Healthcare and AI in Chicago - Tim Turner, Thresholds

Khullani Abdullahi (00:01.39) Hello and welcome to AI in Chicago, a podcast where we explore the nexus between artificial intelligence and Chicago and Illinois more broadly. From academia to startups to finance and capital allocation, Chicago is the nation's third largest city and it's a dynamic environment for advancements in AI research and for the development of AI solutions and services. I'm your host, Khullani Abdullahi, the founder of TechnA.ai. And today I have with me, Tim Turner, a wonderful guest and also the vice president of business insights and analytics at Thresholds. And like many of you, he is helping his organization enter the AI age. For those of you who don't know, Thresholds is one of Illinois's leading community-based mental health nonprofits that provides care, housing, and recovery support for thousands of people each year. Tim is going to share his unique perspective based on his deep background in data and analytics and across several corporate roles leading up to his current leadership role at Thresholds. He earned his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth and a bachelor's degree from Harvard. He's passionate about the intersection between innovation, care, and health equity while using data for social good. So we'll chat with Tim about his career. We'll ask him how AI is developing in both his professional and personal lives. And then we'll ask him some fun questions at the end. So welcome, Tim. Tim Turner (01:37.66) Amazing. Thank you, Kalani. Khullani Abdullahi (01:39.48) Thanks for joining me. I'm very excited to have you. Tim Turner (01:42.834) Wonderful. Glad to be here. Khullani Abdullahi (01:44.608) Excellent. So Tim, tell us who are you, where do you come from, and what have you done? Tim Turner (01:51.718) Yeah, so in terms of, I'll start with where I come from. I grew up in Manchester, Tennessee. It's a small town about an hour south of Nashville, about 12,000 population. So a very small rural homogenous community. I grew up there and then eventually went to Harvard for undergrad, as you mentioned. And as far as who I am, I would say I'm someone who very much is passionate about data, social justice, equity, and also believe in just finding ways to contribute to the community. I'm an avid mentor with various organizations in the Chicagoland area. I've always been deeply passionate about justice, but in particular justice for Black communities. And I'm very much involved in the Chicago Urban League, been involved with organizations like the 100 Black Men of Chicago, and as well as a mentoring organization called Project 110. And as far as what I've I think I've always just tried to bring increasing harmony between my values and the things that I like to do on a day-to-day basis for the community, as well as developing the skills and the knowledge and the capacity to advance causes and to bring things to organizations and communities that I care about and bring those things to help those organizations and communities increase with their become increasingly self-sufficient and continue to advance and promote equity and justice in that way. So yeah, I'm really excited about today's conversation and I think there's no shortage of opportunities to look at ways in which AI, technology, data can all contribute to building the society that we want to see. Khullani Abdullahi (03:52.906) Agreed, agreed. So you've had an interesting career path. You've gone from data science roles at Walgreens and Go Health, which are for-profit organizations, and then have moved into mental health and community-based health care with a unique model at thresholds. So what inspired you to kind of move from the corporate world into the nonprofit world? and how has that journey been and kind of what was your decision-making model? Because people don't usually leave leadership roles in corporate America, especially before they're like 50 or 60. They may do nonprofit towards the tail end, but you left in the height of your career. So I'd love to hear a little bit about you and kind of how that decision came to be and how it's going. Tim Turner (04:46.661) Yeah, yeah. Well, my career really started in nonprofit. So the first organization that I worked for here in Chicago is a nonprofit organization called the History Makers. They focus on documenting the stories of accomplished African-Americans and then using those stories to drive educational programming across the country. And in that opportunity, that's where I really started to learn about being able to seek some of the challenges that nonprofit, smaller nonprofit organizations are faced with, but also the opportunity that those organizations have with additional capacity and infrastructure to be able to advance and promote the work that those organizations are doing. So I knew I wanted to go from the nonprofit space into the corporate space and develop the skills and experience there to ultimately, you know, in a full circle manner, come back to values driven, mission driven. organizations. So from history makers, I went to an organization called Stacks Inc, consulting firm that focuses primarily on market due diligence work for private equity firms. That's where I started to cut my teeth on data analytics. That's when I first became exposed to the world of insights and being able to use large scale analytics and large amounts of data to churn through and to make decisions and help improve efficiencies. And from that experience is when I went to go health and started to learn more about just the healthcare space. I was in a product management leadership role there to help help that organization think through ways of entering into the Medicare space with technology to sell insurance to individuals who are purchasing Medicare plans through through their market exchanges and technologies that they are creating. And then moved into to Walgreens. where I wanted to learn more about continuing to use large scale analytics and customer analytics and customer data to drive decision making and was in the pharmacy insights team there, ultimately got to a position of leading that team and just being able to see that intersection of data, analytics, insights, and at that large of a scale, I got a better appreciation for not only the importance of using front end Tim Turner (07:16.271) analytics and visualizations to drive decision making, but also how the actual infrastructure and the governance and the engineering behind that data was just as critical and just as important to enable those analytics as it was to be able to produce the visualizations and recommendations on the back end. And so I wanted to take those experiences and got to a point in my career in 2023 where I wanted to go back into the social sector, go back into a nonprofit organization. And Thresholds created an incredible opportunity with this position where given the scale and the size of thresholds, just being able to have a deeper strategy and approach to coalescing all the efforts that we're doing around data to better govern our data, centralize our data, to make insights more available at the fingertips of everyone from our leadership to our clinicians. That's the work that I focus on now on a day-to-day basis. tremendous opportunity just to be able to apply those skills I've developed throughout my career into an organization that's doing great work. Khullani Abdullahi (08:34.818) Very cool. Can you describe for people who are not familiar with thresholds, and I include myself, I follow your CEO online on LinkedIn. So I have some sense of what the organization does, but from a data leadership perspective, could you just give us an idea of kind of what your day to day looks like and maybe an overview of the organization and the teams, right? Like how many employees do you guys have? What are the main business units just so that people can wrap their mind around when we go into the conversation later about the use of AI and the use of data in the organization that they have a firm understanding of the size of the organization, its complexity, its main business functions, et cetera. If you could just dive into that a little bit, I think it would be really helpful grounding for the rest of the conversation. Tim Turner (09:32.614) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Thresholds is a healthcare nonprofit in Chicago. We serve about 9,500 patients per year. We call our patients members. And so the folks that we work with are individuals who are dealing with severe mental illnesses. So things like schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, and other conditions that may constrain or make it challenging. day-to-day lives and then we operate in our capacity as a healthcare organization. We have a team of clinicians who go out to the community every day and support those folks through services, wraparound services, so medication therapy management, case management, employment services, behavioral health, crisis care, all different forms of ways to be able to support our members and make sure that they are able to them. find home health and hope through the work that we deliver. And along with that, from a home perspective, another big part of the work that we do is managing a portfolio of housing units. So for folks who are experiencing housing instability in addition to their mental health conditions, that's another way in which we provide support by making sure that we provide housing to the folks who are members and residents within our community. From my perspective, terms of insights and analytics that I'm leading, my job is to lead all things related to data strategy, data governance, data products, as well as AI strategy, all within the realm of helping to use the data, the information that we have across the agency, and creating opportunities to use that data to help drive decision making and ultimately make Tim Turner (11:32.836) the organization more efficient and be able to give us a greater speed of insights, depth of insights, and feel more confident in the decisions that we're making on a day-to-day basis. And that can range on a day-to-day in terms of my activities and what I'm focused on and how I spend my time. That can range from supporting my data engineers with helping them think through what are the right dimension tables and fact tables that they should be building. building in our data warehouse to having conversations with leaders across the agency, in particular departments, so I can understand what data needs or what dashboards or reports they want to try to automate or processes they want to automate from a data perspective. I do a lot of seeking external support and working with different partners to help bring their expertise, either to facilitate things like data literacy workshops or to help us think through the right research and data that we need to collect and analyze to inform our strategic approach to AI or our strategic approach to data governance and data engineering overall. And ultimately just making sure that we are working towards enabling our clinicians and our leaders to have the information that they need to make their decisions and to help the agency become more sustainable and more impactful. Khullani Abdullahi (13:04.471) Very cool. For the last six months, I've spent most of my time either reading and researching or having meetings and conversations about AI at the intersection of a million different things. I'm doing this full time and I feel like I'm drowning in the amount of information and the advancements that are out there. Can you share with us how, like even with your full time job, How are you approaching and what is your strategy for staying abreast of the advancements? Because every day there is a new development. Every week there is a new model, right? And things seem to be accelerating. And so I suspect a lot of people like you who are, know, people have full family lives and full work lives and full social lives. What are you doing? How are you approaching it? What have you found helpful? What would you like to try next that you haven't had a chance to try yet? Share with our audience, you know, kind of your thinking on that and the strategies that you've been deploying. Tim Turner (14:18.063) Yeah, yeah. So I think the framework that I've been, well, one thing I should share is that there's a little bit of like a dirty little secret about me leading AI strategy, which is that two years ago I had not even used chat GPT much and just kind of started. Khullani Abdullahi (14:33.218) I think that 90 % of the people who the CEO looks at and says, hey, you have data and analytics in your title. You have innovation. This is yours now, right? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you got that responsibility to begin with and then kind of walk us through for what you had to upskill in the job during it. And I think that, yeah. Tim Turner (14:43.525) Yeah, see you. Tim Turner (14:57.337) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I feel like my, even my exposure to chat GPT in some ways started when I was at Walgreens and there were, we used to do these in our team meetings. We called insights interests where everyone, you know, spends five minutes. taking turns for each meeting sharing like a hobby or something that they recently read or something that was interesting. And so one of the topics that came up, you know, leaving early 2022 is someone mentioned chat GPT and how you can make these, you know, funny videos or how you could create the content with this relatively new tool that had just been released. And, you know, somehow they had gotten into an early invite pool or what have you and were sharing what they were learning. And, you know, at first I thought, that seems like kind of a cool tool, like a weird form of Google, essentially. I didn't really understand or know much beyond that. And then, you know, probably seven or eight months later, one of my senior managers at the time mentioned how they were using ChatGPT to optimize their SQL code for some of the reports and dashboards we were building. And at that point, I think I was even a little concerned about, should we really be using, you know, this external tool and be like, drop dropping SQL code into that? Is there some deficit with my senior manager where should they just know how to do this automatically and not have to go to an external resource? So had all these questions and concerns. And then, Khullani Abdullahi (16:28.418) You're already questioning people's competency. Tim Turner (16:31.729) I I was just thinking, I don't know how or where, but maybe the shift factor into our mid-year review and make sure I understand. I didn't knock his grade or anything. If anything, it's good to see him being resourceful and creative. Khullani Abdullahi (16:43.886) Tim, I just have to say in the AI world, there is something called shadow AI or in the tech world, right? Shadow AI. And you know, there's like employees using technologies. You are the reason people are hiding their AI usage. So your senior manager was like, yo, I'm improving my SQL scripting delivery implementation. workflow and you were like should I include that in your annual review? Come on Tim. I hope that Tim Turner two years later has changed his tune a little bit. Tell us about that. Tim Turner (17:16.113) if Tim Turner (17:23.333) Thankfully, yes, thankfully I have seen the light and so I've definitely changed my ways. I'm no longer as judgmental about how folks are choosing to use AI. But I think in terms of my approach today to sort of stay on top of things, would say I use a framework. kind of buckets of activities that come to mind, one technical, one more community focused, and one more academic. And so I would say from a technical standpoint, one of the things I've just tried to do is incorporate AI more into my own day-to-day workflow for ways in which I'm doing work for thresholds and even also for just more personal projects and just to explore different ways of testing or better understanding Khullani Abdullahi (18:00.461) Mm-hmm. Tim Turner (18:12.483) AI's capabilities. So for as an example, you know, now, of course, I try to make sure for all of my meetings and all of my administrative meetings, you know, turning on co-pilot so I can record that meeting and have the the recordings and the notes in particular and next steps and all those things, you know, documented right away coming out of those conversations on a personal front from a technical standpoint. I've been playing around with this project with in particular to develop a Python script that will take all of my emails from Orange Theory when I go to the gym and take like my summary emails, one, you know, pull them all into their own separate folder, look at the emails and be able to point out all the different places where there's important data, tracking my, you know, calories burned or how fast I was on the treadmill that day or what was my max heart rate, et and then pull that into its own separate data set and then ultimately visualize that in its own dashboard. So just kind of testing and playing around. I haven't completed the project yet, but that's the goal and being able to work with AI in this way to get it to that point. Is one of the things I'm working on. So that's from a technical standpoint. I'd say from a community standpoint, just always looking for events, looking for lunch and learns, places in Chicago, Khullani Abdullahi (19:20.11) That's very... Tim Turner (19:42.116) different organizations that are hosting workshops. And I spent a good portion of that work when I was initially coming into this role. I've been at threshold since January of 2024. And so I spent a good portion of last year just looking for any event that had AI in the title or some way of just learning more. And oftentimes, of course, wind up being a lot of sales presentations from different companies, but still just kind of getting up to speed and learning in that regard. to a workshop at Stanford around human centered AI design last fall, and it was specifically designed for folks in the social sector. so learning from other nonprofits and use cases and things that they're doing with AI was really helpful. And then finally, from an academic perspective, just books and finding different ways in which people talk about more of the kind of intersections of AI and moral philosophy and whether we're moving towards a dystopian or utopian future and the ways in which it can have an impact on, of course, the way we work and engage with each other on a day to day basis. Yes, please. Ooh, okay. Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (20:49.43) And I recommend a book on that point. Khullani Abdullahi (20:55.852) Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom. He's also the author of Super Intelligence and I happen to find him to be one of the most interesting and robust thinkers about AI and like a post homo sapien feature. But this is a very optimistic book in contrast to his very dystopian and Tim Turner (21:13.509) Hmm Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (21:22.664) non-optimistic last book. Superintelligence is a little dark, but Deep Utopia, Life and Meaning in a Selfed World. You'd really enjoy that, especially based on kind of the books that you mentioned. And this is not sponsored. I just like Nick Blastrom. But if you want to send me free copies of all your future books, call out your girl. He does a fantastic job of actually sharing manuscripts in progress. Tim Turner (21:44.145) Absolutely. Khullani Abdullahi (21:52.418) When I say I stock him hard, I stock him hard. so books, events, building yourself and finding ways to integrate that. Is there a strategy for keeping abreast of the industry and its latest developments that you haven't tried yet that is on your radar and that you're looking forward to implementing? Tim Turner (22:15.823) Yeah, well this is definitely a foray into where I think I need to go to next, which is... Podcasts and just developing a more consistent ongoing passive stream of AI information So, you know be that podcast be that particular, you know shows to rock what to watch on a periodic basis I'm a fan of podcast generally speaking and have a regular rotation of things that span, you know food music and Economics and what have you but finding a way to weave that into the the rotation as well I think would be something I would like to start to get into more Khullani Abdullahi (22:51.584) Excellent. Hopefully that is helpful for a lot of people who are also drowning and feeling overwhelmed about how to stay abreast. And I think to your point, you can't do all of it and you can't do all of it at once. So getting into a routine and adding things and channels and experts and strategies, and then once your habit has formed around that, kind of moving that forward. So I'd like to shift gears a little bit and start. I want to dig into kind of how an organization like Thresholds is thinking of AI. What is the balance of like opportunity and risk? What kinds of conversations are you having without revealing anything proprietary? What are you guys building? What have you considered building kind of, you know, at the 30,000 foot view when AI comes up in a leadership conversation. what's happening in that leadership conversation. Because you're not the only company, right? Like so many companies in Chicago and so many leaders at the VP level and the C-suite level are kind of being faced with a reckoning moment, which is whether you're in product or engineering or strategy, et cetera, you better have something to say about AI. AI policy, AI governance, AI implementation, AI development, right? So kind of what's happening generally within thresholds and then kind of drill down into risk and opportunity, especially because you guys are in healthcare, right? So you're a little bit more regulated, a lot more regulated under a lot more scrutiny. There's a lot more at stake so you can't just build and crash. So walk us through that, share that journey and the thinking with our audience. Tim Turner (24:41.945) Yeah, well, I think this dovetails nicely to a question earlier that I don't think I addressed adequately, which is how did all this kind of land up in my lap and for me to be responsible for that. And thankfully, there was a decent amount of activities that the agency was already embarking on before I even joined last January. But I think there are a couple of ways in which how we have been thinking about AI and different ways we've been exploring what we're doing in that space. But when I joined the agency last year, My boss had invested in a handful of licenses for Microsoft Copilot and we've even explored Microsoft Copilot Studio and got a handful of licenses there. One of the first things that was my responsibility was we have these licenses, go figure out who they should go to, whether we should invest more, whether we should get additional licenses and how can we enable and upscale people to start to use a tool like Microsoft Copilot. to help them on a day-to-day basis. For anyone who's not familiar, Copilot for M365 is just a chat bot that kind of sits on top of your Microsoft Suite so that I would say it's kind of like Clippy from back in the day, but on steroids and being able to really help optimize your usage of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or what have you. And so that was one of the first ways in which we started to explore AI as a department within the IT organization. but also eventually over the course of last year across the agency by helping to create opportunities for folks to learn about how something like co-pilot can help them streamline their email inbox, be able to use that Microsoft Teams to record meetings and then produce notes after those meetings, being able to use co-pilot to potentially draft marketing materials or to draft content. Tim Turner (26:45.649) Those are all different types of use cases that have come up across the agency of being able to use that technology. Additionally, we also are continuing to build and think about ways in which people can use AI to help other parts of the agency in terms of. content generation, but specifically how that kind of starts to flow into different aspects of our clinical operations. So using content generation tools to help with our workforce development team as they're thinking of, you know, being able to creatively create narratives and case scenarios so that that content can be incorporated into training documents. and ultimately be used to help coach and support our clinicians for particular types of situations. Also content generation by taking information from various parts. of the agency and having, again, copilot for the most part, retrieve that information so that we have the most recent documents and policies we all know in large organizations. can have a proliferation of, you know, version control and things that come from all different places, but using copilot's chat capabilities to be able to retrieve that type of information as well. And just being able to streamline operations from a clinical perspective. in that way. think the ways that we are moving forward and trying to think about what role AI will continue to play within the agency, we've experimented with ways of leveraging AI to help streamline the note-taking process for our clinicians. So after their interactions with our members, of course, they have to document and summarize their notes from those interactions, submit that into our EHR so that we can ultimately submit that to our payers for reimbursement. And so increasing Tim Turner (28:44.303) Increasingly, we've been finding ways to leverage AI technology in order to help make that note taking and note writing process more efficient. And I think that's a use case that's just coming up across the entire healthcare space of being able to alleviate and ease a bit of that administrative burden for providers in the space by making a note taking. a bit more streamlined. And then the other things that are really kind of top of mind for us now in the future is that we know that there's a high degree of opportunity, but also a risk of just continuing to incorporate or explore AI into clinical decision making and clinical support. And on one hand, we are going back to your shadow IT comment. Khullani Abdullahi (29:27.011) Right. Tim Turner (29:37.01) We assume that there are folks who are starting to play around with the outer edges of what may or may not be appropriate uses for AI to help win their decision making or to help, you know, support what type of actions or ideas or recommendations should they offer to a particular member. So we want to get out ahead of that by we do have some existing policies. Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (29:59.566) Hang on, Kim. I'm going to cut that part out because I don't want you to get in trouble. So because I can edit it, I'm just going to prompt you again so that you can talk about clinical decisions. So that's. Tim Turner (30:05.081) Okay, okay, okay. Tim Turner (30:14.702) Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (30:18.368) That's really fascinating and it feels like there's a million different use cases and new use cases still emerging when it comes to clinical decision making and the use of AI. How are your clinicians feeling about it? How are you guys approaching it as an organization? And where would you guys like to be when it comes to integrating AI and clinical decision making in the future? Tim Turner (30:46.863) Yeah, yeah, say in the future, we're definitely, we want to be proactive about our approach to AI's role in clinical decision making. You we hear, we see in the news and in the broader conversation about AI, there's certainly ways in which people talk about, know, AI can help. improve and enhance the member experience, the patient experience that can help improve and the clinicians experiences as well can be benefited from AI. And so we are proactively developing policies and guidance and getting information to our clinicians about what are the acceptable and unacceptable use cases for AI? What are the types of information or types of data that should certainly never be entered into a certainly any sort of proprietary or rather external or commercial AI tools. But also what are the opportunities to, know, if a conversation comes up and you have a member that you want to generate, you know, 50 ideas for. Khullani Abdullahi (31:55.436) Yeah. Tim Turner (31:56.658) sober-friendly activities in summer, in Chicago summer, that'd be the type of thing that we want to help guide and coach and support our clinicians and being able to ethically use AI for those types of use cases, but also which ways they shouldn't be incorporating it as well. Khullani Abdullahi (32:13.006) Very cool. What would you say is your organization's approach and strategy? to increasing AI literacy across the organization. So you guys are a fairly large organization. And so I'm assuming that different departments and different teams are probably not necessarily all on the same wavelength when it comes to the adoption of AI tools and solutions and then also AI literacy. And so how are you guys thinking about kind of increasing the overall like knowledge and internal salience of your teams as it comes to AI. And then maybe kind of, you know, based on where you guys are now, what are some of the tactics and strategies that, you know, on the back half of the year, you guys are going looking to implement to kind of get everyone on the same page. Tim Turner (33:12.207) Yeah, yeah, so there are a couple of things that we did throughout 2024 to help advance and promote AI literacy across the organization. So one thing we did is we partnered with the next general organization to do a couple of workshops for our leaders in particular. So we did workshops for our board as well as senior executives across the agency to talk about demystifying AI, to kind provide some underlying ground level foundational understanding of the technology, what it's capable of, what are some of the different use cases that executives and leaders across any organizations are using AI. So being able to bring that conversation to our leadership has made it easier for us to continue to discuss the importance of governance and the role that leaders will need to play in making sure that we're approaching and using AI in the correct manner. We also have produced AI policy documents and guidance on, you know, we've had years, we've had an existing guidance and policies on acceptable use of different types of information and different types of data assets within the agency. So we layered on top of that an understanding of where are, where the guardrails should be in terms of what types of information or what types of data assets could be included in an AI use case versus which ones should not be included into a use case. And that guidance and those policies have been shared across the entire agency so that all folks have access to that information. think our next phase of work that we're thinking about is certainly that shadow IT and shadow AI behaviors and wanting to do more to help proactively understand what are the types of use cases that people are using AI for today? What are the different tools that are out there that being used? What are the different ways in which we should be thinking about over the next two to three years developing or incorporating tools that can address those use cases? A simple example is we've seen or heard of people Tim Turner (35:37.788) who may be using things like Fireflies or Otter to record their meetings. And depending on the audiences and the communities that they're having those conversations with. that may or may not be an appropriate tool to be using for those types of conversations. And so that's where continuing to expand and invest in Co-Pilot and continuing to have other capabilities and tools to corral those types of use cases is what we'll be able to think about over these next few months. Khullani Abdullahi (35:52.854) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (36:08.61) What are you excited about in terms of kind of, know, from your feel, your standpoint, field of view? What are you? What are you most excited about when it comes to the implications of AI for health care for your organization in particular? And then the very vulnerable population that you guys serve at thresholds. And then maybe what is kind of like your principal concern that's like in the back of your mind as you're leading these initiatives at thresholds. Tim Turner (36:45.497) Yeah, well, I know for our I'd say what I'm most excited about, especially for thresholds, is that I think we're uniquely positioned to really be at the forefront of many of these conversations about ethical use of AI and how AI can scale and increase impact or can scale access to. resources and access to, in particular in the mental health space, access to services overall, but doing so in a way that doesn't create unintended harms or doesn't subject ourselves to biases and hallucinations in a dangerous manner. And so I think for, we work with a very difficult and a very marginalized population. And because of the nature of the work that we do, it's also an incredibly difficult job and an incredibly difficult day-to-day experience for most of our clinicians. I think there's a great opportunity on the clinician side to say, are some tools or here are some ways in which technology can just make your workday easier so that you're that much less ideally stressed or constrained by time and administrative tasks or what have you that you have to do. On the other end of the spectrum, think from our member perspective, There are ways in which I think AI can be really critical in providing access to those most marginalized communities or just making sure that those communities are represented and their lived experiences and their voices are reflected in the data, the information, and the tools that are ultimately being used and developed in the mental health and behavioral health spaces. I think I'm really excited about the intersection at which thresholds sits to be able to help inform and drive those conversations. Obviously with our agency we've been around you know 60 plus years we have Tim Turner (38:50.353) substantial amount of impact and demonstrated impact across the span of time that we've been operating. And so I think there's a degree of brand that we kind of carry into the space that could be helpful and beneficial, as well as just making sure that we're centering justice and equity at the forefront of all the AI and other technological activities that we do. Khullani Abdullahi (39:13.198) Very cool. On the risk and worried side, what are you going to be a little cautious or skeptical about? And how are you kind of? you know, how will you know when something might be problematic, right? So like, are there some principles, some guiding values that you and your organization are using as you are evaluating vendors, building solutions in-house, signing up for subscriptions? What does that balance look like? Tim Turner (39:49.392) Yeah, well, think about that in two ways. I think from a risk perspective, there's certainly ways in which, on one hand, I think about the risk of just trying to corral and manage behavior for such an agency that's so large. I think there's always that. you know, kind of philosophy about the biggest threat to cybersecurity or the biggest thing that you have to manage with cybersecurity is just human behavior and being able to corral that. you know, I'm, you know, looking at, as we think about as large of as our agency is, you know, we want to be able to, Khullani Abdullahi (40:20.472) Yeah. Tim Turner (40:31.245) mitigate the use cases and the situations where a clinician is using AI inappropriately or because they're so stressed, finding ways or thinking about potentially how. AI can alleviate that stress, but doing so in a way that's not responsible. So there, think we rely heavily on always encouraging and driving home the point that keeping the human in the loop or being the human in the loop is incredibly valuable and incredibly necessary. At no point should a person be copying and pasting or just immediately taking content from an AI tool and just using it at face value. Khullani Abdullahi (41:09.282) Right. Khullani Abdullahi (41:16.162) Right. Tim Turner (41:16.371) I think we've done a good job socializing that message across the agency to make sure that people feel empowered to share how they're using AI, if they're using AI with their leadership and with their supervisors, because that should just be part of the overarching philosophy in terms of how we function on a day-to-day basis. From a technology and from a vendor perspective, I think we are definitely looking at partners who have already demonstrated a commitment to equity or demonstrated a commitment to ensuring that the work of any, or the output rather, of any technological solution that they implement or any services that they administer or consulting they offer is laddering up towards supporting organizations who are doing mission-driven work and not just seeking efficiencies purely for the sake of becoming just more productive. or more profitable. So having that filter and criteria of working with partners who have also worked, already worked with social sector organizations or have already worked in healthcare and have already been demonstrated value to organizations that are in a similar space as ours, I think it's really important for us to make sure that we feel confident that they're gonna keep our values and our mission at the forefront of that work. Khullani Abdullahi (42:44.782) I really appreciate you sharing that and using language like missions and value. I think that a lot of for-profit companies using market-based language like ROI and value and revenue, a lot of that is readily available online. But I think mission-driven organizations and nonprofit organizations and civil society organizations, academic organizations in particular, are going to have an outsized impact for everyday people and how they experience and come into contact with AI in various services. So I'd love to hear what advice you would give to other leaders who are trying to introduce AI in a responsible manner in a mission-driven organization and what you wish you would have known at the start and maybe some thoughts on how they could approach it because it does sound like threshold is further along in their journey than many non- profit and healthcare organizations. And so kind of some of the learnings that you've had, what might you recommend and what kind of advice might you give to other leaders who are similarly situated. Tim Turner (44:17.049) Yeah, yeah, well, I think one thing that I would recommend and I think it's important first step is to bring together your leadership and bring it together, whether it's senior executives and senior leaders within your organization, or bring together your board and have this demystifying, some form of a demystifying AI or some form of a conversation just to set that foundational understanding of what AI is, why, you know, what sort of the broader conversations that are happening across the space with organizations that are incorporating AI Khullani Abdullahi (44:45.57) Right. Tim Turner (44:55.539) experimenting with AI. I think especially in the healthcare sector, I believe it's something like two thirds of physicians have incorporated or explored incorporating AI into their day-to-day healthcare practices. I want to say north of 80 percent of large nonprofits have experimented with AI to certain extent. I think bringing your leadership together and saying, this is something that is It's a technology that's here and it's increasingly going to become ubiquitous across the space. And so we need to have a point of view about this technology and start to do the work required to bring that. to bring that point of view together. I think it's also important to be very honest and be very frank about the potential harm or the potential for unintended consequences of AI. Talking about biases, talking about hallucinations, even talking about some of the ways in which people have an aversion to an AI or continuing to use AI because of the environmental impact or the consumption of Khullani Abdullahi (45:53.228) Yeah. Tim Turner (46:10.577) resources or what have you. I think just having that very frank and open conversation can allow for your leadership team to start to think about what are the ways in which we want to be able to bring AI into our work, but also what opportunities exist that would allow an organization to achieve and maximize or just work increasingly towards improving lives and scaling impact and what role AI can play within that conversation, knowing that those constraints and concerns can still be present as well. And then I think it's just a matter of really starting to think through and document as many use cases as possible, whether it's we have this manual process for retrieving and tracking physical documents or even just something as simple as having an enterprise tool to record conversations and record meetings so that your administrative staff don't have to track as precisely notes and action items coming from different meetings. I think just having a frank conversation about all those different use cases and then start to prioritize which ones will have the most meaningful impact to drive towards your your organization's overall mission and goals, that's a good place to start those conversations as you embark on that journey. Khullani Abdullahi (47:39.212) I really appreciate you kind of breaking down some of that advice. One thing that is really great about Chicago, neither of us are originally from here, but one thing that I've discovered is that Chicago, for being such a very large city, is very open to coffee chats and very open to people doing one-on-ones, right? Like Chicago does one-on-ones really well. Like outside of Silicon Valley and San Francisco. So with that said, are you open to people connecting with you, especially those in the nonprofit space who are about to launch these initiatives to have a deeper, further, more candid conversation? And if so, Is the best way to connect with you on LinkedIn? Do you have a website? Are you a Twitter person? I can put it in the show notes. How could someone get in touch with you to learn more both about your work and to get your advice? Tim Turner (48:37.809) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would love to have a coffee chat. So, you know, I mentioned that community bucket of ways in which I stay on top of things. So building out the community and learning from others is a big part of what I believe is really important and valuable in order to continue to make progress in this space. So, yes, LinkedIn would be best. Feel free to reach out to me there. with the link in the show notes, you can find me there. And I would love to get connected and talk more about the work that we're doing and also learn from others about ways we can all collectively make the right meaningful impact in the AI conversations. Khullani Abdullahi (49:15.124) Excellent. I appreciate you saying yes. And I apologize in advance if you get inundated. And I apologize to Mark if you start leaving work because you got coffee chats left and right. My bad, Mark. And so I named this podcast, you know, AI in Chicago, which is pretty audacious because I'm not from Chicago. And so who am I to do it? And so Tim Turner (49:21.777) I'll go. Tim Turner (49:30.353) you Khullani Abdullahi (49:44.526) I, in keeping with the, I think some of the traditions that Chicago really loves, I feel like I need to ask all of my guests about food preferences or something related to pizza or is it Malort, right? Like the Chicago has these things, right? Or like the intersections, right? Like you're not allowed to say, I'm gonna mess this up, like Augusta and Ashland. You should say Ashland and Augusta. I still use GPS to get home every day. So. Tim Turner (50:06.577) Thank Khullani Abdullahi (50:13.038) In terms of the Chicago-isms, I'm going to ask you to share your favorite restaurant. I'm going to ask you to share your favorite place to grab a drink. And I'm going to ask you to share deep dish or thin crust. Tim Turner (50:15.729) You Tim Turner (50:19.633) Yeah. Tim Turner (50:24.593) Hmm Tim Turner (50:32.593) Yeah, let's see. Well, I'll start with the beverages. probably the place, thing that's top of mind. But I would say Money Gun, which is a speakeasy. Khullani Abdullahi (50:39.574) Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (50:43.374) I'm going to write this down because I don't get out much. And so for me, this is research. OK. Tim Turner (50:50.449) Highly highly recommend. It's a nice You know try to get there on the earlier side I would say if you want to get a seat, but they actually have a punch card It's almost like a loyalty program. I am a member 30 30 So if you do if you have all 30 of the cocktails that are on there name on a plaque So I would just put Khullani Abdullahi (51:02.465) You remember? Khullani Abdullahi (51:09.43) Wow! Okay. This is going to get published online Tim, so these are mocktails everyone. Mocktails. Okay? It's in progress. Aspirational. Tim Turner (51:21.44) I haven't said I'm on the wall yet. I'm just saying that's a long term journey. Don't try to do them all in one night. But yeah, that's probably my favorite, one of my favorite. Khullani Abdullahi (51:33.462) Is it a hidden speakeasy? Is it like one of those Chicago speakeasies where you gotta like knock on the door and like have a code or something? But there's no, I can't like see a sign. Tim Turner (51:42.35) It's good. Tim Turner (51:46.332) There won't be a big sign that'll say like money gun, but it is like, it's not so inconspicuous that you won't be able to find it once you get the Uber dropped off at the address. So yeah, it'll be visible. Yeah. Khullani Abdullahi (52:00.47) All right, so, and what nights can people find you there? No, I'm just kidding. Don't call people your money gun nights. I don't want any problems. My liability insurance doesn't cover people following you to your favorite speakeasy. Okay, favorite restaurant. Tim Turner (52:03.683) Yes! This is my way of like balancing the coffee. Favorite restaurant, what comes to mind is Sushi Suite 202. It's in Lincoln Park and it's actually a converted hotel room in the same building as the Jay Parker. Khullani Abdullahi (52:21.23) Okay. Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (52:29.442) Big. Khullani Abdullahi (52:33.826) Okay. Tim Turner (52:33.877) And yeah, go to second floor, go to Suite 202, that place you do have to knock to get in with reservations in advance, of course. Yeah, it's just like a little, I think, eight seat kind of sushi spot. They have a handful of welcome cocktails and then you move over to a bit of an omakase sushi experience there that's reasonably priced and makes for a fun event. Khullani Abdullahi (52:39.435) Okay. Okay. Okay. Khullani Abdullahi (52:59.82) You're very fancy, Tim. No hole in the wall dive bars for you. Everything is hidden, leaked, omakase. There's no such thing as reasonably priced omakase. Stop misleading my audience, okay? Hopefully, relatively, right? In comparison to Tokyo, it's reasonably priced. Thanks, Tim. Okay, deep dish or thin crust, and where do you get it from? Tim Turner (53:05.361) Thank Tim Turner (53:12.593) Relatively relatively speaking You Tim Turner (53:27.857) I am team well, I like both I would say I'll go with thin crust I think if I'm gonna be you know having a pizza on just like a regular, know, Friday night or what have you I'll go with a thin crust and I actually would would say Medici in Hyde Park is my favorite pizza spot and Their barbecue pizza barbecue chicken pizza in particular is one of my favorites Khullani Abdullahi (53:56.782) I'm going to love this segment because I'm just going to have a massive list of like the greatest swats in Chicago validated by people whose opinion I really value. Tim, thank you so much for taking time out of your extraordinarily busy day serving some of Chicago's most vulnerable people and populations. And thank you to your threshold teammates for keeping everything running while you hung out with me for a couple hours. Any last words or comments that you want to share? Otherwise, I'd love to continue the conversation and have you back on as you guys go through this journey for periodic updates. Tim Turner (54:39.567) Yeah, yeah, I love this. Well, thank you, Kalani, for creating this space and creating these conversations and allowing for folks to share what they're doing in AI, and in particular, what's being done to continue to work towards equitable and justice-centered applications of AI. So we'd love to continue to stay connected, and however I can be supportive and helpful, please let me know. Khullani Abdullahi (55:03.854) Sounds good. Thank you so much. We'll see you again next week. You can find us at Chicago AI Podcasts dot AI. And I'll put all of the notes and the links and the recommendations in the show notes, including the 30 mocktail strategy that Tim is pursuing. Thanks so much, everyone. Thanks again, Tim. Talk to you soon. Tim Turner (55:27.333) Thank you, take care.