WiDS Maastricht Conference 2022 - Bringing AI Innovation to the Healthcare Market – a Founder's Perspective.

The digitization of the healthcare system and particularly an artificially-intelligent health Made in Europe remains a difficult undertaking. Grounded in science and highly regulated by the government, health care is a very challenging sector with many stakeholders and hard to navigate. Young and innovative startups are the right mechanisms to bring new technology to the market, but they are confronted with many challenges that make it hard to exploit the big potential of AI. Zana, founded and led by Dr. Hoxha,  is one of those startups in the German KI Landscape working to drive digitalization forward in Health.

The talk presents the innovative Conversational AI technology of Zana for building chatbot and voice assistant systems that can communicate in natural language and accompany patients on their healing journey. A glimpse is offered to the commercial solutions and the various projects where the technology is deployed. The talk further addresses from the personal experience as founder the challenges of bringing innovation to a risk-averse market, mechanisms that help to overcome such difficulties, and the role Universities play to transform the high quality of European research into a competitive, commercializing approach.