No Pilot Graveyards: How Novant Health’s CAIO Turns AI Into Patient Outcomes
Technovation with Peter High (CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO Interviews)Show Notes
Healthcare has accumulated friction that patients have come to accept as normal. Novant Health’s Chief AI Officer is systematically dismantling it.
In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Vijay Sankararaman, Chief AI Officer at Novant Health, about deploying AI across patient experience, clinical operations, and proactive population outreach at a system with 22-plus hospitals and 8 million annual patient encounters.
Sankararaman came to healthcare from retail product and engineering leadership at Walmart and Lowe’s, and he brought a problem-first discipline with him: every AI initiative must justify the problem it solves before the technology is considered. His team has deployed a 24/7 surgical companion, a lung-cancer screening outreach program that contacted more than half of 20,000 at-risk patients in a fraction of the time human call programs managed, and a mammography scheduling agent that drove call abandonment to near zero.
Key Highlights:
Why the hardest part of a CAIO’s job is saying no to AI proposals
How a conversational AI agent reached thousands of at-risk lung-cancer patients human callers could not
What 40% after-hours engagement reveals about suppressed patient demand
Why the CEO’s frame on AI (technology feature vs. business reimagination) determines whether a CAIO role makes sense
How Novant’s build/buy/co-develop architecture avoids vendor lock-in without slowing deployment
This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io
More from Technovation with Peter High (CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO Interviews)
AI layered onto a broken process doesn’t fix the process; it just runs it faster. Prakash Kota spent his first 18 months at UKG consolidating two legacy companies into unified CRM, ERP, and data systems before any AI conversation began. Now, as Chief Transformation Officer, he is shifting the question from “what tools can we deploy?” to “what outcome are we trying to reach?” That discipline extends to the customer funnel, where AI-assembled signals travel with a prospect through every handoff, and to sales reps, where an autonomous assistant pushes pre-meeting briefs before a rep has to ask, reclaiming the 40–50% of call-prep time currently spent on research.
The binding constraint on AI adoption is not access to tools. It is the organizational fear and mindset shift required to reimagine work entirely.
Most generative AI programs stall at the pilot stage. Zoetis reached 95% computer-based colleague adoption.
The next generation of technology giants may not be built in software. They may be built in factories.
Mastercard processes billions of transactions, and fraud doesn’t wait for rules-based systems to catch up. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Nirav Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Mastercard Services, about how the company uses AI to score transactions in the milliseconds between a card tap and approval, and what it takes to build that kind of infrastructure at scale.