ABOUT
Kelly Smith
I help health-tech teams design AI that's honest about what it knows.
I came to this work sideways. My background is in biological anthropology — the study of humans as we actually are, not as we'd like to imagine ourselves: embodied, fallible, and at our most vulnerable exactly when we most need something to work. That way of seeing people never left me, and it's the reason my design work starts from the person in the worst state rather than the average one. It turns out to be the right instinct for health technology, where the people who most need a product to be careful are the ones least able to protect themselves when it isn't.
For most of my career I've worked for myself — decades of design and strategy practice, independent by choice. That independence is not incidental to what I offer now. The value of an outside advisor on responsible AI is precisely that they have no stake in shipping the feature anyway. I can tell a team the thing their roadmap doesn't want to hear, because my judgment isn't for sale to the deadline.
What pulled me toward AI specifically is a growing unease. We are clearly heading toward a world where AI is the source of answers — including health answers — and we are getting there faster than we're building the safeguards to make it safe. Most people extend trust to AI output without a second thought, no scrutiny, no doubt. In most contexts that's a small risk. In health, it's the whole risk. I don't think that future is wrong. I think we have to build it carefully, and right now not enough people are treating that as the actual work. So I made it mine.
I studied at Harvard, and spent most of my career self-employed — building strategy and design practices for the people running businesses, and thinking hard about how to communicate under complexity. Health technology is where I've brought all of it to bear, because it's where the stakes of getting the human part right are highest. I've been writing publicly about where AI meets real users — the questions of trust, certainty, and what a product owes the person on the other side of the screen.
I'm based in Houston, which means I'll defend the position that good Tex-Mex is a legitimate reason to move to a city. The rest of my arguments are on the Writing page.