DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - AI's Canary in the Coal Mine (ft. Amy Brown)

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed interviews Amy Brown, founder and CEO of Authenticx. Amy shares insights on leadership, the impact of AI in healthcare, and the importance of embracing challenges as learning opportunities. Tune in for a deep dive into innovation and personal growth. 

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices Podcast, where we chat digital transformation, challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, it's Ed. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. And I just want to say thank you to all of our listeners for listening. I know there's a lot of different things you can be doing with your time and you've chosen to invest 30 minutes with us.

And I just want to thank you. And we'll make it worth your while because I have Amy Brown with me. She's the founder and CEO of Authentics. Amy, welcome to digital voices. Thank you. It's so great to be here. Yeah, we're going to be talking AI and things like that. And you've been doing this for a long time.

It's kind of like in vogue now, you know, some of the things we're talking about. But you've been doing this for quite some time, at least in AI. Yeah, since before it was sexy for sure. So then it's going to be really great to get your perspective. But, Amy, if you've listened to any of our episodes, you know the most important question we ask is coming up first. and that is what are the songs on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to chill to?

Yes. So I am really in right now to NACO and Medicine for the People. It is a really eclectic band that uses all kinds of influences from Puerto Rican, rap, rock. And it's just, it's a really, really motivating group. And I've been listening to them nonstop right now. All right. We're going to add that to our Spotify playlist. because of course we have a digital voices, Spotify playlist.

And I think out of our 300-some episodes, that might be the first macro reference. So we're going to definitely add that. So that's awesome. What about life message or mantra? Are there words that sort of guide you that you live by? Yes. Wherever you go, there you are.

And what that means to me, because it seems like a very obvious statement, is I found in my journey that if you only look to external sources to figure out where you're going and what you're doing, you're missing a big part of the journey, which is an internal one. It doesn't matter what job you go to, what geography you locate.

You're always there inside yourself. And if you don't start with the journey from within, then you're going to continue to struggle, right, to look for solutions or answers to your meaning, your purpose, et cetera. Wherever you go, there you are, to me means work on yourself. first and always. I love that.

Did that sort of form in your youth or did it come later as you matured as an adult? Just curious. It's something that my mom said to me when I was a young adult struggling with mental health things and college choices. And it didn't really mean much to me then. But as I look back on my journey since then, I see the wisdom in that, in that, in that statement. Totally profound. That's why I asked. Let's talk more about you. You've ready shared a little bit, but like, where were you born? Tell us your whole journey here to becoming a

founder. Yes, I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan while my dad was doing his residency at the University of Michigan. But quickly after that, my parents relocated back to their home in Indianapolis. And my dad began what is still like a 45-year career as a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon. And And that was a big influence on my growing up. He gave me exposure to the patient care side of things. And I got to see not only the clinical side of his work, but also observe the business side of health care and how there's a lot of tension and conflict. Sometimes that happens between actual clinical care and business.

And just a fun fact, he woke me up in the middle of the night when I was in eighth grade and asked if I wanted to go on a heart transplant. And I got to do that. And it was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. My mom, special ed teacher, huge influencer on my life as well. And that's how I got my start. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. So what was the primary catalyst?

And I think maybe you've revealed it already that got you into health care. Your dad's working in health care. Is that sort of what led you down that path? Well, I started as a young adult thinking I wanted to pursue clinical. care, but pretty quickly realized that my passion was more on macro systems. And so I ended up actually pursuing my master's in social work with a real, real focus on macro systems. And my very first role outside of my graduate program was in state government working with Medicaid. So I got to really look at from a macro perspective how policies are made, why policies are made. And, you know,

became really fascinated with this idea of regulatory and policy impacting massive populations. And that became really my passion. And after I left state government, I started to see the reality of how policies actually impact the real world because I landed in healthcare business. I was working in managed care companies and health insurance companies and pharmaceutical services. companies and I was seeing the reality of where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, between policy and real world. Yeah, don't you wish that everyone in a leadership position anyways in healthcare sort of had to have a track, you know, like you did in graduate school, you had to do a couple,

you know, specific tracks to get wide exposure and have some exposure, not just academically, but in real life to policy and how it's made and developed and executed. It's a very eye-opening experience. Yes, I think that could be very enlightening for all of us. Yeah. I always think we had multiple tracks, like spend time in the payers like you did, spend time in policy like you have. I think it would just make us all well-rounded leaders

and probably help us all break through a lot of the log jams that exist today in healthcare. Tell us about some of the key moments that led you to the path of CEO. So now, you know, fast forward a few years, you are CEO of a company. So what were key moments? About two years before I decided to leave my corporate career, I was starting to kind of take stock of my career in my life. I, at, you know, at the age of 42, I was the chief operating officer of a travel medical insurance company. I had had my fourth child. My husband was a full-time stay-at-home dad.

And I was taking stock. It was that kind of mid-career moment for me. And I faced kind of a fork in the road moment of do I continue to be an employee and have at least a perceived secure job and keep my kids comfortable? Or do I show them and do. demonstrate for them what it really means to follow your dreams and the financial sacrifice, the scarcity that that you can feel when you start a company. And I decided to go that second path. It was a it was a family decision. We rearranged our life and our lifestyle so that we could

live without an income for 18 months. And that's that's what happened. And it was just it was just an important time in my life to really think about the impact. I wanted my career at have and ultimately decided to go all in. Yeah, what would you say to listeners? Because I bet listeners want to do something similar. And there is something in the comfort of the corporate job for sure. But as we know, and you just look at headlines, it's really not as secure as you might think it is.

What would be one or two words of advice or wisdom that you would share in someone who's trying to process that decision? Like should they jump or not? Yes. It's, well, first of all, I empathize with that struggle and that tension because it's real. The pressures on, particularly if you have children or if you have aging parents, the pressures to do all the things to make your life comfortable or secure, they're real. And it's very easy to buy into the perception of security in a corporate environment. I would say that you really have to deeply be introspective for a while.

One of the best pieces of advice I got while I was thinking about taking the leap was I had a mentor that said, you need to emotionally try on the role. You need to go through the motions mentally and in your head what it's going to take. You need to write it down. You need to talk with your family about it and start to really simulate for your mentally and emotionally what this is going to take and decide whether you're comfortable with that or not. I can tell you seven years into starting Authentics, nothing could have prepared me for the level of difficulty of starting a tech company. And if you don't have that inner

conviction that this is absolutely worth giving it all for, then it may not be the right thing. Yeah. That's Sage advice. So we talked to you. talk a little bit about how this previous experience helped you, not just growing up and being in the home that you had, but also the government policy work and things like that. And now as a founder, you also have insights in digital health funding and investment landscape. Can you share anything about that that Listers, that you think Listers might find interesting? Like, was it hard what you started? You said 18 months you were planning, okay, I may not have any income.

Did you find it difficult to work with that investment community or, you know, any insights that you could provide? Sure. Well, when I started the company, my plan was to bootstrap as long as I could because I really wanted to learn whether or not the idea I had for this product would actually, could actually sell. Like if any, I could get any customers. And I think that was the right choice for me because I needed to work that out for myself. It was, it was 18 months in that I realized, actually, yes, people are willing to pay for this. And now, you. you have a very small window to grow. And I knew that AI was going to be a part of our solution. And I knew that AI was going to explode eventually. And so I knew that I needed to raise capital. I had never done anything like that before. So I had, it was a whole second job was just learning the venture capital market. And yes, it was very hard. And also I've raised three rounds of capital in three very different market conditions. And so with every market condition and every stage that your business is

in when you're raising capital, it's a whole new learning curve. Yeah. So the natural segue into Authentics itself. Tell us about the founding. How did it come about? You took the leap. And where are you now? Yeah. The problem that I saw before I started Authentics in the market was that, you know, the healthcare industry was focusing a lot on, you know, predicting and understanding clinical outcomes. And there was also a lot of focus at that time on, you know, getting more in touch with the customer experience. And the way the market was getting in touch with customers' experience was through surveys and NPS scores. And meanwhile, I was a COO and part of my responsibility was running call center operations where customers will call in with their complaints or issues or needs.

And we recorded all of those calls and they sat on a server. And I was thinking, man, there's a huge disconnect. Inside these conversations are really the keys to the kingdom. It's the canary and a coal mine. If you can listen to these interactions at scale, all the business intelligence we need to improve customer experience and the customer journey are really, really buried here. And so Authentics is a conversational intelligence company. We are an AI native company where we have built what I think of as AI ears that are tuned to pick up specific signals in conversation data that help companies better serve their patients or their customers. How do your customer go about getting the ROI, right?

That's always the big conundrum, whether it's a new company or an older established company, great technology, and there's all the focus, and rightly so, right, that I need to be able to demonstrate a return on investment.

How are some of your customers demonstrating that? Yes. Well, first, within Authentics, we know that in order for our company to grow and have stickiness, we have to deliver an ROI for our clients. And so we have prioritized the quality of our AI models to be specifically tuned and geared for the healthcare industry. We only work with healthcare companies.

And so we've taken great care to kind of investing in the quality and the accuracy of our AI model. What our clients do to drive ROI is the signals that our AI detects are things like where there is customer friction in the journey, where there is negative sentiment because of that friction, where there are missed gaps in care or gaps in therapy that are not only impacting the patient experience, but also the revenue of the company. we're laser focused. Our AI ears are laser focused on identifying those signals and our clients use those signals to fix the problem, which is often a systemic problem, a process problem, or a technology problem. They love to believe that the problem is all in their frontline agents if their agents just answered questions better. but what we've been able to determine from listening to over 300 million customer conversations is that more times than not, the problem really is more systemic and in the hands of the leaders

and they need to listen. And we're giving them a much more scalable way of doing that. Yeah, that's profound. As you were sharing that, I think about all the contact centers and help desks that I've overseen over seen over the years. Yeah, we get that rich data, but we didn't have the ability to mine it because we didn't have the technology or the time, whatever. this audit, obviously with AI and your product, you can do that and get quick analysis, right?

Because then you can also use that to improve your service or reduce amount of calls, right? Because you're finding out, oh, everyone's struggling with XYZ, like how to do order entry, just as a silly example. And this would tell us, hey, 90% of our calls are related to that. So we can address training. Yeah, I could see a lot of value there. Exactly. Go ahead.

Sorry, I was just going to say that, you know, with the, emergence of AI and AI tools, there's obviously a lot of momentum right now on reducing the call center human workforce and replacing that workforce with AI agents. And our position on that is, regardless if a company is using an AI agent or a human agent, and we could give all kinds of opinions and recommendations on when you should use what type of agent, regardless, that agent is communicating with your paying customer. And inside, that interaction are profound insights that need to be heard and listen to. So that's the role we see ourselves playing. Yeah. That's awesome. Where do you think we're headed with conversational AI?

Like if you were to put your future hat on, you know, whether it's your product specifically or the industry, like we're doing some cool things now. What do you think's coming next? Yeah. Do you want my optimistic prediction or my cautionary? Let's do both. Okay. Well, I'll start with the cautionary and end on the optimistic. The cautionary is that the way I'm interpreting the market right now and all the enterprises that are, you know,

trying to figure out how to leverage AI, they're very much focused on AI deployment. And what I see missing in the whole outcome is the intentionality around how to implement, implement an AI solution across a workforce and that harmonization of human and AI tools. And unfortunately, the data tells us that about 80% of AI projects fail. And the reason they fail is not because of the AI. It's because of the human component of it. And workforces are scared. They're confused. They don't know how to recalibrate their purpose alongside the AI. And our leaders haven't

done a good enough job, preparing their workforce, establishing their values for their human workforce versus their AI workforce. And I fear that short-term thinking will win out on, you know, how do I drive either profitability or revenue goals, you know, for the next quarterly earnings call and just a short-sighted mindset in deploying this type of technology. So that's my cautionary tale. On the optimistic side, you know, AI such an incredible opportunity to help address gaps in care. I see it. We see it from listening to these interactions. We think there's an opportunity for greater interoperability, for greater choice and personalization. If organizations can leverage the technology in the most effective way, which

takes time and it does take human effort, intentionality, to pull all those things together. And if we can do that, we can absolutely address some of our health care disparities and the cost of care in this country. Yeah. No, I'm with you there for sure. Amy, you're an exceptional leader and you've done some great things and very inspirational on how you took risk and going from the security, quote unquote, of working for corporate America and then doing your own thing. So I want to shift a little bit, just talk about leadership in general. Was there a moment of time that you realized that you were a leader? Like, was it in your youth?

Or where did you discover sort of that leadership? Yeah. I don't know if it was in my youth. I think, you know, when I first took on a management opportunity in the early parts of my career, I had been hired to work in a managed care, company that was regionally based. And for the first time in my life, I was managing people. And those people I was managing were five years, 10 years, 15 years older than me. And it was one of the most humbling experiences because I realized at that time, my goodness, I have less experience than

these individuals in their job. And I need to come in and start to bring some value here. And it was rough. I was in my early 20s at that time, and I knew that learning to be a leader would be a formidable task, and it continues to be a, you know, it's a never-ending journey of learning. Yeah, that I, when you were speaking, that just reminded me as well of in our youth, right? Yeah, you're used to leading people that are older than you, and then there comes this time, which has come for me, where it could be the reverse. And that took a little bit of getting used to, but it was fun to see as well.

We talked about some words of advice sort of for probably mid-career people already that were thinking, maybe I've got this great idea, maybe it should try something. What about younger leaders? Maybe they're just graduating or they're in their first jobs.

And, you know, everyone, most people, they want to do really well and they want to succeed and they want to keep moving on in their career. What are two words of advice you might have for them? Yeah, and at Authentics, we have quite a bit of our workforce that are young in their career. And the ones that are most successful are those that commit to the daily hard work of learning, of failing, of learning from their failures, and learning through experience.

Team members that commit to the hard work of receiving constructive feedback and taking it in learning. from it, it's almost like signing up for rejection and the feeling of suffering. But if you do that, it can be the greatest teacher. Right. Where I see newer folks in their careers go wrong is when, you know, they want to go through the motions of their job responsibility and then are ready to get promoted in the first 12 months, but they haven't actually done the hard growth work of learning. And I think we've done a disservice to younger generations if we don't give them the opportunity to fail. And, you know, so that would be my advice is commit to the hard work of failure. Yeah.

It's a great teacher. Yeah. And you used the word suffering, which I've been obsessed with lately after speaking to some other guests on digital voices. And I think there's something to that. I need to explore that a lot more. What is one thing your parents kind of force you to do in your youth and you probably rolled your eyes, you know, a little bit? But now looking back, you're grateful for the things that they taught you that perhaps informed your leadership today. Well, my parents were a great example of, you know, they had means.

We lived a comfortable life, but my parents never substituted my own learning and opportunities for failure and disappointment with money or with like they never gave me an escape hatch from the from the challenges. I started working as facility maintenance staff person when I was 14 years old. I was cleaning toilets, waxing floors, and I did that all through my high school. And that manual labor was one of the best teachers that I could have started with. And I'm grateful that my parents, even though I didn't have to work, They insisted that I did. And it taught me important things that I, you need to know what you can do.

You need to know what you're made of in order to take risks in life. And that helped give me some of that grounding. Yeah, no, that's awesome. Like I said, very inspirational. I know our listeners are appreciating this and we'll share it with our kids. You know, you're very busy. Obviously, founder, CEO, you have children, life outside of work. How do you recharge your batteries so that you remember?

remain fresh yourself. Yeah, it's a, it's a constant battle to be completely transparent. We're in a very busy stage of life with aging parents. You know, I have four children, some who are moving on to college, and some who are still at home. So it's a very, very busy time of life. In terms for me, recharging looks like going internal and going quiet. So I practice meditation. I do try to work out every day, not so much for physical fitness as much as for my mental health. I found that it really, really helps. I try to read and stay connected to the world outside of what's right in front of me every day so that I have perspective. Perspective is such a great, great teacher. And stepping outside and taking time to look around you is so helpful to recharging. Amy, this has been amazing.

And we talked from everything from your mantra, which really came through the entire conversation, wherever you go, there you are. We talked about your career and the benefits of having worked on the policy side, the state side, air and pharmaceutical aspects give you this well-rounded view to ultimately start, take that chance in your 40s to like, wow, start your own company, even though you still have four kids at home. That's pretty badass, as I would say, to do something like that. But you did it.

You did it well and your company does great things for your, for your customer. What did we miss or what would you like to double down on? I'll give you the last word. Gosh, you know, I think I would just share with your listeners. You've been very gracious about kind of sharing about your listeners and, you know, where they all might be on their own journey. And I would just say, first of all, if you feel like you are in a challenging work environment, if you feel a little bit lost or not sure if you're doing the right thing,

the number one thing I have learned in looking back on my journey is nothing is wasted. Even the hard times, even the challenging times where you're lost or whatever you might be feeling struggling, it is not wasted effort. It's something to learn from and it is something to fuel you into your future and your next step. So invest some time, you know, reflecting on that and not thinking of challenges as negative, but as teachers. And that can help inspire kind of your next moves in your career. Amy Brown, well said.

Thank you for being our guest on Digital Voices. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.