Redesigning Work for the AI Era: Oliver Wyman's Ana Kreacic on Talent, Productivity and Human Judgment

As healthcare confronts workforce shortages, rising costs and growing demand for care, the industry cannot simply hire its way out of its challenges, and using AI to make existing jobs more efficient may not be enough. Organizations will have to fundamentally rethink how work gets done, how employees develop expertise and what responsibilities should remain with humans.

Ana Kreacic has spent her career studying how markets, companies and people adapt to change. A former economist who worked across tech, telecom and healthcare, she is now Partner and Chief Knowledge Officer at Oliver Wyman and Chief Operating Officer of the Oliver Wyman Forum – the firm’s think tank. Her work focuses on integrating customer insight with business strategy and leadership effectiveness. She helps steer companies to create new business and operating models that transform them into more customer and employee-centric organizations.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Ana joined Keith Figlioli to discuss how AI is changing the healthcare workforce and what leaders must do to keep pace. Ana shared her firsthand insights along with data from the recently released Oliver Wyman Forum report, “The Reality Check: Beyond the AI Hype,Hope, and Hysteria.” The research draws on more than 25,000 survey responses across 15 countries and territories and a survey of 415 CEOs conducted with the New York Stock Exchange. Among other findings, it shows how early companies are on the AI adoption curve, with only 8% of workplace AI users reporting an organization-wide standard for deciding what happens when AI saves time.

With so much to still be discovered and decided, Ana and Keith’s conversation focused on the challenges and opportunities of building an AI-enabled healthcare workforce, from developing talent to fundamentally rethinking how work gets done. Some of the topics they discussed include:

• Impact on entry-level employees. AI may not eliminate entry-level jobs, but it is raising expectations for people filling them. Employers increasingly seek judgment and expertise from recent graduates that they once expected employees to develop over years on the job. Ana argues that organizations need to rethink how they train and develop junior employees, ensuring they continue to gain the experience and judgment needed to advance their careers in an AI-enabled workplace.
• Keeping up with the speed of change. Being a fast follower made sense when technology advanced in relatively predictable, linear steps. But AI is improving exponentially, making it harder to sit on the sidelines and catch up later. Even if what employees learn today is outdated tomorrow, Ana says organizations need to keep experimenting and learning so their teams can adapt to whatever comes next.
• Finding – and keeping – AI super users. Some of the employees most skilled at using AI are also best at hiding those abilities and are worried about what employers will do with their newfound productivity. Ana argues for open conversations about how AI is changing work, learning and career development. She believes leaders need to identify and support these employees, make clear that they have a valued role in the organization's future, and encourage them to teach others rather than conceal their skills or leave.
• Thinking in extremes. To rethink work rather than just automate existing tasks, Ana challenges leaders to ask what they would do if they had to increase capacity by 20%, 30% or 40% without adding comparable staff, or serve patients in markets they cannot reach today. Imagining those constraints can reveal opportunities to redesign entire workflows. Simply adding AI to the current process, she warns, may only "move the bottleneck" somewhere else.

To hear Ana and Keith discuss these topics and more, listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.

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