Chetan Reddy, founder of Confido, joins the Intelligent Indians podcast to explain how AI is leapfrogging one of the least digitized industries on earth: US healthcare an industry where, as he puts it, the system of record is still sticky notes.
Confido builds AI teammates agents with names like Sarah and Ryan that run the front office of specialty medical practices: answering phones, handling insurance, booking patients, chasing referrals and payments.
The result is striking. Around 800 to 900 patients a day ask to meet or speak to Sarah, not realizing she's AI. Fewer than 2% of callers now choose to speak to a human up from a 65% AI-completion rate when they started to 98% today.
In this conversation Chetan and the Z47 team go deep on why healthcare resisted tech for so long, why "digitizing the work" has to come before any AI ROI, how Confido built and humanized its agents with 2,000+ empathy parameters and constant patient feedback, how their on-site deployed engineers (FDEs) and the "Care OS" platform make each deployment faster than the last, the India (Bangalore) team that powers 24/7 patient coverage, the open-source vs frontier-model strategy, and the bigger vision: becoming the operating standard for US specialty care.
Intelligent Indians is brought to you by Z47.
What you'll learn:
1. Why "digitize the work" must come before any AI ROI in a legacy industry
2. How to humanize AI agents so customers prefer them to humans
3. Why fewer than 2% of patients now choose a human over the AI
4. How on-site deployed engineers + a platform make each deployment compound
5. Why an AI-native company can beat foundation-model giants on last-mile ROI
6. Open-source vs frontier models: a practical framework for vertical AI
Chapters
00:00 Intro - how US healthcare runs on 1990s software (and sticky notes)
01:30 Why AI can leapfrog the digitization friction
04:00 "Can I meet Sarah?" - 800 patients a day asking for an AI
06:00 Humanizing agents: task completion, 2,500 empathy parameters, patient feedback
09:30 Why less than 2% of patients choose a human
11:00 Can't a foundation model just do this? Why digitizing the work is the moat
14:00 What "digitize the work" actually means — the 25-insurance-contracts example
16:30 Landing deployed engineers inside a care org without conflict
18:30 The outcomes: 2–3x more patient encounters, 20–30% cost savings
20:00 Building Care OS — a platform whose customer is the FDE
23:00 How deployments compound: 6–9 months down to 3–6
25:00 Is the market as competitive as it looks?
29:00 The Bangalore team and 24/7 patient coverage
33:00 The bigger vision: becoming the operating standard for US healthcare