.

Kellogg professors of operations Itai Gurvich and Jan Van Mieghem posited that there was a better way to get AI to effectively queue patients than the typical method of triaging based on a likely diagnosis—the process that a human healthcare worker might use.   

The duo compared two ways to use AI: an algorithm that first diagnoses a patient’s condition from the x-ray like a radiologist would and then assigns the patient a priority rank, versus an algorithm that directly decides a patient’s priority rank based only on the raw features of a patient’s x-ray, without diagnosis. 

They found that the second, “direct model” was more effective at reducing wait times. 

“If our ultimate goal is to prioritize patients, then our objective is not necessarily accuracy [of diagnosis] but rather the cost of making the wrong patient wait too long,” Van Mieghem says.    

When tested on a dataset of chest x-rays, this process of bypassing an initial diagnosis when triaging patients significantly reduced the total cost of waiting.

“There’s a benefit to thinking differently about the noisy information you get from the x-ray,” Gurvich says. “It reduces the waiting time for the most-urgent cases.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Recalibrating in the age of AI

As firms scale AI beyond pilots, the bottleneck has shifted. “As marketers now move to implement AI, success requires thinking about change management, not just buying tech and tools,” says Kellogg’s Jim Lecinski. Fortunately, Lecinski offers five priorities from a marketing lens for AI adoption.

One, find the right problem. Leaders need to “know where they’re pointing this tool and what they’re intending to accomplish, such as growing topline revenue, generating productivity savings, or decreasing friction,” says Lecinski.

Second, redesign the work. Organizations that bolt AI onto existing workflows rarely achieve transformational change. Not enough organizations are thinking about how they can accommodate the tech, says Lecinski. “It’s a human challenge, a change-management challenge—and that means it’s a leadership challenge.” 

Third, make the tech stick. Ensuring adoption requires embedding AI across an organization, not through a one-off rollout, but by the ongoing revamp of how work gets done. “You can’t just train people once a year with prompt training. You have to do continuous coaching.” says Lecinski.  

Fourth, rethink your org’s shape. The biggest changes may come in the middle of organization, where people and AI will increasingly orchestrate work between teams and functions. So reevaluate how work gets done. 

Lastly, create customer value. Lecinski suggests leaders who are truly transforming their marketing function are using AI to create value for customers. “Those are the classic levers for growing the top line—not just shrinking costs.”   

Learn more in Kellogg Insight.

“Leaders must create the conditions that encourage a growth mindset and help prevent complacency and reluctance to be a catalyst for change.”

Have a great week!

Blake Goble, marketing manager
Kellogg Insight