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AI is quietly reshaping the efficiency, power, and potential of U.S. healthcare, even as government health policy and spending drastically shift. Philips, the legacy electronics manufacturer turned medtech provider, is leading the AI healthcare revolution, streamlining and accelerating the workflow of patient care. Philips North America CEO Jeff DiLullo shares how technology can have the biggest impact on health outcomes todayfrom radiology scans to cancer diagnoses, and what it takes for leaders in any industry to rethink the way we work to best meet the moment. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. AI seems to be changing everything. There’s a lot of talk about it, but in some businesses, I feel like the conversation about it is ahead of the actual implementation or the impact, and I’m curious how true that might be in medtech. How is AI impacting things now, today, versus what you think it can do in the future? If you remember, we released the Future of Health Index. One of the things that we realized is that AI, in some of these compartments I’m talking about, is quite mature. FDA cleared, very safe for clinical use. Other areas, it’s more experimental. But the trust factor of the use of that AI is actually quite nascent. It’s the biggest barrier right now to larger scale deployment. Yeah. That health index that you mentioned, the 2025 Future Health Index, I mean, there was this sort of trust gap in it, right? That something like 60, 65% of clinicians trust AI, but only about a third of patients or certainly older patients do. How do you bridge that gap? Is it Philips’s job to bridge that gap? Whose job is it? So I have the benefit of having two Gen Zs and a millennial, they are digitally fluid. They don’t worry at all about the AI models that are coming on the other side of this because they’re used to it and they understand it. Older patients, not so much. The magic is always the healthcare practitioner that’s directly interfacing with the customers or the patients. If they believe what they’re doing, if they know it’s credible, if they’re using it to augment their analysis or their diagnostics, not replacing it, I think ultimately we’ll see an uplift. It’s our job to provide valid FDA-cleared, very good diagnostic capability leveraging AI. But if our doctors and nurses believe what we’re doing and they see the value in increasing their time with patients and also a little de-stressing, we think it’s going to really pick up in a parabolic way in the next few years, at least in health. I can understand and see how AI can quickly help some of the back office functionality in healthcare, but you’re talking about for practitioners, right? How does that practically work today? So I’m going to give you, let’s talk radiology. It’s the biggest field right now, diagnostic, right? The earlier the diagnostic, the better the outcome most likely. And when I think of a radiologist, I have to wait a month and a half. I’m in a pretty nice part of Vanderbilt University area, like a lot of health tech around me in Nashville, but I’ve got to wait over a month to get a scan. So in radiology, we start with the box or the design, right? I have an MRI that is highly efficient. I can move it around, I can put it on a truck. But today, I can get a scan done in half or even a third of the time. The AI built into the system software makes it much faster. Just a few months ago, I had a scan that took only 20 minuteswhereas a couple of years ago, the same scan would have taken about 45 minutes. The smart speed that we have on the system actually compresses the scanning time. It doesn’t fill in the blanks, it removes the noise. You actually get a better scan in a shorter time. If you’re a radiologist having to do 12 or 15 studies a day, but you can do 20 studies a day, I get more patients through, I drive more reimbursement, it’s better for the hospital, it’s better for patient care. Then I take it into workflow, and today I can pinpoint things that are happening in that digital image and send it to a radiologist and say, “You should look here,” in just very simple speak. It’s very complicated stuff, but the AI is already mainstream today where we can actually pinpoint areas for radiologists to look at and make a determination. I can digitize the whole process today with digital pathology. And I can have a finding where somebody’s waiting, do I have cancer or not? I can do this in hours now because it’s all digital. And that kind of workflow and orchestration is a game changer. And the issue of AI hallucinations, which show up with some of the generative AI things, does that apply to healthcare? Are there different kinds of safeguards? Because I guess there’s a human who’s checking. There’s so many things today, like smart speed I just talked about, being able to run that radiology workflow to compress the time of diagnostics, run the tumor boards in hours, on-demand meetings like you and I would on Zoom or teams, all of that is happening today, but not happening at the pace it could. My point is, go do that right now. Every health system, go do that. As you start to unpack these more generative AI models, I think there’s real reason to be cautious and make sure we have the right controls and the governance on them, but not experimenting in them also is not an option. We kind of have to. But we see leading institutions, MGB, Stanford, Mount Sinai in New York, we see them really working with population health data to really try to train models on very specific and even broad use cases. There’s so much to do right now. In other words, you don’t have to go all the way out to the silver bullet of, we’re going to live forever or we’re going to solve every health problem. You can make the system we have right now more efficient and more effective today. Bob, when you first drove a car, was the first thing you did to go to the Autobahn? Probably not. There’s so much to do in the neighborhood. There’s so much to do in my town that I can really get good at what we’re doing and drive productivity at scale. You need to have the innovation and the creativity to get us to the next place, but 80% of it we can do today. That is just game-changing in terms of how we deliver today, and that’s what we think is really the next opportunity here for healthcare. And I think that’ll happen with what’s mature in AI and virtual capabilities in the next few years because the need is so great.
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E-Commerce
Google has agreed to pay a 55 million Australian dollar ($36 million) fine for signing anticompetitive deals with Australias two largest telecommunications companies that banned the installation of competing search engines on some smartphones, the U.S. tech giant and Australias competition watchdog said. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in a statement it had commenced proceedings in the Australian Federal Court on Monday against the Singapore-based Google Asia Pacific division. The court will decide whether the AU$50 million ($36 million) penalty is appropriate. Under the anticompetitive agreements, which were in place for 15 months until March 2021, Telstra and Optus only pre-installed Google Search on Android phones sold to customers. Other search engines were excluded. In return, the telcos received a share of the advertisement revenue Google generated from those customers. Google accepted that the agreements were likely to have the effect of substantially lessening competition, the commission said. Google has also signed a court-enforceable undertaking that commits the company to removing certain pre-installation and default search engine restrictions from its contracts with Android phone manufacturers and telcos, the commission said. The tech company said in a statement: Were pleased to resolve the ACCCs concerns, which involved provisions that havent been in our commercial agreements for some time. Commissioner chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said: “Conduct that restricts competition is illegal in Australia because it usually means less choice, higher costs, or worse service for consumers. Importantly, these changes come at a time when AI search tools are revolutionizing how we search for information, creating new competition, Cass-Gottlieb added. Last year, Telstra, Optus, and their smaller rival TPG agreed to court-enforceable undertakings with the commission that they would not renew or make similar deals with Google to limit search options. By Rod McGuirk, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The fatal explosion last week at U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area coal-processing plant has revived debate about its future just as the iconic American company was emerging from a long period of uncertainty. The fortunes of steelmaking in the U.S. along with profits, share prices and steel prices have been buoyed by years of friendly administrations in Washington that slapped tariffs on foreign imports and bolstered the industry’s anti-competitive trade cases against China. Most recently, President Donald Trump‘s administration postponed new hazardous air pollution requirements for the nation’s roughly dozen coke plants, like Clairton, and he approved U.S. Steel’s nearly $15 billion acquisition by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel. Nippon Steel’s promised infusion of cash has brought vows that steelmaking will continue in the Mon Valley, a river valley south of Pittsburgh long synonymous with steelmaking. Were investing money here. And we wouldnt have done the deal with Nippon Steel if we werent absolutely sure that we were going to have an enduring future here in the Mon Valley,” David Burritt, U.S. Steels CEO, told a news conference the day after the explosion. You can count on this facility to be around for a long, long time. Will the explosion change anything? The explosion killed two workers and hospitalized 10 with a blast so powerful that it took hours to find two missing workers beneath charred wreckage and rubble. The cause is under investigation. The plant is considered the largest coking operation in North America and, along with a blast furnace and finishing mill up the Monongahela River, is one of a handful of integrated steelmaking operations left in the U.S. The explosion now could test Nippon Steels resolve in propping up the nearly 110-year-old Clairton plant, or at least force it to spend more than it had anticipated. Nippon Steel didn’t respond to a question as to whether the explosion will change its approach to the plant. Rather, a spokesperson for the company said its commitment to the Mon Valley remains strong and that it sent technical experts to work with the local teams in the Clairton Plant, and to provide our full support. Meanwhile, Burritt said he had talked to top Nippon Steel officials after the explosion and that this facility and the Mon Valley are here to stay. U.S. Steel officials maintain that safety is their top priority and that they spend $100 million a year on environmental compliance at Clairton alone. However, repairing Clairton could be expensive, an investigation into the explosion could turn up more problems, and an official from the United Steelworkers union said its a constant struggle to get U.S. Steel to invest in its plants. Besides that, production at the facility could be affected for some time. The plant has six batteries of ovens and two where the explosion occurred were damaged. Two others are on a reduced production schedule because of the explosion. There is no timeline to get the damaged batteries running again, U.S. Steel said. Accidents are nothing new at Clairton Accidents are nothing new at Clairton, which heats coal to high temperatures to make coke, a key component in steelmaking, and produces combustible gases as byproducts. An explosion in February injured two workers. Even as Nippon Steel was closing the deal in June, a breakdown at the plant dealt three days of a rotten egg odor into the air around it from elevated hydrogen sulfide emissions, the environmental group GASP reported. The Breathe Project, a public health organization, said U.S. Steel has been forced to pay $57 million in fines and settlements since Jan. 1, 2020, for problems at the Clairton plant. A lawsuit over a Christmas Eve fire at the Clairton plant in 2018 that saturated the areas air for weeks with sulfur dioxide produced a withering assessment of conditions there. An engineer for the environmental groups that sued wrote that he found no indication that U.S. Steel has an effective, comprehensive maintenance program for the Clairton plant. The Clairton plant, he wrote, is “inherently dangerous because of the combination of its deficient maintenance and its defective design.” U.S. Steel settled, agreeing to spend millions on upgrades. Matthew Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project, said U.S. Steel has shown more willingness to spend money on fines, lobbying the government and buying back shares to reward shareholders than making its plants safe. Will Clairton be modernized? It’s not clear whether Nippon Steel will change Clairton. Central to Trumps approval of the acquisition was Nippon Steels promises to invest $11 billion into U.S. Steels aging plants and to give the federal government a say in decisions involving domestic steel production, including plant closings. But much of the $2.2 billion that Nippon Steel has earmarked for the Mon Valley plants is expected to go toward upgrading the finishing mill, or building a new one. For years before the acquisition, U.S. Steel had signaled that the Mon Valley was on the chopping block. That left workers there uncertain whether they’d have jobs in a couple years and whispering that U.S. Steel couldn’t fill openings because nobody believed the jobs would exist much longer. Relics of steelmakings past In many ways, U.S. Steels Mon Valley plants are relics of steelmakings past. In the early 1970s, U.S. steel production led the world and was at an all-time high, thanks to 62 coke plants that fed 141 blast furnaces. Nobody in the U.S. has opened a new blast furnace in decades, as foreign competition devastated the American steel industry and coal fell out of favor. Now, China is dominant in steel and heavily invested in coal-based steelmaking. In the U.S., there are barely a dozen coke plants and blast furnaces left, as the country’s steelmaking has shifted to cheaper electric arc furnaces that use electricity, not coal. Blast furnaces wont entirely go away, analysts say, since they produce metals that are preferred by automakers, appliance makers and oil and gas exploration firms. Still, Christopher Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburghs Center for Social and Urban Research, questioned whether the Clairton plant really will survive much longer, given its age and condition. It could be particularly vulnerable if the economy slides into recession or the fundamentals of the American steel market shift, he said. Im not quite sure its all set in stone as people believe, Briem said. If the market does not bode well for U.S. Steel, for American steel, is Nippon Steel really going to keep thes things? Marc Levy, Associated Press
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