Sean Lane, CEO of Olive

Sean Lane, the CEO of health care artificial intelligence firm Olive AI, believes the future of the U.S. workforce is a combination of human labor and artificial intelligence — people and technology working side-by-side. Lane wants to see Olive have a role in that force. 

The Columbus-based software company, which grew exponentially during the pandemic, tripling to 600 employees, continues to expand, and it closed a $400 million funding round July 1 and was valued at $4 billion.

In an interview with the Dispatch, Lane broke down the firm’s somewhat complex business, talked about the meaning behind the name “Olive,” and described the bright future he sees in Columbus tech.

Dispatch: What Olive does is pretty high-tech, and it’s a little complicated. In layman’s terms, could you break down what Olive does, and what problems the company is working to solve?

Lane: First and foremost, health care doesn’t have the internet. That’s the biggest problem. You see that every time you go to a doctor’s office — you have to fill out the same form, every single time. It’s like health care doesn’t know who you are. That’s because the systems aren’t connected and they don’t talk to each other and the software doesn’t talk to each other. Olive is really automation that connects all of those things together. We use artificial intelligence to do it, to create this workforce of AI (artificial intelligence) workers, that provide automation to connect everything together, to take on a lot of the administrative burdens, to work on these workflows inside health care, so that ultimately, the experience of health care is much more like what you get in other areas that have the internet, from shopping to hotels or anything else.