A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency

gtowey

> “I’ve got four bottles of something that I take twice a week sitting here,” Callaghan said. Profits are up! A smashing success!

matteoraso

>A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency. It’s led to delays, incorrect information and privacy concerns. You should post the entire title.

sghiassy

Honest question, why aren’t pills dispensed by machines? I get that a pharmacist should review the prescription. And let’s say you even want employee-customer interaction; which is great. But dispensing X pills from one bottle to another bottle is a solved problem right?

firasd

A paradoxical situation here is that they are probably not using the frontier models because compliance and other stamps of approval but this packaged approved AI is making silly mistakes in reading forms

svitlak

unrelated, but post's photo - the building - reminds me a cat face

Avicebron

It seems like the article's unspoken consensus is if they hired people (ideally local) and paid them a living wage it would go back to working well enough like it did before they attempted the bot. I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

champagnepapi

When is this madness going to stop? We need to do better as a society.

jdw64

What I've noticed is that AI excels at tasks that are self-contained within a specific logical framework, like coding, writing, and mathematics. But conversation isn't self-contained and requires too much contextual information, which is why AI chatbots and counselors don't seem to perform well. Ironically, coding and mathematics are about simplifying the complexity of the world and reducing it to logical procedures. That's exactly where AI performs well. But in any profession that involves friction with the real world, current AI still seems to fall short.

trollbridge

Impressive: they managed to use LLMs to recreate the CVS pharmacy experience, where you get random phone calls from random pharmacies offering to refill a prescription you don't need refilled, or better yet, they just call you to tell you it's already refilled.

dreamcompiler

Let me predict how Kinney management is going to react to this fiasco: They're going to call it a PR problem and say they haven't done a good enough job of selling the benefits to the customers. So they'll double down and tell the customers they're holding it wrong. That will of course just piss off the customers more. The right solution which will restore customer trust is to rip out all the AI shit, call it a failed experiment, and go back to the old system. They'll never do that because then the VP who thought up this garbage won't get his bonus. This assumes a ton of HIPAA data doesn't get sent up to some cloud and then breached. If that happens, people will start going to prison. HIPAA enforcement does not fuck around. Or at least it didn't before AI and Elon took over everything.