Adapt or Fall Behind: Navigating Medtech's Revolutionary ChangesAdapt or Fall Behind: Navigating Medtech's Revolutionary Changes

How prepared is your organization for the next decade of transformation in medical device design, manufacturing, and packaging?

Amanda Pedersen

February 4, 2025

7 Min Read
A side-view photo of Nicholas Webb on stage delivering his keynote at MD&M West 2025
Based on his just-released book "Chaotic Change," Nicholas Webb kicked off the MD&M West conference with his keynote that provided attendees with the foresight and practical tools needed to drive growth and innovation through future-ready strategies.Image by MD+DI

What is the future of healthcare? Nicholas Webb, CEO of LeaderLogic thinks the bigger question, at least for medical device executives, is what is your future within the industry? Is it good, or is it bad?

Webb, a renowned healthcare futurist, medical device technologist, and bestselling author, delivered a powerful keynote to a standing-room-only MD&M West audience Tuesday morning on what he calls "the blur of chaotic change" happening right now in the industry.

"Is your future as an executive within the medical device industry, is your future good or is it bad? And that's really the question today. And here's the answer: Yes," Webb said. "Yes, it's good for organizations who are willing to lean into the blur of chaotic change.”

Webb expects the "AI shift" to take the industry to a level that is probably difficult for most people to imagine just in the next three to five years.

“This is a time where it's really important for us to pay attention because the good news is—and I think it's all good news—is that if we lean into these disruptive changes, we can leverage their superpower to be able to drive amazing organizations," Webb said. "But I think if we ignore the speed and the size of chaotic change, which is where we are now, then I think there's some possibility that you could put yourself in a situation to fall behind.”

Related:AI-Powered Medtech: What Companies Need to Know About Regulatory and IP Risks

Creating experiential value in medtech

Nicholas_Webb_quote_graphic.png

As healthcare moves more toward consumerism, Webb said the medical device industry must learn to create holistic and experiential value.

"My clients that are delivering directly to the healthcare marketscape—those organizations absolutely have to deliver experiential value, not just technical value," Webb said.

The industry needs to be consumer centeric to the point where it is above the baseline level of customer expectation, and that customer is comprised of an experiential ecosystem of buyers, payers, and recommenders, and all of the different people that live within the experiential ecosystem have to be more thoughtful about that, he said.

"Right now we are living in what I like to call the human experience economy, the HX economy. The experience is a differentiator. I would proclaim here that if we are in the business of dispensing plastic stuff to the marketplace and we're not looking at the way in which we build the protective bubble and the delivery modality of experiential design, bad stuff's gonna happen," Webb said. "...The organizations in healthcare that are winning are delivering experiential value, not just transacting medical devices. The lesson for us is that if we are delivering just medical devices, then in a time of the experiential economy we're going to be in really bad shape."

Related:Navigating FDA’s Draft Guidance for AI-Enabled Medical Devices

Organizations within healthcare, especially in the device space, should be able to deliver layered and dynamic value, according to Webb.

"More value than just transacting plastic, more value than just transacting packaging, or equipment, or services. When we deliver more value than just that, we're positioning ourselves for commercial success. So, if we want to drive sustainable and predictable growth, we have to deliver more than economic value; we also have to deliver experiential value. That's a fact," Webb said.

Leveraging emerging technologies

Adapting to emerging technologies is also key to navigating the industry's transformation in the coming years. Webb said medical device executives must think beyond just AI and think about leveraging emerging technologies to drive sustainable and predictable growth without getting blindsided in the marketplace.

"We're probably all suffering from AI fatigue," he said. "I think that ultimately we think about AI ... it's pretty easy to just sort of assume that AI is ChatGPT and call it a day. But as we get into multimodal AI and that becomes more expansive to where the machine is not just using language models; it's managing the movement of disparate data sets and unstructured data to understand the meaning of things to be able to fuel our innovation pipelines."

Related:FDA Issues Draft Guidance for AI-Enabled Devices, Seeks Public Feedback

Citing a study by McKinsey and Company, Webb said AI can reduce costs by as much as 30%.

"So, when you think about AI, the thing that it could do for us right now is that it can provide us the ability to invent. For somebody who has 40 patents and considers myself an inventor, I'm not nearly as good as AI," he said. "AI can look at a lot more data than I can, and it can understand nanodata; it can understand the meaning of that, and it can draw far better predictive models. So, if we're not leveraging AI in the way in which we manage every aspect of our innovation pipeline, I think we're missing some opportunities."

That said, Webb acknowledged that AI is not as good as humans and ultimately AI doesn't replace humans, it just allows humans to do things that they couldn't otherwise do. Afterall, he said, the word artificial in artificial intelligence means fake. It doesn't know how to invent yet.

"The concern, of course, is that what happens when the invention, the machine, knows what to invent? That will happen. Right now, it doesn't know what to invent, but it does know how to invent," Webb said. "So, what we have to do is combine artificial intelligence with human intelligence, and this is a thoughtful strategy that organizations have to build out in order to make this work. When we do that, we actually create cooperative intelligence, and cooperative intelligence is us collaborating with the machine by getting better insights and making better decisions. We already see that clinically; we see that in virtually every aspect of healthcare. Healthcare is the best possible target for the use of artificial intelligence."

Creating better enterprise value in medtech

Webb also emphasized the importance of creating better enterprise value from a staffing perspective.

"We're in a time of a need to have maximal amounts of productivity and yield, and the best organizations are developing what we now call HXI, human experience innovation, where we create great places to work and to collaborate. These organizations are far more innovative, they deliver better products to the marketplace, and they're driving unprecedented levels of growth," he said.

According to Webb, his clients are saving 35% to 40% on their costs just by taking repetitive tasks and letting machines do it.

"The majority of us will be hiring far more AI agents than people over the next three years, and the reason for that is that they're dutiful, they're specific, they're predictable, and they're a fraction of the cost," he said. "So, I don't think we have much of a choice but to widely adopt the usage of these agents to be able to do very specific things that we used to have humans do. And you know the good thing is that if we do this right, it actually improves the quality of life for everyone involved."

Learn from the farming industry’s history

Farmers driving John Deere tractors fitted with mowers harvest a field of alfalfa, Bakersfield, California, circa 1950.

Webb provided an example from the farming industry's move from manual human and animal labor to the use of tractors.

"When we started to use tractors in America, believe it or not, that was considered incredibly controversial. And the main reason that people pushed against the tractor on farms—we had 30 million farms at that time—was the fact that their expertise was animal husbandry. They were experts at animals, and they didn't want to learn the scary tractor. And those who didn't adopt the scary tractor by understanding carburetors and transmissions and how to manage this machine, those organizations, those farms, unfortunately went bankrupt," Webb said.

Meanwhile, the farmers who adopted tractors thrived and prospered.

"People were dying on the field from exhaustion working 17-hour days, and then they turned it over to the robot—the tractor—and now they're working 8-hour days," Webb said. "So, we can improve our quality of life; we can significantly improve productivity and yield so that we can allow the machine to do the lame machine stuff so that we can do the beautiful human stuff, which is important at a time of the human experience economy."

About the Author

Amanda Pedersen

Amanda Pedersen is a veteran journalist and award-winning columnist with a passion for helping medical device professionals connect the dots between the medtech news of the day and the bigger picture. She has been covering the medtech industry since 2006.

Sign up for the QMED & MD+DI Daily newsletter.

You May Also Like