New Home – Steve Pappas

Where AI Meets the

Human Side of Business

Steve Pappas helps healthcare leaders harness governed AI and knowledge to transform patient and member service operations – eliminating hallucination, accelerating outcomes, and building the next generation of patient- and member-first care.

$50M+

Panviva Exit Value

6x

Startup Exits

300+

Podcast Episodes

5.0

Apple Podcasts

Founder · ExSynt Solutions ● eGain Head of Innovation & Healthcare GTM ● Author · SIMPLE CX ● Board Member · Vern AI & Octain Growth ● Science of CX: Moment Zero · stevepappas.net ● $50M+ Panviva Acquisition Exit ● Founder · ExSynt Solutions ● eGain Head of Innovation & Healthcare GTM ● Author · SIMPLE CX ● Board Member · Vern AI & Octain Growth ● Science of CX: Moment Zero · stevepappas.net ● $50M+ Panviva Acquisition Exit ●

Thirteen Years.

One Obsession.

Steve Pappas built his career at the intersection of knowledge, technology, and human experience – long before “AI” became a boardroom buzzword.

Over 13+ years leading Panviva’s U.S. expansion, Steve grew a knowledge software company to $20M ARR and a $50M+ acquisition by Upland Software. When every agent has the right knowledge at the right moment, patient and member outcomes transform.

Today he leads the eGain’s Innovation Division and Heads the Health GTM effort and sits on the boards of Vern AI and Octain Growth. He hosts Science of CX: Moment Zero (300+ episodes, 5.0★) and authored SIMPLE CX: Deliver Great Customer Experiences.

“AI without governed knowledge is just expensive guesswork.”

“The best patient experience starts before the phone rings.”

“Contact centers are the new front door of healthcare. What happens there is not an operations problem. It is a strategy problem.“

13+

Years leading Panviva to a $50M+ exit

6×

Successful company exits as founder

2

Company Boards: Vern AI & Octain Growth

I did not learn customer experience in a classroom. I learned it watching my father, a Master Plumber who financed startups for founders with nothing but a handshake.

-Steve Pappas

Governed AI & hallucination elimination · AI-first patient access & member services design · Knowledge integrity as the foundation of safe AI · Reducing AHT & FCR · AI Healthiness™

Breaking KM apathy · The knowledge-AI stack: how architecture determines what AI says · Hallucination as a quantifiable business risk · Knowledge systems in a generative AI world

The SIMPLE CX model · Moment Zero: the instant before the interaction · The human-AI handoff · CX transformation from the $50M Panviva exit

Building an AI go-to-market for healthcare from scratch ·Category creation & positioning · From PoC to production:why most AI pilots fail · Agentic AI in healthcare

Six exits, one playbook · Scaling Panviva: 13 years building aKM category · What the $50M acquisition taught about value, timing, and negotiation · The founder-to-executivetransition

Discovery-Driven Digital Transformation Success

Organizations are drowning in CX data yet understanding customers less than ever. Steve argues that data tells you what happened — context tells you what it meant. The article introduces a two-layer discovery framework separating stated problems from the actual problems underneath, illustrated with a hospital patient portal case study where the real issue was trust, not usability. Required reading for any leader planning a digital transformation initiative.

Read at: pipelinepub.com/346/3820

AI Drift is Silent, Inevitable, and Currently Happening in Your Healthcare Contact Center

With 84% of health insurers now using AI across product lines, a new and largely unnamed risk is emerging: knowledge drift. Unlike model drift, knowledge drift is a content problem — AI systems confidently answer policy and procedural questions long after the underlying formularies, CMS rules, state Medicaid regulations, and payer bulletins have changed. Steve explains the healthcare-specific accelerants driving drift, introduces the AI Healthiness Assessment (AHA) framework, and lays out five content governance practices that stop drift before it reaches a member or patient.

Read at: egain.com/blog/ai-drift-is-silent-inevitable-and-currently-happening-in-your-healthcare-contact-center

A Plumber Who Bet on Founders.

A Son Who Never Forgot.

I did not learn about customer experience in a classroom. I learned it watching my father.

He was a Master Plumber, certified, respected, and quietly remarkable. He did not just fix pipes. He financed the plumbing infrastructure for startups when nobody else would back them. He bet on founders with nothing but a handshake. And every single time, he over-delivered.

Growing up surrounded by family businesses, trucking, produce, a Greek candle company, I absorbed something most MBAs never get taught: every person in a company either helps win a customer, grow a customer, or lose one. There is no neutral ground.

My uncle reinforced it at every turn. Show up. Do more than you promised. Treat every customer like your favorite relative.

Those roots sent me into technology, into knowledge management, data quality, and now AI, because I realized the experience you deliver is only as good as the knowledge behind it. Garbage in, garbage out. If your people do not have the right answers at the right moment, the handshake means nothing.

Great experiences don’t happen by accident. They happen by design.
And they start with a guarantee that the person picking up the phone has exactly the right answer at exactly the right moment.

Read the full origin story [link to long-form article] →

The Framework:

Moment Zero™

“The moment before everything changes, when the outcome has not been written yet, but the forces that will write it are already in motion.”

Moment Zero™ is the invisible threshold that separates great organizations from reactive ones. It is not a crisis point. It is the window that exists just before one. Leaders who recognize it act differently. They move before the market forces their hand.

In healthcare, Moment Zero™ happens the instant a patient picks up the phone or a member reaches out for help. An agent has roughly four seconds before the experience is written. In those four seconds, they either have the right answer or they do not. Governed AI determines which world your organization lives in, and the difference is not marginal. It is the difference between a 60% hallucination rate and one below 1%.

Steve built the Moment Zero Framework™ as both a methodology and a provocation: most organizations make their most consequential decisions after the moment that mattered most has already passed.

Moment Zero™ Map

Forces are building. Signals are present but unread. The window is open. Most organizations are still in this state and do not know it.

The threshold. Knowledge, decision, and outcome converge in a single instant. Every call. Every claim. Every patient access touchpoint. This is where everything is decided.

The outcome is written. Organizations either learn from it and adapt, or repeat the pattern at scale. Ungoverned AI locks you into the pattern.

Strategic Engagement

That Moves the Needle

Steve operates at one intersection: where AI capability meets knowledge governance in healthcare. Every engagement, whether a keynote, a board seat, a go-to-market build, or a contact center transformation, starts from that same conviction: the experience you deliver is only as good as the knowledge behind it.

Keynotes, workshops, and fireside chats on AI in healthcare, the Moment Zero Framework™, and what it actually takes to scale a company to exit. Available for national conferences, leadership events, and private sessions.

AI strategy, knowledge governance, and contact center transformation for health plan member services and hospital patient access operations. Specializing in Knowledge Integrity, because ungoverned AI hallucinates 60% of the time. Governed, it drops below 1%.

Steve currently sits on the boards of Vern AI and Octain Growth, bringing the pattern recognition of six exits to every conversation about AI and customer intelligence. Limited availability for new advisory engagements.

Currently Building

As Head of Innovation and GTM Head for Healthcare at eGain Corporation, Steve is designing and executing the full healthcare go-to-market from concept to pipeline, including a proprietary AI Healthiness Assessment™ and the first knowledge governance certification program for healthcare contact centers.

Tools Built

AiDiscover exsynt.com/aidiscover, (ExSynt Solutions) is a structured discovery intelligence system for organizations evaluating AI Healthiness Assessment (AHA) egain.com/healthcare, delivering deep insights across patient access, member services, and knowledge governance.

Learn more at exsynt.com →

Ideas That Challenge

the Room

From full-day AI workshops to fireside chats and national conference stages, Healthcare, AI, CX and KM Podcasts. Steve delivers talks that blend real operating experience with forward-thinking AI and patient and member experience strategy. Every session is built from the operator’s perspective, not the consultant’s deck.

“AI without governed knowledge is not transformation. It is expensive chaos dressed up in a demo.”

-Steve Pappas

Signature Topics:

Why "Probably" Is the Most Dangerous Word in Healthcare AI The case for Knowledge Integrity and what a 60% hallucination rate actually costs health plans and hospital systems. (Revised from: "Healthcare AI and Knowledge Integrity: From 60% Hallucination to Under 1%")
Why "Probably" Is the Most Dangerous Word in Healthcare AI The case for Knowledge Integrity and what a 60% hallucination rate actually costs health plans and hospital systems. (Revised from: "Healthcare AI and Knowledge Integrity: From 60% Hallucination to Under 1%")
Six Exits, One Playbook: What Scaling to Acquisition Actually Looks Like The pattern recognition behind building companies that attract strategic buyers, not just revenue.
The Human Side of AI: Why Empathy and Technology Must Coexist Building AI-augmented contact centers that feel more human, not less.
Agentic AI in Healthcare: What Your Contact Center Does Not Know Could Hurt Someone Preparing health plan and hospital access teams for the agentic AI transition. (Revised from: "Patient and Member Access in the Age of Agentic AI")
Building Contact Centers That Create Loyal Patients and Members A proven methodology for redesigning operations around knowledge-first principles that drive measurable loyalty metrics.

SIMPLE CX:

Deliver Great Customer Experiences

The no-nonsense playbook for healthcare and operations leaders who want customer experience to be a competitive advantage, not a budget line item.

Built from 30 years of building, scaling, and selling companies, this is the framework healthcare operations leaders reach for when they are done with theory and ready for results.

If you lead a health plan member services team, a hospital patient access center, or a customer operations function and you want a framework your whole team can actually remember and use, this is the book.

Science of CX:

Moment Zero

300+ conversations with the operators, innovators, and executives redefining what patient and member experience looks like in the age of AI, before most of the industry knew it mattered. Rated 5.0 on Apple Podcasts.

Guests have included CX strategists, health system leaders, AI founders, and the practitioners who are actually doing the work, not just describing it from a stage. If you are serious about healthcare AI and patient access, this is where the real conversations happen.

300+

Panviva Exit Value

5.0

Stars on Apple Podcasts

Emotionally Intelligent Innovation: Transforming Customer Experiences

with Craig Tucker, Vern AI

Amplifying Healthcare Experiences with AI

with Amy Brown

Unleashing High Performance and Maximizing Growth

with Margie Oleson

Unlocking Customer Truth: The Roadmap to Revenue

with Kristin Zhivago

Navigating Knowledge Transfer in the AI Age

with Greg DeVore

Crafting Experiences Beyond Technology

with Chris Wood

Starter

Questions

Signature Talks

by Audience

Provider-Side

45–60 MIN KEYNOTE

The moment a patient calls is already won or lost based on the knowledge available. Covers the three-layer knowledge architecture, an AI Healthiness diagnostic, and Monday morning action steps.

Best for: NAHAM National, NAHAM Regional, patient access retreats

45–60 MIN + OPTIONAL WORKSHOP

Where AI creates the most value in scheduling, prior auth, and registration and where it creates risk. Real peer ROI benchmarks.

Best for: NAHAM, AAHAM, health system operational leadership

Payer-Side

45–60 MIN KEYNOTE

Why “deflection” is the wrong goal for member services AI. Six governance practices every health plan needs before deploying AI to members.

Best for: AHIP, HPA, RISE Summit, Medicaid plan executive forums

45–60 MIN + ASSESSMENT WORKSHOP

The five dimensions of AI Healthiness accuracy, transparency, compliance, empathy, continuity with a live assessment framework deployable in under a week.

Best for: HPA workshops, RISE summit, AHIP member services tracks

RCM

45–60 MIN KEYNOTE

Where AI creates the most value in RCM pre-auth, eligibility, denial prediction and why payer rule libraries need governance like clinical protocols.

Best for: HFMA Annual, Becker’s RCM, AAHAM, CFO forums

45 MIN KEYNOTE

The Moment Zero of financial counseling: the conversation before the bill that determines whether you collect.

Best for: HFMA, MGMA, Becker’s, VP Revenue Cycle forums

KM & CX

45–60 MIN KEYNOTE

Why the AI era permanently elevated KM from operational overhead to strategic asset. Breaking KM apathy and the anatomy of a knowledge system AI can actually trust.

Best for: KMWorld, APQC KM Conference, CX Summit

45 MIN - TIED TO THE BOOK

The SIMPLE model revisited for the AI era what changes, what stays the same, and the six highest-stakes decisions in AI-powered CX.

Best for: CX Summit, CCW, contact center leadership conferences

RCM

45–60 MIN - OPENER/CLOSER CALIBER

A new mental model for how AI, knowledge, and human judgment converge. Live examples across patient access, member services, revenue cycle, and clinical decision support.

Best for: HIMSS general sessions, HLTH keynote stage, C-suite forums

30–45 MIN - PROVOCATIVE, DATA-LED

The evidence behind the 60% hallucination rate in conversational healthcare AI and the four-step path from ungoverned to AI Healthiness.

Best for: HIMSS tech track, HLTH, AI safety conferences, hospital boards

Starter

Questions

Knowledge-Driven CX and the Future of Agent Experience

Why Customer Experience Is the Best Strategy for Scaling Your Startup

A Deep Dive into Knowledge Management and the Future of CX Operations

Let’s Build

Something Real

Whether you are exploring a speaking engagement, a workshop for your leadership team, an AI strategy conversation, or simply want to talk healthcare AI and patient experience, Steve reviews every inquiry personally.

For speaking inquiries, please include your event date, audience size, and topic focus. Steve responds to all speaking requests within two business days.

Send a Message

Book Steve for Your Event

Every engagement is tailored to your audience and goals.