Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

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Cost to serve, LLMs & objectives 

At Alan, we have ambitious objectives to reduce our cost to serve by 2025.

Ambitious objectives are uncomfortably exciting. Uncomfortable because we don’t have all the answers today to achieve them. Exciting because they allow us to contemplate innovations to reach them, and when we do reach them, Alan will be in an incredible position. 

As Larry Page said, “We underestimate the large-scale changes and we are too optimistic on how long it’s going to take for them to arrive”. 

It means we usually overestimate the impact of our actions in the short-term but we significantly underestimate how much the world changes over long periods of time. 

Regarding cost to serve, we can’t only make incremental changes to achieve high objectives. We have to change the paradigm. 

The way to do it is to ask ourselves, “If I was starting Alan today, with all that has changed in terms of technology, how would I do it?”

In the case of our cost to serve, we are lucky, because we have a new technological wave to surf: Large Language Models and generative AI.

It is important for us not to consider technology as it is today, but how it is going to be in one year or two. 

One good way to do this is to take a step back on where the technology was two years ago (pretty bad), one year ago (a lot less good), and where it is today, and try to project the curve for the next three years.

As a result, we believe it is better to aim for 85% and achieve 80% than aiming for 40% and achieving 40%. This is exactly what we are doing with some of our key objectives. We gave ourselves a highly ambitious, 75% reduction target, and our team is exploring bold options to get us there. It will require a truly disruptive approach, leveraging technological changes, but also creative processes, UX, partnerships, and organisational ideas.

As the CEO of Pfizer said about COVID vaccine development:

“If I had told everybody that we needed to do it in eight years, they would’ve said, ‘You’re crazy. It takes us 10 to 12.’ So I told them we had to do it in eight months, because if I told them eight years, they would’ve taken the old process and tried to fix it in little ways, and that would never work.” 

Let’s focus on big disruptive steps that can transform the way we serve our customers and that will help us achieve our objectives. 

Some articles I have read this week

Culture:

• The diversity myth (The New Criterion)

• How to deal with people who don't like you (Twitter)

•  Big ambitions, Low expectations and High Standards (Farnam Street)

Healthcare:

• Apple unveils watchOS 10 with new features for mental health, vision health (Mobi Health News)

• More Older Adults Plan to Use Digital Health Technologies as They ‘Age in Place’ (Managed Healthcare Executive)

• How Docus.ai Is Powering A Groundbreaking AI Powered Health Platform (Forbes)

Marketing:

• Adding a Paid Tier to The Split + Launching a Podcast (The Split)

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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!