alt Hacker NewsSo - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider.
First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important domain expertise and implementations are.
Second, the amount of noise of "Voice AI for <industry>" is incredible. Most of them are completely clueless about the industry & basically "YC-striver" type who can only sell to other yc companies. They fail hard the moment they touch critical functions of the real world.
We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".
Replies
> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy
How happy are their patients?
Starting with your funding and who you've acquired tells me whatever follows is not really worth reading.
> First, The technology works
God I would love it if this comment is read out at a hearing about defrauding investors or massively leaking PII
Make it so the parts that are done by AI are rock solid, until then, they shouldn't be near a customer and be done by humans. Resist the greed!
Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 66% on human evals.
I’ve been working with AI for years now and it’s not an easy task to get it right, but negative news go viral faster especially when it’s what people want to hear.
As someone who has worked with companies in the space more than a decade ago, I'm glad that you're doing this! Genuinely love the "embedded not installed" approach.
I suspect that applying an aerospace approach of dissimilar redundancy and root cause analysis to this will yield a much better experience for everyone (i.e. you, the pharmacies and the patients) than what would have been possible with humans alone.
I've ranted about this before, but medicine as it stands isn't a serious field. And I can say that with a straight face, because medicine has until now, been the only field of modern scientific endeavor (or rather cloaked under modern scientific endeavor) that has fought tooth and nail against gathering more data points for improving understanding.
More detail here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762650
I'm glad that you're doing this!
I've been building agentic voice workflows with nearly 2 decades of healthcare experience. Would love to talk if you're available.
Please apologize for making the world a worse place and explain how you will close your company down.
We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy.
Is your pharmacy one of your customers? Do you use your own product regularly?
The pharmacies are happy because you are giving them higher profits.
Meanwhile you are royally fucking over the end user with your AI shit.
“You are absolutely right! You should indeed not give your 5 year old child 1000 milligrams of ibuprofen per hour”
Good to see info on how critical domain expertise is for success.
I've seen AI used well in a few support situations, and it is great - faster to get to the answer vs a human (usually faster than even getting to a human, which is another issue)
When my case can be handled by the automated system, it is great, when it is not, it is usually misery, leading to anger at the customer and whatever company sold them that automated isht.
Especially for intelligent knowledgeable users of anything, by the time we call, it is an issue likely to need escalation.
So, the one absolutely critical factor for me and everyone I know is: how fast and easy is it to get to a human when we find the automated assistance does not work for our particular issue? It should be "I need to speak to a human now", and the immediate response should be "OK, let me get you one... Hello, this is [person], how can I help?" with the prior transcript already on the human's screen.
If this works, it is good because the humans are operating a level up, not having to deal with endless monotonous minutiae, and dealing with interesting issues all day, which means they get good at it and have a better attitude — a win for all.
How, and how well do you handle that situation — how close are you to the proper response I described?
> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".
This is such a great graph. Your company feels successful because your customer is happy yet the rest of the world would be just happy if your company died in a fire. This seems to also be just fine for companies like yours.