All agree that technology can help eliminate the inefficiencies that burden our institutions—healthcare, law, politics, and education. What’s often less immediately visible is how new technology can add value: real-time solutions and insights otherwise humanly impossible. Even more overlooked is technology’s ability to reshape institutional culture—the only truly sustainable way to drive lasting progress.

 

Healthcare

The most pressing challenge in healthcare is technology’s failure to simply integrate and optimize existing data. Even before applying AI, better data integration could exponentially improve diagnosis and transform the entire continuum of care.

 

Emerging technologies also have the potential to free caregivers from non-essential tasks, allowing them to focus solely on patient care—to see, listen, touch. Yet, investments in technology often increase the burden as software interfaces multiply. We need more genuine innovation:

 

• Instinctive, organic interfaces that require no change management

• Intelligent algorithms that work invisibly in the background

• Digital work engines that remove friction, rather than adding to it

 

 

Law

In some cases, new technology can even help remove institutional corruption. For example, what I call ‘AI lite’ uses transparent weighting to learn from the attorney’s conventional practices, to guide forensic analysis of document evidence in real-time. This could revolutionize the legal practice, especially in fields like family law, where vast volumes of convoluted digital communication often go unexamined. Using a novel end-user interface—a "database document"—attorneys and investigators could not help but analyze the available evidence. This lightweight form of AI can even help induce creativity within the investigator – human innovation in real time.