AI Governance at Scale: Rob Alger, Senior Vice President of Health Plan IT Strategy at Kaiser Permanente and Chair of the Health Plan AI Council, on Speed, Safety and the Human in the Loop

What does responsible AI look like inside one of the country’s largest healthcare systems?

In this episode, Rob Alger explains how Kaiser Permanente is thinking about AI at scale, including governance, human oversight, vendor risk, orchestration, and the tension between moving quickly and protecting trust. The conversation goes beyond generic AI optimism and gets into the operating realities leaders are wrestling with right now.

One of the clearest ideas in this discussion is simple: AI can be powerful for organizing information, surfacing patterns, and reducing administrative burden, but that is different from letting AI make decisions. Rob shares how Kaiser draws that line, why “human in the loop” matters, and where they are already seeing real value through ambient listening and other practical use cases.