Ankit Jain, Founder & Company Lead at Infinitus Systems, Inc. 5-12-24

This episode is a comprehensive discussion with Ankit Jain, Founder and CEO of Infinitus Systems, focusing on his journey in healthcare and technology, and the impacts of AI and automation in these sectors.

1. Entrepreneurial Spirit: Jain's entrepreneurial drive is fueled by his desire to create impactful solutions from scratch, influenced by both his parents' professional backgrounds.
2. AI in Healthcare: Infinitus aims to automate mundane communication tasks in healthcare, allowing professionals to focus more on patient care.
3. Predictions for AI: Jain anticipates a temporary slowdown in enterprise AI investments, which he refers to as an "AI winter."
4. Challenges in Healthcare: The episode highlights the systemic challenges in integrating new technologies within healthcare, emphasizing the need for resilience.
5. Vision for Technology: Jain stresses the importance of focusing on the broader impacts of technology rather than getting caught up in the hype of new innovations.

1: Introduction and Background

Ankit Jain shares his entrepreneurial journey and the inception of Infinitus, aiming to enhance healthcare efficiency through AI. Scott Becker: "Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about Infinitus?" Ankit Jain: "We're automating back office phone calls so healthcare workers can focus on patients."

2: The Drive to Found Companies

Jain discusses his motivation derived from his family background and the addictive nature of turning ideas into reality. Ankit Jain: "Once you take that plunge and create something from zero, it's quite empowering."

3: Impact of AI on Healthcare

Exploring the potential and challenges of implementing AI in healthcare, including the concept of an "AI winter." Ankit Jain: "I predict a little bit of an enterprise AI winter."

4: Technology Integration and Future Predictions

Jain provides insights into the future of technology in healthcare, emphasizing the importance of strategic integration and avoiding single points of failure. Ankit Jain: "It's important to experiment quickly and quietly."

1. Embrace Experimentation: Leaders should foster a culture of rapid experimentation and learning from failures.
2. Focus on Impact: Choose technologies that significantly enhance operational efficiency and patient care.
3. Anticipate Technological Shifts: Stay informed about potential shifts and prepare for integration challenges.
4. Avoid Overhype: Be realistic about the capabilities and impacts of new technologies to maintain credibility.
5. Build Resilience: Develop systems with redundancy to protect against failures and ensure continuity of service.

In this episode, Ankit Jain, Founder & Company Lead at Infinitus Systems, Inc. joins Scott in a discussion about the purpose and mission behind Infinitus Systems, his entrepreneurial journey, technology trends he is currently keeping an eye on, and more.

People

Ankit Jain, Scott Becker

Companies

Infinitus Systems, Inc.

Books

Mentioned: "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel

Guest Name(s):

Ankit Jain

Content Warnings:

None

Scott Becker

This is Scott Becker with the Becker's healthcare podcast. It's my pleasure today to visit with Ankit Jain. Ankit is the founder of a company called Infinitus. He's a brilliant leader. We'll have a wide ranging discussion about what they do in healthcare, how we started this company, what drove him to be a founder, how he's had success with it, advice for systems and testing different technologies, advice for companies, and a lot more.

Ankit, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Infinitus? Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Scott. Once again, my name is Ankit Jain. I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Infinitus.

Ankit Jain

We are a five year old company that is aiming to create time for healthcare. This is my third time founding an entity. I started off my career as an engineer, built a search engine, which ended up being acquired by Google, then went and started a company in the mobile space, then after that company got acquired, went back to Google to help start Google's AI venture fund. And in 2017, after the transformers paper came out, I was showing a demo of something that some Google engineers built to automate reservations at spas and salons and restaurants using voice. And my wife turned to me and said, so you're telling me these brilliant engineers made a machine that can have conversations just like a human, and they decided to make spa reservations?

This is so Silicon Valley. And I challenged her, and I said, what would you do with this technology? And she said, I would change healthcare. The number of people that spend more than half their day waiting on hold just to get information, whether it's for benefits eligibility, prior authorizations, claims statuses, denials. That's just between providers, pharmacies and payers or for referrals or phone calls, plague healthcare.

And so we started infinitus to automate those back office phone calls so that all these people that joined healthcare to serve patients could do exactly that. And five years in, we've done just over 3 million of these phone calls on behalf of over 80,000 providers around the country. Anka, take a moment. You started several companies. I know you're literally a double graduate from UCL, Berkeley engineering, different types of engineering, master's engineering.

Scott Becker

Where's the drive found to found companies? Where's that drive come from? Growing up, I grew up in a household where my mom was a stable breadwinner. She was a managing partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. And my dad was starting company after company in the network security space.

Ankit Jain

So a lot of inspiration came from the two of them of balancing the technology side of my brain and the business side of my brain. But once you take that plunge and you are able to take something from zero to one, it's quite addictive. It's quite empowering to say, I can create something from nothing. And the drive to have impact is what drives me. When we talk about the impact we want to have at Infinitus, it's about how many hours, hundreds of hours, thousands of hours, millions of hours we can unlock for healthcare workers so that patients can get on therapy quicker, they can adhere to those therapies because they can afford them.

And it's something that makes healthcare about healthcare, again, not just about back office paperwork and phone calls. The phrase zero to one, I think, famous phrase used maybe in Peter Thiel's book, if I'm correct, or another great founder's book. Talk a little bit about that concept. We were talking about that yesterday, zero to one. And then certain other people are fantastic at growing something once somebody has started it.

Scott Becker

From one to 100, talk about the phrase zero to one. I guess a lot of people are familiar with it today, but not everybody is. Talk about that phrase and concept. Yeah. To me, zero to one is being able to take something vague, take an idea and make it a reality.

Ankit Jain

And what zero to one is for a company changes from day to day. In the first six months of the company, it was making sure that we had the right financing, that we had enough talent density in a room. It was five of us for the first year or so that we were able to prove that the craziness of building a machine that could speak for hours at a time could be delivered. So it was proving that you could build a technology. And then as you look at year two, the zero to one, the vague thing that we had never done before was to convince people to buy this and start using it and make real calls.

So you have the technology now you've got a machine that's making phone calls. Will people talk to a machine? It's a human on the other side talking to our machines. So the zero to one kind of change there. And as where we are now, five years in, having a bunch of proof points, a number of customers that are seeing tremendous efficiencies from our services, I'm spending my time thinking about, how do I take this from a one product company to a company that can really serve our customers and unlocking even more time.

And so there's a constant evolution of what new problem needs to be solved and how we open up opportunities for us, for our customers, for our employees. To me, that is that zero to one mentality that drives me.

Scott Becker

What are you most focused on and excited about this year? What are you most focused on and excited about as we roll sort of towards the middle of 2024? Yeah, so there's three things that I'm watching right now as I think about the world of healthcare, the world of AI and technology, because that's the intersection of where I am. I think, front and foremost, all the stuff that's happening with change, healthcare right now, the dominant effects of the outage, it has huge implications on the industry. From our perspective, the whole times when you call the payers have gone up because people aren't able to get some of their data digitally.

Ankit Jain

But that's a small piece of it. But everyone is realizing that single points of failure, no matter how basic building blocks they are, are not good for the ecosystem. So as we think about the healthcare entities that exist, everyone's going to think about redundancy, everyone's going to think about how can they make sure that they don't have such a situation that happens again. And we think this is part of the plug and play infrastructure that's very relevant to AI, being able to use whatever modality you need to do to complete a task. As you adopt new technology, how do you make it so it's plug and play?

You define your goal and then the technology does the rest for us. Our customers come to us and say, can you get us the data needed to make sure a patient can get on therapy? They don't really care whether we get it online through a portal, whether we get it through an API, or whether it's through a phone call that we make. And that's the kind of redundancy that they're looking for. That's kind of trend number one.

Number two, and not too many people are talking about this right now, is I predict there to be a little bit of an enterprise AI winter. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. If you go back the last 2025 years, there's been a few periods of time when people have found there to be giant AI breakthroughs, and then it's kind of fizzled away. I don't think that's going to happen again. I think we have fundamentally unlocked a new kind of technology that will drive a huge revolution.

But every single time this has happened, whether it was the Internet, whether it was mobile, whether it was cloud, all the big enterprise buyers were extremely excited by it, and they came up with all kinds of use cases, but the technology wasn't ready for those enterprise use cases, whether it was security, whether it was compliance, whether it was guardrails, whether it was the right use cases being built out. After that initial excitement, there was a little bit of a correction in terms of the actual dollars spent on that new wave, and we're starting to see this a little bit in AI. 2023 was the year where everyone had an AI strategy, and now we're hearing from so many people that the actual spend on AI is not as much as they expected. And that's because people are building. Now what you're seeing though, is a set of consumer use cases that are coming to being and really growing.

But as those are built out, those enterprise features will be built out. In a couple of years down, you're going to see enterprise applications of AI start blooming again. We saw this on the Internet. It took a few years for the enterprise Internet offerings to come up and run in mobile. The first set of success stories were all consumer.

And then a few years in, you saw the VPN's and all the enterprise communications come into mobile. Same thing happened in cloud and I predict the same thing is going to happen in the world of AI.

Scott Becker

Thank you. Fascinating to watch. And as you mentioned, it's like with all these new technologies, there's a huge wave of spending, then it slows a little bit as people try to integrate and figure it out, and then it becomes very real or not. I think we all assume that AI at some point will become very real. But your point on this technology spend and where it goes to waves and you call them the AI winters.

I think a fasting, fasting perspective when there are people trying to pitch an AI enterprise for an entire health system or entire this entire that versus a specific point solution. The other thing that you mentioned versus point solution were single points of failure. And we saw that it was discussed broadly in DC the other day. Any broader thoughts around protecting oneself as an entrepreneur, a founder, a leader against single points of failure? I think it's critical to building any company, whether you're a startup, whether you are a large enterprise, figuring out what your redundancy is, or how your vendors make sure they're not at risk because of a lack of redundancy.

Ankit Jain

So with all of our systems, we've got very detailed backup and recovery options, disaster recovery options. Most of our customers ask us in detail about what those are so that we don't fall trapped to some of those. I do think to the first part of your question, Scott. As we see maturation in this wave of technology, we will see a lot of consolidation. I think last I heard, there was something above 10,000 digital health startups that are selling point solutions to various entities across healthcare.

I don't think any large enterprise wants that many vendors. Now, it's exciting to see all this innovation, but it's also tiring for a CIO to be thinking about how am I going to integrate all of these things. Everyone's data schemas are slightly different, everyone's integration pathways are different. And so I predict again, in the next few years, we see pretty large consolidation, and a few companies are able to thematically own certain areas and become the de facto solution providers across a suite of solutions to each healthcare entity. And this is a very important point, because we all know of stories and so many examples where people can build the most brilliant point solution.

Scott Becker

And what we have found in the market is ultimately, even if it's the most perfect point solution, it almost has to be so perfect, because as you said, most systems don't want to be running more than 1000, 1200 applications to go with five to ten enterprise systems. And so nobody wants 12,000 point solutions, even if it's the most brilliant thing, because it's unmanageable. And so you've seen the venture capital world, you've seen the custom world move away from somebody's brilliant point solution to solutions that come with more breadth and depth and a greater, as you say, a suite. And it's really fascinating because it really differentiates companies, because there are so many brilliant people out there that could build a brilliant point solution where they're really focused, and it's better than anything else for that point solution, you know, far better than Epic's offering in it, far better than lots of other offerings in it. But the great challenge is hitting this middle spot where you still have got complete excellence, but you're in a broader category, not just in one solution.

I mean, isn't that fascinating how that works? I find it fascinating, yeah, I think it's absolutely right. And this has been true for enterprise software for decades. The incumbent, the person with the, you know, the company with the distribution, is able to outmaneuver an innovator just by a press release. And a 60% is good solution because it's that much easier to adopt, much easier to not have to do a new master services agreement, a new procurement, more vendor risk assessments, your security posture, surface area is not increased.

Ankit Jain

And so I think as companies and entrepreneurs and startups really think about it, it's important to start off with differentiation, but then start figuring out why would a large enterprise add complexity to their surface area, and how do you convince them to do that?

Scott Becker

I think that's exactly right. So talk about you've had this great career as an entrepreneur, brilliant person, family, half entrepreneurial, half somebody who just made sure that the bills were paid. Fantastic. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs, other founders? No.

Ankit Jain

There's so many things and everyone has to go through their own journey. I saw my dad work incredibly hard, while my mom also worked hard, but supported us in a different way. As I've gone through this journey, my wife, her family, my family have all pitched in just so that I can follow my dreams in startup land. I think as a healthcare entrepreneur, I think it's important to accept that healthcare isn't the easiest place to affect change, but it's important to have the grit, if you truly believe in it and have the passion to change it. I think this is something I tell every person who joins our team, which is healthcare isn't for the faint of heart, but if you really care about it, you will be more satisfied than any other industry.

The second thing is, it's easy to give up when things seem hard, when you don't get a deal or you're not even able to get the meeting with the right person. But if you stick around long enough, and I'm not anywhere near long enough, just about five years into healthcare, I think in most cases it's a question of when, not if. Most people have the right ideas and most people in healthcare across every part of it, whether you're the payers, the providers, manufacturers, pharmacies, everyone wants to do right by the patient because all of us are patients ourselves. So at the end of the day, while it might seem at a very surface level that we're negotiating or pushing back in different ways, we want to do right because we know it's going to come back and affect us directly. And that really moves healthcare forward, sometimes slower than most of us would like, but it moves it forward because everyone's intentions are aligned.

And on the AI side, I think it's important for healthcare leaders that balance the wanting to innovate with the wanting to have business impact. While I'm running an AI first company, I want us and all of our customers to be thinking about the impact we'll have, not about how it's done. Someone shouldn't buy our services because it's an AI service, they should buy our services because we can create time for them, because we can unlock people to support more patients. Because five years from now, ten years from now, that's what's going to endure. And I think as an entrepreneur, it's important to focus on those North Star metrics that actually make the difference in the long term.

Scott Becker

Let me ask you one other question. What advice for CIO's, for health systems in acquiring technology, evaluating technology, what advice do you give to them? I think for someone acquiring technology, having the ability to experiment fast, to fail fast and try more things, is the most important thing a leader can enable. We do this internally with our science and research teams. Failure is seen as something that is a mark of future success because we know we will learn from that and move forward.

Ankit Jain

I see one thing over and over again in healthcare. You see these solutions or these companies that build hype extremely fast. And when they fail, and that's happened multiple times in the last five years, it almost sucks the wind out of the room. And it takes that risk taking posture out or the wanting to take risk out. I think it's important to experiment quickly and quietly if people are worried about what a fallout would look like rather than do a lot of marketing before you see success.

And so balancing the publicity and balancing successes is something, it's a hard thing to do, but I think it's very important for everyone in the world to. Do, but it's very important internal and external. For example, we came to the conclusion that in trying to new technologies internally, quite frankly, trying new people internally, trying all kinds of things internally, all of them are a work in process to take time to evaluate. And if you oversell, we're bringing in this new technology, it's going to be great. We're bringing in this new technology, it's going to be great.

Scott Becker

You run the risk when it doesn't turn out as great as is expected, that your team and people and system have lost confidence in you. It's this concept of constantly these are all work in process, we're all working through them and we're going to try and figure it out. It doesn't mean that we're not going to give it 100% and doesn't mean that there aren't some huge bets that are hundreds of millions of dollars, like an epic system that you better make work. But I think your point on not overhyping early is so important. I think that just is a great point.

Ankit Jain

Absolutely. I mean, I think one of Amazon's leadership principles comes to mind, which is be right often, right. It's not about being right always, but you want to be right often. And you want to be able to take those risks and minimize your failures, but have the psychological safety to have some failures. Ankit, I want to thank you for joining us.

Scott Becker

Could you just for a moment tell our listeners where they can find out more about Ankit chain, about infinitis? So I would love to have folks learn more about us on LinkedIn or on our website at www. Dot Infinitus. Dot AI. Infinitus AI.

And so I'm going to correct myself. Infinitus, not Infinitus. Ankit, thank you so much for joining us today on the Becker's healthcare and Becker private equity podcast. What a pleasure to visit with you. Thank you so much.

Ankit Jain

Thanks so much.