Building an AI-First Culture Is a People Strategy

A physician can tell in an instant when a patient is scared, even if the patient never says so. No algorithm can do that. For Brittany Podolak, chief people officer at athenahealth, that gap between what technology can compute and what a human can perceive is the starting point for everything the healthcare technology company is building around artificial intelligence.

During a fireside chat at From Day One’s Austin conference, moderated by Dan Solomon, contributor at Texas Monthly, Podolak shared how athenahealth has approached AI adoption not as a technology rollout, but as a cultural shift. The conversation covered leadership development, skill erosion, bias auditing, and what she calls the “non-negotiable professional skill” every worker now needs.

A People Initiative, Not a Tech One

When athenahealth began shaping its approach to AI, leadership made a deliberate choice to frame the effort around people, not tools. “AI isn’t about replacing human capability; it’s about amplifying it,” said Podolak. In healthcare, that amplification applies directly to empathy, judgment, and trust, the qualities she considers core to the company’s mission.

That framing influenced how the message landed internally. Rather than pitching AI as a mandate, Podolak’s team asked employees to consider which problems they were already trying to solve, and how AI might extend their reach in solving them. Curiosity followed, she said, but buy-in remained an ongoing effort rather than a one-time achievement.

Podolak’s team also used AI to change how it develops leaders. Traditional coaching programs, she noted, tended toward a one-size-fits-all approach. By partnering with a strategic consulting firm and giving leaders access to a large language model for on-demand coaching, athenahealth introduced a level of personalization that hadn’t existed before. The shift also redefined what leadership now requires: supervising AI-generated output, not just people, and building the skill to coach the prompts behind it.

Asked whether AI adoption threatens core professional skills, Podolak described three categories: skills that erode quickly without daily use, skills that stay dormant but return with practice, and skills that fade harmlessly, like handwriting. She pointed to a decades-old case in aviation, where pilots who relied heavily on crew resource management lost some hand-flying ability, as a caution for high-stakes skills like critical thinking. Those, she says, cannot be delegated to AI without deliberate practice.

Making AI Literacy Everyone’s Job

Podolak compared AI fluency to earlier shifts in workplace technology, like the move to PowerPoint and Excel. Holding out, she said, isn’t a viable strategy, since someone who does use AI will eventually outperform someone who doesn’t. Rather than issuing static prompting guides, athenahealth built a curriculum meant to develop what Podolak called “prompting muscle,” paired with lessons on responsible use, including matching the tool to the task rather than defaulting to the most powerful model available.

She also spoke to the importance of understanding bias in the technology. Inclusivity, Podolak said, has to be designed in rather than assumed. She urged leaders not to take vendor claims about algorithm auditing at face value, and to instead maintain direct oversight of how systems are evaluated. She also pointed to representation among the people training AI models as a factor shaping how equitable the resulting output becomes. athenahealth's employee resource groups, she added, play an active role in product development and customer research, feeding directly into how the company designs for accessibility.

Moving Past the Experimental Phase

Training also became a tool for managing anxiety. By pairing structured learning with hackathons, ambassador programs, and an internal event called Growth Week, athenahealth found that quarterly sentiment around AI improved as employee knowledge did. Confidence, Podolak said, tracked directly with competence.

Solomon pressed on whether companies have moved past the trial-and-error stage of adopting AI. “Have we moved past that?” Solomon asked. Podolak said athenahealth has, pointing to how the company’s own measurement of success has shifted from an early fixation on token usage to a focus on the quality of output produced.

One correction has emerged along the way, she noted: reminding employees that being AI-first doesn’t mean using AI for everything. Output that skipped human thinking and creativity was noticeably weaker. Keeping that distinction alive, Podolak says, remains a continuing effort as the technology evolves.

Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.

(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)