The AI Revolution Is Moving at the Speed of Months (video)

Episode Overview

Healthcare technology entrepreneur Tony Paquin has spent 30 years building and scaling software companies in regulated markets. Today, as CEO and co-founder of iRemedy Healthcare, he leads an AI-enabled procurement platform designed to strip out middlemen, cut drug costs by 15 to 25 percent, and reshore the US pharmaceutical supply chain. In this episode, Paquin draws on that deep operational experience to assess exactly where AI stands right now—and where it will take us next.

The conversation covers AI’s accelerating pace of change—moving not in years but in months or even weeks—its transformative impact on sales and marketing, and the surprising conclusion that the most experienced professionals may hold the strongest hand in the AI era. Paquin argues that critical thinking, subject-matter expertise, and the ability to orchestrate digital agents are the skills that will define the winners in the decade ahead.

Key Insights

1. Here is what you need to know about the unprecedented speed of AI adoption.

Unlike previous technology revolutions—from DOS to Windows, the internet to mobile—AI is unfolding over months, weeks, and sometimes days rather than years. Paquin, a 30-year software veteran who has lived through every major platform shift, says he has never seen anything move this fast. The implication for business leaders is stark: passive observation is not a strategy. Organizations that wait to understand AI before acting will find themselves already behind, with the gap widening daily.

2. Here is what you need to know about AI’s impact on sales and marketing.

AI will automate the parts of sales that drain time without generating value—note-taking, CRM updates, lead research, and initial outreach. That automation will, paradoxically, make skilled salespeople more important, not less. As AI-generated content floods every channel and deep fakes erode trust in digital media, buyers will place a premium on direct, verifiable human relationships. Relationship-driven salespeople who can build trust, probe for real needs, and close complex deals will thrive; order-takers operating on rote tasks will not survive.

3. Here is what you need to know about becoming a conductor of digital agents.

Paquin has restructured his entire organization around a single principle: every employee is now a conductor of digital agents, not a doer of discrete tasks. A team of ten people, each running five to ten agents, delivers the output of a company that was 50 to 100 people just two years ago, at a fraction of the payroll. This is not a future projection; it describes iRemedy’s current operating model. The practical lesson for leaders is to audit every role in the business and ask which tasks can be delegated to agents immediately.

4. Here is what you need to know about the trust advantage experienced professionals enjoy.

Conventional wisdom assumes younger, digitally native workers will dominate the AI era. Paquin inverts that assumption. Professionals with deep subject-matter expertise can interrogate AI outputs, recognize when an agent has gone wrong, and redirect it—capabilities that require years of domain experience to develop. When iRemedy’s agents produce a flawed supply-chain analysis, it is Paquin’s team that spots the error and courses the agents to try a different approach. That interaction quality, grounded in experience and critical thinking, determines whether AI produces useful results.

5. Here is what you need to know about AI’s role in healthcare supply chain resilience.

Roughly 90 percent of the drugs Americans use are manufactured in China and India—a concentration that creates serious quality and national security risks. Five years ago, iRemedy attempted to build a database to map the entire pharmaceutical supply chain and found it computationally impossible. Today the company deploys swarms of AI agents to perform that same analysis in real time. Paquin sees this as a template for the broader domestication of healthcare manufacturing: AI does not just streamline procurement, it makes reshoring viable by making complexity manageable.

Pull Quotes

“AI is unique, though. All these other changes happened, and they were big and important—the internet, the PC computer revolution—but AI, I’m telling you, in my 30 or 40-year career, I’ve never seen anything move this fast. We’re not talking about years, we’re talking about months.”  — Tony Paquin

“At the end of the day, you’re going to have to talk to a client, have a relationship, and close the deal. In a surprising sort of way, I think the salesperson is actually going to be more valuable than ever.”  — Tony Paquin

“Employees are no longer responsible for some work. You’re an employee that’s really a conductor of digital agents that work on your behalf to achieve certain goals.”  — Tony Paquin

“That interaction—which you and I have the ability to do because of our years of experience—actually puts us at an advantage, because that’s really what it’s all about today: your ability to interact based on your critical thinking skills and your experience.”  — Tony Paquin

AI in Healthcare Procurement: Key Statistics from iRemedy Healthcare

Related Resources

• iRemedy Healthcare — Book a free consultation
• Sales POP! Podcast