Alphabet CFO Cites Cancer Experience to Explain AI Optimism

Alphabet Inc. Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said her own experience of breast cancer helped her understand the “extraordinary” potential of AI in healthcare.

Porat said after learning about progress Google made in early metastatic breast cancer detection with AI, she called her own oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and asked: “Is this really as important as I hope?”

Porat’s oncologist told her it was the only technology that could democratize healthcare, she recalled, in an interview with David Rubenstein at Bloomberg House at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday.

WATCH: “It’s the ability with AI to aggregate so much data that you can actually have a level of diagnosis that is better than what specialists can do,” Porat says.

Source: Bloomberg

“It’s the only way that ...