Brian Hartzer’s warning to AI wannabes

“I’d had a huge amount of respect for Quantium from a distance. We’d never worked with them, but I knew about them and was jealous of my competitors who had their capabilities.”

Four years on, Driussi’s pitch to run the health JV was “a bit too good to pass up”.

More than ‘just making money’

“I’ve always been interested in making an impact and doing something that has a broader societal impact than just making money.”

Hartzer has observed the generative artificial intelligence boom with interest, but says Quantium’s long history in what are now seen as almost foundational AI techniques, such as data analytics and machine learning, will prove vital for large organisations that want to get the best results from AI.

“It’s one thing to sit at home and you use it to write Shakespearean sonnets and draft TikTok posts. It’s quite another to leverage it in the context of a large enterprise that has cybersecurity risks, privacy risks, ethical considerations, complex private datasets. So a lot of the work that companies like Quantium have been doing is about setting up the infrastructure to deploy AI at scale is foundational.”

That’s not to say that companies shouldn’t and aren’t experimenting with generative AI. But Hartzer says it has been fascinating to see many early adopters are now finding that their initial success is coming with challenges, in finding, building and maintaining the resources required to make generative AI projects sustainable.

There’s a balance to be found, he says, between the experimental and the foundational.

“Back in my banking career, I used to call it the Field of Dreams notion, which is we’re going to spend the next two years building this amazing data platform, and then life will be great. Yeah. But you spend years and all this money but you never quite seem to get value out of it.

“Or you get a little skunkworks thing – someone builds some clever little demo of something – and then you go, ‘how do I actually deploy that in my environment?’ And actually, you can’t.”

Hartzer sees a lot of opportunities for Quantium to help organisations across the health sector, from payers (governments and health insurers) who want the best bang for their buck, the care providers who need to use scarce resources in the most efficient way, suppliers to the sector such as pharmaceutical companies, and the research community.

The sector has massive amounts of data, but Hartzer says it has been relatively slow to use it.

Quantium Health will be based in Sydney, but the JV with Discovery and operations in US and Britain will mean Hartzer is on the road a lot more than he’s been since leaving Westpac.

One fascinating project Quantium is currently supporting is a government-sponsored collaboration between Australia’s leading cancer specialists, where patients are being invited to opt in to a program whereby their DNA, the DNA of their tumour, and their treatment history are collated to identify potential treatment pathways for patients and assist pharmaceutical companies in the development of new treatments.

“I think we’re getting closer to finding solutions for some of these chronic diseases. And it’s quite exciting to think that we’ve got the capability to contribute in that way.”