In a recent morning conference at a regional hospital, a senior attending physician asked us: 'Isn't design thinking outdated by now?' We hear that question more than once a year in the medtech space. Our answer: design thinking didn't fail in the last decade — it just ran too slowly. AI compresses the prototype-and-feedback loop from months to days, which is what design thinking has been quietly waiting for. This piece walks through our recent internal pivot — from a single-specialty pilot to a cross-specialty schema composer — to show why AI is not the replacement for design thinking. It's the tool design thinking has been waiting twenty years for.
