Human First, AI Empowered

At a recent AI-focused town hall, someone asked about the potential backlash of proclaiming ourselves “AI-First.” It was a great question — and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. “AI-First” is a bold statement, one that signals a fundamental shift in how a company thinks and acts.

Companies are, above all else, collections of humans. Well-led companies unite people around a broadly shared goal (in our case, to make healthcare whole). People’s actions toward these goals are guided by our stated values. In a healthy company, those values are more than just lip service. Introducing a third vision, AI-First, can seem disruptive and confusing. What really comes first? AI or our values?

At Fullscript, our core values are Authenticity, Community, Grit, and Ownership. We live these values every single day. Anyone successful here knows them by heart and demonstrates them consistently in their actions. I say this not as a “rah-rah” booster, but simply as an observation of our culture. I’ve worked in plenty of places where values were nothing more than posters on a wall. We’re different. Even as we grow we still lean on these values to guide our decisions and actions.

This is the most uncertain time in tech we have seen a decade or more. No one really knows what the next two months will bring, let alone the next two years. Yet I see many in the industry diving in headlong, making wild claims about productivity gains and headcount reductions. During a revolution, all you truly have are your people. Abandoning them along with your core values at a time like this is a recipe for failure. You risk alienating your best people. Alienating people who are already feeling uncertain about the future.

Used correctly, these tools empower people to do more and own more. The tools work now, and are getting better every day. Already in the early days of our AI journey we are saving thousands of person-hours, removing toil and drudgery from the day to day. The easy answer at this stage would be to look at reductions. After all, with so much automation there must be redundancies, right?

When planning our AI-First strategy, we started with our values, our mission, and our people. We did not talk about redundancies, we talked about acceleration and empowerment. These tools allow us to take on missions we never would have attempted before. To dream bigger and achieve more. We can only do that with our people. People who are empowered, engaged and aligned. Focusing on simple profitability is, we think, short sighted.

So, to better answer the original question from the town hall: Fullscript is not an AI-First company. We are a Human-First, AI-Empowered company. We seek to leverage these tools to do more, accelerate our mission, and ultimately transform healthcare. There is little doubt that AI will reshape the workforce, it has already begun, and the pace is only increasing. But we will navigate this change as we always have, through our company mission, our values, and our people.

— Jeff Fouchard