5 min readNew DelhiMay 2, 2024 08:26 AM IST
First published on: May 1, 2024 at 03:26 PM IST
“We help people collect their nutrition, fitness, steps, sleep, heart rate data, and then we process all these signals with technology, with AI, and we also use human coaches to drive accountability.” Tushar Vashisht, CEO of health app Healthify, which claims to have over 40 million users, explains how they are using their first mover advantage in AI towards their mission to ‘healthify a billion people’.
Sam Altman-led AI powerhouse OpenAI has acknowledged Healthify for its unique use case. On April 10, OpenAI made the GPT-4 Vision available broadly. As part of its announcement, the AI start-up highlighted Healthify’s innovative application of this tech in real-time – essentially showcasing nutritional analysis from meal photos through Healthify’s SNAP 2.0 feature.
The recently launched SNAP 2.0 sets a new benchmark, with the ability to recognise over a million global foods with greater accuracy than humans. “We surpass human accuracy today. So if you just take a photograph, we’ll track it for you in a single shot,” Vashisht states.
“We were the first in the world to develop a consumer-facing AI solution in 2019. At that point, there were no other consumer-facing AI solutions at scale,” says Vashisht who has led the company since its inception in 2014. Vashisht says this combination of cutting-edge technology and human expertise has enabled Healthify to achieve remarkable results in terms of impact and scale. “This year we’ll probably end up helping about 10 million pounds of weight being lost…which is about, risk-adjusted, almost a million lives saved,” he tells indianexpress.com.
The company has been working with AI innovations in the health coaching space from the very beginning. Vashisht claims while Healthify was the first in the world to develop a consumer-facing AI solution, its virtual coaching assistant Ria introduced in 2019 has been a groundbreaking development thanks to integration of powerful language models like GPT-4. “Ria 2.0 is much smarter, much more capable. And we partner with multiple people, including OpenAI, to make that happen.”
Talking about challenges, Vashisht says overcoming hurdles like personalisation and proactiveness has been pivotal to the success of Ria. “It’s easy enough to build a bot where you can ask questions, but it’s hard for an AI to give you proactive insights…This stuff is not that easy to do, and this stuff can only be done if you have enormous amounts of data with you.”
Ria 2.0 has been trained to offer highly personalised and contextual guidance. One can get generic answers on ChatGPT and other platforms, but Vashisht says the real challenge is to build personalised solutions as you will have to closely examine all the data.
Achieving this feat involved years of data collection, model fine-tuning, and integration of advanced vision AI like GPT-4 Vision. “Using a combination of lots of data personalisation…all of the years of work that we have done on open source solutions…and combined with GPT vision, our ability to accurately recognise your food is enormously high.”
Healthify is now doubling down on AI to create fully autonomous health agents that can seamlessly integrate with various ecosystems. “We are hoping that Ria 3.0 will be a truly autonomous agent… (it) is also going to be integrated with the ecosystem…to be able to book consultations for you, book gym classes for you, connect you with the right meditation spaces for the evening, or to be able to enhance and improve your sleep, etc.”
Vashisht is confident about the potential of AI to democratise access to quality healthcare in India. “India will leapfrog just like it did from web to mobile. I think it will also leapfrog AI systems much faster. India specifically, will require AI technologies to democratise access to health fundamentally.”
When asked about concerns surrounding AI displacing human jobs, Vashisht shares his optimism in AI’s ability to create new opportunities. For professionals in the wellness industry like dietitians, Vashisht sees AI as a catalyst for growth and more opportunities with AI as a copilot. “I don’t think technology fundamentally takes away jobs. It changes jobs though. It creates new kinds of jobs to be done.”
Meanwhile, according to reports, Healthify let off 27 per cent of its workforce, which is about 150 people in sales and product teams. Vashisht clarified to media outlets that in the next three to four months, Healthify’s Indian business will turn profitable, and the restructuring, although unfortunate, was a key step towards its goal.
CEO Tushar Vashisht said that Healthify is now doubling down on AI to create fully autonomous health agents. 
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