Designing the Future of AI Beyond the Model

June 17, 2025

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AI is growing up.

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We’ve moved past the “wow” stage. What once felt like a magic trick — chat interfaces, instant summaries, lifelike audio, predictive insights — is now moving into structured workflows and operational systems. The narrative is shifting from “what’s possible” to “what works.”

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At Sidekick, we’ve seen this transition firsthand. For years, we’ve worked in digital health, understanding not just what AI can do, but what it should do. The new phase of AI isn’t about novelty, it’s about injection. How do we embed intelligence into meaningful processes that produce measurable results?

And this matters. Because it’s no longer about playing with prototypes — it’s about making decisions that affect business models, compliance strategies, and patient outcomes.

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This evolution means AI isn’t replacing people. It’s becoming part of the system: augmenting teams, automating complexity, and scaling expertise. But with that comes new responsibility. We must design and deploy AI with purpose. It must be safe, reliable, and aligned with what actually drives impact.

Design Your Destiny

As AI matures, the conversation must shift from what the model can do to how the solution is built around it. A powerful model is only the beginning. It’s the architecture, design, and orchestration that ultimately determine whether AI delivers real value.

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The next wave of AI solutions won’t be built on a single “big” model. They’ll be composed of multiple specialized models, each playing a focused role within a well-designed system. That could mean combining large foundation models with smaller models optimized for tasks like classification, personalization, or safety validation. It might include human-in-the-loop components for oversight, or rule-based systems that enforce regulatory constraints. The future isn’t monolithic — it’s modular.

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In this phase, solution design matters more than ever. The best-performing, safest, and most scalable products won’t just have the smartest AI — they’ll have the best architecture. How are inputs handled? How are decisions validated? How are humans kept in the loop? These aren’t engineering details. They are the very essence of responsible AI.

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We’ve always believed in building for the long run here at Sidekick. That’s why we’ve prioritized a responsible and layered approach to AI integration — one that combines the strength of models with strong infrastructure, ethical design, and real-world constraints. Because ultimately, it’s not about proving what AI can do in theory. It’s about what it can do at scale, in practice, for people who rely on it.

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Prepare for the Transformation

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype cycles. AI demos look magical, breakthroughs feel exponential, and predictions of disruption are everywhere. But while today’s excitement is justified, the real transformation will take time — and depth.

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As Bill Gates famously said:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

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With AI, we may need to compress that timeline even further.

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Today, we’re not overestimating the next two years. We’re overestimating the next two months. And we’re likely underestimating what will happen over the next ten months. The pace of progress is unlike anything we’ve seen. Models evolve in weeks. Entire product categories appear overnight. But it’s still early days — and most of the real transformation is still ahead of us.

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AI isn’t just a wave. It's a shift in the underlying landscape. Like electricity, or the internet before it, AI will quietly embed itself into every system and service, changing how things work beneath the surface. It will become foundational, invisible, and ubiquitous.

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The next 12 months may be the most transformative yet. We're at a moment where AI is stepping out of labs and pilots and moving into the core of business operations. We will start to see AI solutions that not only streamline tasks but reshape entire industries.

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You can already feel this in the music industry, where AI-generated content is prompting deep questions about authorship, ownership, and authenticity. Healthcare will face its own reckoning, one that touches ethics, safety, and trust. The challenges will be bigger — and so will the stakes.

Final Thoughts

AI isn’t the solution. But it will be a big part of every solution.

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Everyone is moving fast — but now is the time to slow down and design deliberately. The winners in this next phase won’t be those who move first, but those who build their foundations right.

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About the author

Olafur "Oli" Viggosson

CPTO, Sidekick Health

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