Advancing Health Care with AI: Humana’s Slawek Kierner Talks Synthetic Data and Real Lives

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:00)
There can be sizable gaps between people working directly with technology and people working in product teams. Today's episode with Slawek Kierner, Senior Vice President Digital Health and Analytics at Humana, illustrates how diverse experience can come together in novel ways to build value with AI.
Hello and welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:39)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, BCG and MIT SMR have been researching AI for four years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:06)
We had a great discussion with Prakara Mahotra from Walmart last time. Prakara himself has a fascinating background from organizations like Twitter and Uber to his current job at Walmart. There's quite some differences between those organizations, but it's also interesting to learn some aspects that are similar. Check out our last episode for the fun details.
For today, let's go on to something new. Shervin, I'm really looking forward to today's episode.
Slawek, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. Part of our focus is on you really. Can you introduce yourself, tell us what your current role is, and we'll go from there.

**Slawek Kierner** (1:44)
My name is Slawek Kierner and I'm a Senior Vice President in charge of Data and Analytics at Humana. Humana is a Fortune 60 company. I really focus on health care and helping our members live longer and healthier lives. I have roughly 25 years of experience in data and analytics across consumer technology and health care industries. And you know, I've always been interested in data. My first money I spent on a PC and got Matlab and Sumulink loaded there, and I would create all kinds of simulations, get them run overnight and see what's coming out in the morning and use all kinds of ways to visualize data. At that time, I was fascinated with process simulations and autonomous control systems and adaptive control. And this fascination got me a job with P&G, Procter & Gamble. And the good thing is that I could continue to use my passion. So there was a lot of permission space to innovate and bring advanced algorithms to these spaces. And that's how I started. And that was also a fascinating time, because you could start to have feedback from your algorithms, from your early AI-based systems.
And with this moment, I got hired by Nokia. It was already a moment when iPhone was launched. And that was another fascinating transformation.
And as you probably know the story, that part of business was acquired by Microsoft.
And I moved all of my team, and I was running data and analytics for Nokia at that time, to Microsoft, looked around for a while, helped run some of the same operations across Microsoft's retail and devices business, and then moved to the cloud and AI unit. And that got me to Humana. So roughly one and a half years ago, I got to this moment when I thought, okay, I build quite a bit of experience in data and analytics, and can make money with it, but now let's try to use it for some good purpose.
And that's something that we can do in health care. We're next to having a lot of data. We also have a very noble purpose.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:54)
I think you've almost run the table at almost every sort of industry and every sort of application. Sounds like you're just right ahead of whatever's happening next.

**Slawek Kierner** (4:03)
That's what I hope so. I'm looking for these challenges.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:06)
This is pointless, but I have to follow up. Were you a chemical engineer back at the P&G days?

**Slawek Kierner** (4:12)
I worked very close to chemical engineers, by the way. So part of my projects were to actually rewire large chemical factories and think about really, really huge chemical operations that P&G has in major cities. But to your point, I actually did two majors. One was in mechatronics, but essentially at that time, in a fascination with AI in my part of the world.
And the other one was in business management.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:40)
I just mentioned that because both Shervin and I were chemical engineers back in the dark ages and thought we'd found a compatriot in the whole thing. Because I actually got interested in, you mentioned simulation as your beginning as well. And that's where I started too, was you didn't have to build a plan. You could just simulate it and just really show some of the opportunities from data. And it sounds like you saw some of those same things.