By Geoffrey Clapp, Chief Product Officer
I’ve worked in digital health long enough to have witnessed how positively transformative technology can be — when it’s done right. I’ve also seen just as many times how sideways things can go when innovation is rushed, untethered from purpose, and disconnected from the people it should serve.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in today’s race to bring AI solutions to market. No company sets out to build AI that makes healthcare less human. No executive stands up in a boardroom and says, “Let’s dilute empathy. Let’s make this journey feel more transactional.” And yet, that’s what I see happening far too often. Chat-only front doors replacing relationship-based care. IVRs optimized for speed and deflection rather than continuity. Patients reaching out in vulnerable moments, only to start over with someone new every time.
But the issue isn’t the AI itself. It’s the absence of a North Star.
When technology is deployed without a guiding purpose, efficiency quietly overtakes empathy. What’s pitched as a pursuit of convenience and efficiency ends up eroding quality of care and member trust.
Progyny’s North Star: Member First, Always
For the past decade, every technology decision at Progyny has been run through the same lens: does this enable a more human experience and a better outcome?
We’ve been unwavering in our belief that all healthcare experiences require empathy and deep-seated trust. That trust has two dimensions: the human connection members feel with their care team, and the confidence that their most sensitive data is always protected. We view security, privacy, and thoughtful compliance as core to our member-first commitment — not just legal obligations. And nowhere is that more important than in women’s health and family building, where member experiences are deeply personal journeys requiring a trusted, relationship-based approach to care.
Mark Weiser, longtime head of Xerox PARC, captured something essential about technology that I’ve returned to often throughout my career. He said, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear, weaving themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” Technology, he insisted, “should create calm, not demand our focus.”
Today, AI that disappears — that doesn’t demand our focus — is almost hard to imagine. But that’s precisely what we’re building toward at Progyny: a platform where AI is woven into the fabric of care, bringing more empathy, clarity, and calm to every member interaction.
Too often in our industry, AI efforts fall for the allure of scale and speed, prioritizing what’s easy to measure over what actually matters. Automation rates become a core KPI. The result, ironically, is a model that moves us backward not forward: fragmented, low-touch, impersonal experiences that may appear to be modern but feel disappointingly familiar.
That’s not the experience women deserve. Or the kind of healthcare experience any of us want.
AI in Service to Relationship-Based Care
If we want healthcare to feel more human, can AI really help? Can we design it to bring people closer rather than push us apart? At Progyny, we believe we can – and must.
The beating heart of our care model is the Progyny Care Advocate, or PCA — a dedicated care partner who guides members through every step of their journey. Our investments in AI are squarely focused on enabling them to deliver the most human, most impactful care experience possible.
We’re currently pursuing that goal across three categories:
- Alleviating administrative burden. Healthcare is mired in administrative work — authorizations, lab orders, leave policies. When AI supports those processes, the member experience improves and costs come down. We recently showed a large client that their utilization with Progyny increased while costs went down — not through revenue cycle machinations, but through a system that simply helps more people access the right care at the right time.
- Making every conversation smarter. Our challenge in today’s data-rich environment isn’t access to information — it’s making it useful in the moment. AI can surface what’s relevant so our PCAs have a complete, timely picture of a member’s journey before a call even starts. The result: PCAs enter every conversation fully informed and prepared to help. We’ve talked forever in healthcare about enabling providers to work “at the top of their license.” This may be the moment when we move past talk and finally make it happen.
- Reaching new levels of quality and accountability. Most so-called quality assurance is little more than a sampling exercise — a handful of calls reviewed weeks after the fact. AI enables clinical and service quality reviews across every interaction, in near real-time. That’s a radically different kind of feedback model for driving continuous improvement.
When you remove administrative noise, surface the right information, and create time and space for care partners to be fully present, something remarkable happens: real conversations, real moments of connection, real relationships built on trust.
Consider this story of a Progyny member who entered care with a history of pregnancy-related trauma. When her baby arrived early at 34 and a half weeks due to an infection and spent 2 weeks in the NICU, her PCA was there to guide and assure her. During a postpartum check-in, when her PCA took the time the moment called for — asking questions, empathizing, and offering thoughts, the member broke down — realizing for the first time that she’d been in denial about experiencing postpartum depression. Her PCA was again there for her, connecting her to resources and support. The member later wrote to the PCA to say she’s not sure how she would have made it through those dark days without her support.
That breakthrough moment would never have happened with a chatbot. And it didn’t happen because of AI. But it was made possible by everything AI was quietly doing in the background: clearing distractions, providing context, and “creating calm” and space for human connection.
Humanity: The True Competitive Edge
This is an exciting moment for women’s health and family building. We’re finally seeing the kind of investment, innovation, and healthy competition this critical space deserves. Across the industry, companies are moving fast to stake out their AI story with new copilots, chat interfaces, and automation layers.
This is great news — we’ll all be lifted by this rising tide of competition and investment. But without a North Star, I fear much of that innovation will yield more of what we don’t want and can’t afford: care that’s impersonal, transactional, and less effective. Impressive technology that, by removing the human connection we all crave, fails the people it is meant to serve .
The future of women’s health won’t be won by whoever automates the fastest or launches the most features. It will be won by whoever stays most relentlessly focused on the member — applying every technological innovation in service of moments like the one above: a member, at her most vulnerable, finally feeling seen and supported.