Ignite Startups: Ganesh Padmanabhan on Building AI Infrastructure for Healthcare | Ep301

Ganesh Padmanabhan (0:00)

There's a lot of, there's a JAMA article that just came out, how it was a little tasteless, which is, it basically said human doctors will be obliterated by AI doctors. I don't think that is actually true, because it's not very contextual.

And LLM actually doing, you know, better in tests is not an indicator it's gonna perform well in real life, right? So that was a problem there. But we see that the big opportunity is look at that entire admin layer of work that gets performed, and take it off of the human's hands, and put it in agents, so that's what we do. We have some of those agents just making calls, making sure that they're actually reviewing things, processing information and making humans better at what they do.

Brian Bell (0:58)

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are delighted to have Ganesh on the mic. He is the founder and CEO of Autonomize. Did I get that right? AI?

AI agents are now running inside of three of the five largest US health plans. He left a 15-year run through Dell and Intel to build it. And this year, that bet earned them a spot on the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers List. So thanks for coming on.

Ganesh Padmanabhan (1:21)

Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Bell (1:24)

Well, I usually start the conversation with your origin story. What's your background?

Ganesh Padmanabhan (1:27)

I grew up in India, southern India, by the coast.

I did my formative education. I didn't have an undergrad in mechanical engineering, although I never worked a day in mechanical engineering. Found computers along the way, did a few different funky things during college, build businesses and stuff. And then got into technology, found software. This was early 2000s and got into software engineering. Was working for a company called Adaptec, got into Intel and then Dell. Did a long 11-year stint at Dell and rose to the land as engineer, product manager, general manager for a business. We built the youngest billion-dollar business at Dell, which include a lot of data, a lot of AI. Those days of AI is different kinds of AI now. And then somewhere after that run, Dell EMC merged and I was looking at what do I do next? And got the startup buck to start building companies again. So founded a few companies, had some good runs, worked for some really small, amazing organizations and started Autonomize about four and a half years ago.

Brian Bell (2:28)

Yeah, really amazing background. I'd love to dig into the mechanical engineering thing because you never did that. Like how did you decide on that degree? And are there any regrets there? Or do you feel like it was like a really good foundation for the rest of your life?

Ganesh Padmanabhan (2:42)

I think it was a very, very good foundation. And how I got into it was like my granddad, my mom's dad, he used to run a machine shop and he had this huge automobile workshop and he would, I would spend all my summers there and he would put me to work. And at one point he actually made me take over, like they had these big quarries but big compressors on the back of trucks that would be used to break rock. He made me took apart the entire compressor, like every single piece of it and taught me to label it and stuff to them, put it back together the same day. It took me three days eventually, but I did it. I eventually put it back. That was the bug that caught me in terms of mechanical engineering. But it gave me a lot of good foundational fundamental things around, like how things work, and physics is a model for a lot of things in life.

So it helps you understand physics a lot more, math a lot more, and so forth.

Brian Bell (3:35)

Usually, the smartest people I know is they got physics degrees.

Ganesh Padmanabhan (3:38)

Yeah.

Brian Bell (3:39)

I did the hard degree. Yeah.

Ganesh Padmanabhan (3:41)

I mean, physics in itself as a degree is much harder than the physics that I had to take to be a good mechanical engineer.

Brian Bell (3:47)

But it was kind of- It's like finance to math, right? I got a finance degree and it's a lot easier than a math degree.

Ganesh Padmanabhan (3:52)

Exactly. So I think one of the things that mechanical engineering really teaches you to work with atoms than just bits. Then that gives you a really good foundation to work with bits, the way I view it. No regrets.