Old Philips Factory Building in the center of Eindhoven, Netherlands
Shez Partovi is head of innovation and strategy and head of businessman in Royal Philips, a World Health Technology Society based in the Netherlands. Philips focuses on improving health and prosperity through meaningful innovation that combines advanced technology with deep clinical and consumer insight. In 2024, the company generated revenue of 18 billion euros and employs more than 67,000 people, serving customers in more than 100 countries.
An experienced clinical professor, neurorant, global executive and businessman, Partovi brings a unique perspective from decades of leadership to health systems, cloud transformation and artificial intelligence. Under its leadership, Philips is promoting its role as a reliable partner in integrated diagnostics, scaling analytical data and optimizing driving flow throughout healthcare. Working at the intersection of diagnostics, information technology and patient care, Partovi helps to shape the company’s vision to provide better care for more people, especially at an age characterized by clinical deficiencies, cost pressures and explosive demand.
A strategy that is anchored in customer pain points
Philips’ strategic approach is misleading simple: Invest in resolving customer problems, not promoting the company’s ideas. “The best innovations are painkillers, not vitamins,” Partovi said, underlining a shift from traditional R&D silos to the customer.
Shez Partovi of Philips
Any divisions of Philips, from precision diagnosis to sleep and respiratory care, applies this philosophy through standardized corporate relationships with health systems. These relationships often include co-installed groups of engineers, product managers and architects who are directly integrated into clinical environments. “We repeat in bed, in the Radiology Suite or the Pathology Laboratory,” Partovi explained. “So we create algorithms, software and solutions that offer significant results.”
A distinctive example is the Smartspeed AI software developed for Philips Blueseal MRI scanners. Inspired by the needs of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, which faced a patient delay, Philips created a neuronal network that tripled scanning speeds and improved image resolution without requiring new material. “It is a jumping on the software in productivity,” Partovi said. “And came from listening to a client’s pain point.”
Organization of innovation for scale
The innovation in Philips is not left to chance. Partovi oversees a tightly structured system that balances decentralization with long -term research. About 80 % of Philips’ R&D resources are incorporated into its basic business units, ensuring close proximity to customers and rapid feedback circles. The remaining 20 % resides in the central innovation groups that focused on industry shift discoveries.
One case is the Blueseal itself, which uses only seven liters of sunglasses, much less than the standard of industry 1,500. “No one asked for magnetic resonance imaging without sunset,” Partovi said. “But we saw the benefits of sustainability and cost years ago, and now the whole industry is moving in that direction.”
Either near the market or looking around the corners, all Philips Innovation share three features: Must be
- People and central patient
- Co-created with partners
- Designed for scale.
“We want to improve the lives of 2.5 billion people annually by 2030, including 400 million from inadequate communities,” Partovi said. “This is only happening if you build with the global impact on the mind.”
Rupping Health Care Software with Business Informatics
Two years ago, Partovi expanded his responsibilities to include the Philips Healthcare IT department. The move was strategy: Unlike the material, which has long product circles, the software must be constantly evolving. “If a magnetic resonance scanner is updated every two years, the software should update every six weeks,” Partovi noted.
Philips has consolidated its illustration and clinic in an autonomous unit to accelerate innovation. Division covers everything from diagnostic spectators for radiologists and pathologists in integrating medical devices that supplies prediction algorithms. ‘In a hospital, anything with digital reading [including] Fans, pumps IV, screens, can consume data and apply AI to it, “Partovi said.
These possibilities are already supplying forecasts. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Philips is working to predict respiratory discomfort in patients with ICU, helping clinical jokes intervene earlier and improve results.
Three dimensions of AI: Automate, Augment, Agility
Partovi describes Philips’ AI strategy in terms of three functions: automation, growth and agility. Each is used to enhance clinical efficacy and efficiency.
- Automation: In a heart attack, AI can now detect the basic frames and calculate heart pressure in seconds, tasks that once took 20 minutes of manual effort. “Sonographers were not trained to make Photoshop,” Partovi said. “They were trained to take care of patients.”
- Increase: In the healing suite guided by Philips’ image, AI merges real-time imaging to guide the catheters through the heart precisely, to become essentially co-pilot for invasive cardiologists.
- Agility: Through the integration of medical devices and continuous data analysis, AI always allows monitoring systems that can predict and prevent complications, improving patient safety and optimizing the clinician’s response.
Partovi sees AI not as a replacement for carers but as a tool that extends capacity. “The most pressing challenge in health care is the gap between demand and supply,” he said. “AI helps us close this gap.”
Bridging the confidence gap in AI
According to Philips Future’s latest health index, a global study of 16,000 patients and 2,000 clinics, a remarkable gap remains between the physician and patients’ confidence in AI. While 79 % of clinical doctors believe that AI reduces weights and improves care, only 59 % of patients agree and many worry that AI can reduce the time spent with doctors.
However, trust grows dramatically when people stay in the loop. “Patients showed 86 % confidence in AI when a doctor participated,” Partovi said. “The route is clear: the AI design to enhance, not to replace, the human relationship.”
This insight has become central to Philips’ AI planning philosophy, which highlights transparency, justice and regulatory rigor. “Innovation must be responsible, or it is not an innovation at all,” Partovi said.
Internal use of genetic AI in Philips
While the greatest attention goes to patients’ applications, Philips also utilizes AI internally throughout the business. In software engineering, AI genetics is now responsible for 30 % of the new code in some groups. “A programmer said to me,” I feel I have a new job, “Recalls Partovi.
Customer service is also evolving. Large language models trained on the knowledge base of Philips Philips are now the advanced conversation tools used by both customers and internal service groups. “In one group, 10 % of services are fully treated by Agentic AI,” he said.
The result? Faster innovation cycles and more effective exchange of knowledge in a complex, global organization.
Looking forward: A new era of intelligence
For partovi, the excitement around AI and genetic technology has not diminished. accelerates. It leads to the present moment to go through tectonic shifts: the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the rise of IT.
“Now we are entering the age of intelligence,” he said. “For the first time, you can incorporate reasoning and action into digital tools. This changes everything.”
From the close of care gaps to areas that are not served to convert daily work flows to hospitals, Partovi sees AI as the engine that will eventually achieve the promise of healthcare for access, shares and personalization. “We have dreamed of using technology to close the healthcare gap,” he said. “Now we finally have the tools to do it.”
Peter High is president of Metis strategyA business and IT Counseling Company. He has written three bestselling books, including his last Arriving at Nimble. It also measures the Technology Podcast Series and talks to conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @Peterahigh.
