Healthcare doesn't necessarily become less human when AI enters the conversation. It can become more human if AI removes the frustrating parts of healthcare that humans aren't particularly good at.
Voice AI is moving beyond demos and novelty applications and into the everyday infrastructure of healthcare. From scheduling and intake to wellness checks, translation, and patient communication, AI-powered voice technology is beginning to change how patients interact with hospitals, clinics, and care networks.
In this episode of The Beat's AI series, Sandy Vance speaks with Isaiah Granet, co-founder and CEO of Bland, about the evolution of voice AI in healthcare and what it takes to make these systems reliable enough for real-world patient interactions. Isaiah explains why BLAND chose to build its own models rather than rely on frontier model providers, how that approach can help address healthcare's data privacy and security concerns, and why highly specialized AI can outperform general-purpose models for specific healthcare tasks.
In this episode, they talk about:
How voice AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure across healthcare
Why BLAND chose to build its own AI models instead of relying on frontier model providers
How specialized AI can address healthcare's unique privacy, security, and reliability requirements
Why AI-powered automation could actually make healthcare more human
How BLAND is scaling voice AI across scheduling, patient engagement, translation, and other healthcare use cases
Why the quality of the patient interaction has to come first
How AI could become a more accessible "front door" to healthcare
A Little About Isaiah:
Isaiah Granet is the CEO and co-founder of Bland, where he’s building production-grade voice AI for real customer conversations. A Y Combinator alum (S23), he has raised $65M to build reliable, enterprise-scale voice systems.
Before founding Bland, Isaiah founded San Diego Chill, a nonprofit providing one-on-one ice hockey mentoring for children with developmental disabilities. For this work, he was named a CNN Heroes Young Wonder.
