AI Isn’t the Future; It’s Already Transforming Customer Experience

Is there humanity in AI? CX Joe explores this topic.

The CX Lesson Hidden Inside Rare Disease Breakthroughs

Let’s be honest: modern medicine is optimized for scale. Blockbuster drugs. Mass-market conditions. Billion-dollar pipelines. And if you fall outside of that system—if you’re one of the millions of people with a rare disease — you’re often left waiting. Not because a solution doesn’t exist, but because no one is incentivized to find it.

That’s the gap AI is starting to close. For decades, the assumption has been: if a disease doesn’t have a treatment, we need to invent one. But what if that’s wrong? What if the cure is already sitting on a shelf? There are over 4,000 FDA-approved drugs on the market today. The real challenge isn’t creation — it’s connection.

And that’s exactly the kind of problem AI is built to solve.

The Case Study: Dr. David Fajgenbaum

Before this was a movement, it was survival. As a medical student diagnosed with Castleman disease, Fajgenbaum was repeatedly on the brink of death. Last rites read. Hospice discussions underway. No clear path forward. So he did something most patients can’t do: He started running the experiment himself.After multiple near-fatal relapses, he identified an existing drug that saved his life—and kept him in remission for over a decade.

Watch the full discussion on the “In the Business of Humans” podcast.

But the real breakthrough wasn’t just the drug. It was the realization that followed: He shouldn’t have had to figure this out alone.

This Is What “AI in Healthcare” Actually Looks Like

Not chatbots. Not dashboards. Not hype. Real impact looks like:

• A patient getting a treatment that didn’t “exist” yesterday

• A doctor having answers instead of guesses

• A rare disease becoming treatable overnight

AI isn’t replacing medicine—it’s accelerating it.

The most powerful idea here is also the simplest: We may not need to create as many cures as we think—we need to find the ones we’ve already overlooked. AI is what makes that possible at scale. And for millions of patients with rare diseases, that shift changes everything.