Podcast Transcript
Barlas Yuce:
Welcome to the Art of Intelligence, where we decode the future of AI, one story, one use case, and one bold idea at a time. I’m your host, Barlas Yuce, inviting you to join me and industry leaders as we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our world from the boardroom to the classroom and beyond. Now, whether you’re an innovator or skeptic or just AI curious, this is your front row seat to real conversations and practical insights behind the buzzwords. Let’s paint a bigger picture together. Today we have Paul Banco. Hi Paul, how are you?
Paul Banco:
Good afternoon. I’m doing well and you?
Barlas Yuce:
Fantastic. So to give our listeners a little bit of a background, today’s guest is Paul Banco, an accomplished entrepreneur and technologist based in New Jersey. Paul is the CEO and co-founder of ETHERFAX, a company at the forefront of secure document delivery and cloud-based communication solutions. Under his visionary leadership, ETHERFAX has transformed how organizations manage and transmit sensitive documents, setting new standards for security efficiency in the telecom and healthcare sectors. Paul is also an inventor with multiple patents to his name and demonstrates a relentless drive for practical innovation. Is that it Paul, or is there more?
Paul Banco:
One more to add. I’m also the president and co-founder of a company called Weave Cloud Solutions, which is an intelligent document processing AI platform, primarily built for the healthcare vertical. Somewhat of a new venture.
Barlas Yuce:
We are definitely going to learn a lot more about that. But first, tell me the answer to this question. It’s the same question we ask everybody that comes on this show. If you could have one job, any job in the world for 12 months, what would it be and why?
Paul Banco:
I’ll tell you, and I don’t know if you consider your definition of a job paying or non-paying, but I would love to just do philanthropy for a full year of just helping children, especially those that are less fortunate. ETHERFAX does have a corporate social responsibility page and we’ve done a lot of work from supporting various orphanages out in the Philippines. We’ve built an entire filtration system in Kenya, so I really love that work. I think I would love to just do that for a full year, just touring over the entire world.
Barlas Yuce:
That sounds wonderful. Yeah, great job. If you could do it, I would love to do that myself. Great answer. So Paul, tell me a little bit about yourself. We know about what we talked about in the summary with ETHERFAX. Can you give us a little background on how you came up with this company and how it all came together?
Paul Banco:
Back in the Y2K era, I was one of the lead engineers at Merrill Lynch and was responsible for getting our systems ready. All the trades were confirmed via fax. So one of my charters was, well, we need an enterprise fax server worldwide, which contained like ML Japan, ML Australia, ML New York, all of them. So I chartered that. Fast forward, my tenure ended at Merrill Lynch. I opened up my own professional services firm and I happened to just start reselling fax server solutions and technology solutions, computer systems and things of that sort. So I partnered up with one of the founders of the company, his name is Tom Linhard. He’s the CEO of Faxcore, and we were sitting in his office one day and I said, Hey, I kind of got this idea, and we did some napkin architecture and said, well, why don’t we start transitioning this stuff to the cloud? And here we are decades later, almost two decades later, and we have a really, really nice successful business. There’s actually three co-founders to the organization.
Barlas Yuce:
Which co-founder are you? The technical guy, the pretty guy or the money guy?
Paul Banco:
I’m more of the visionary guy. We have our technical guy whose name is Rob Cichielo, and then we have the money guy, Tom Linhard. So we each bring a very unique feature set to the organization and it just runs like a well-oiled machine.
Barlas Yuce:
Excellent. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the new venture, the AI venture with healthcare.
Paul Banco:
Well, we actually have, so there’s two things here. We actually saw the need for AI. AI is great at doing a lot of things, especially when it comes to healthcare and summarization, right? We’re not using AI to diagnose and build treatment plans, although it could be used for that, and I’ll tell you a story around that. But we actually built that into ETHERFAX and then we found the need. Our customers were coming to us saying, this is great, but we need more of a workflow type application that gets our documents as they come in. We could extract the data, put it into our Epic system, our Cerner system, without having to keystroke all of this information in because on average it takes somebody anywhere between a fast typer, 10 to 20 minutes to get all this information into the EMR. So we built a platform utilizing AI that looks at all this unstructured data and then automatically ingests it or exports it into the EMR, just saving the clinicians’ time.
Barlas Yuce:
Sounds excellent. Yeah, this seems like it would be a no-brainer. Like why wouldn’t every hospital clinic and every company that has any kind of medical intake or emergencies, why wouldn’t they use that? Is that something that you guys have really been pushing for a long time?
Paul Banco:
Yeah, absolutely. You hear, I mean, I got to say I love, I am so happy to be alive and not just because of the reasons of being alive, but all the technological advances that AI has done for us. I mean, it’s absolutely amazing. Yes, you would think it’s a no-brainer and people are like, oh, AI is taking away jobs. We have to evolve as a civilization. I mean, were we worried about the elevator operators that now elevators are autonomous? Right? I, and I don’t think this is a real quote, but it’s been said, Henry Ford said, if I listened to my customers, I would’ve invented faster horses, right? I mean, would you get into the plane that the Wright brothers first flew? Absolutely not. Right. And I mean, we are just, the innovation that’s coming out of this country is just absolutely insane. So we’re not about taking jobs, we’re just about making you more efficient, and every hospital organization is turning towards AI, whether it’s for intake and for diagnosis. I was at a New Jersey HIMSS event not too long ago, and there was a doctor that got up there and said, we use AI every day. It is the equivalent of one doctor seeing 200 million patients over a 20 year period. We now have access to this information within seconds.
Barlas Yuce:
Have to introduce you to Leslie Cook Ramirez. Leslie, if you’re listening to this pay attention. Leslie Cook is in charge of HCLS at AWS for partners, so we need to get you guys together. She’s definitely someone that can make sure that,
Paul Banco:
Well, we’re an AWS customer, so all of our federal stuff is within AWS GovCloud.
Barlas Yuce:
Even better. That’s wonderful. Can you give us a little rundown of maybe a process of how AI is working inside your world in the new startup? Maybe give one process where it helped the company or saved the company money or time.
Paul Banco:
Absolutely. When I experienced this firsthand, and I have two elder parents, I’m in what they call sandwich parenting right now, and my father was admitted to a facility called Care One, and I had to go in there and sit in the admissions room and I filled out all of this paperwork and I handed it to the clinician and then she basically took everything that I wrote, and now she’s entering it into the screen, and I was in there for 30 minutes, and of course my entrepreneurial hat came on and said, I could have that done for you in seconds, and imagine if I can do it with one patient. Imagine how quick you’ll be able to get all this information in delivering a better experience than not only the family, but what about the actual patient? Let’s start to getting patient care coordination and let’s start treating them.
Needless to say, not in that facility, but in another facility. We did just that, right? And you start talking to these, whether the clinicians, administrators, and you try to take this application away, you would think that you were cutting their hands off. They’re like, absolutely not. This has made us so much more efficient. We have less errors. We’re getting to our patients. We’re answering referrals quicker, our billing, our rev cycle, it has just made the world a better place, not only for them, but for the patient and for the patient’s family like myself. And this is a systemic problem throughout the entire industry. 100%. We’re helping solve that bottleneck in the workflow.
Barlas Yuce:
That’s fantastic. My entrepreneurial hat comes on, this would work great. If you one added physical products to being able to put this into a doctor’s office and say, Hey, look, I’m going to create this iPad on a stand. All they have to do is go to a customer. It goes in, now you got the software and the hardware, and then the next step that, in my brain, would be CVS and Walgreens and getting every CVS and every Walgreens to be able to come in and do an intake form for all of those elderly folks that come in to get their shots, see the pharmacist, get a consultation. Now that would be a huge scale. Every CVS, every Walgreens, that would be pretty awesome.
Paul Banco:
Well, that’s the problem in the industry, and it’s referred to as interoperability, right? Who owns your patient record, right? Barlas, you go to the doctor, who owns it, does Epic own it? Does the hospital own it? And there’s laws around patient sharing and there’s agreements, but the issue is, and we’re trying to do better at it, is there is really not a tremendous amount of interoperability between systems, right? One patient, one EMR may call it an encounter, the other one may call it a visit. How do you map these thousands of fields? And this is why fax is alive today. It’s the least common denominator. I refer to the fax as the cockroach of technology. It’s simple. It works, it’s secure. You can get a document from point A to point B, and this is why 70, 75% of all healthcare communications or healthcare data is still transmitted via fax.
Barlas Yuce:
Because it’s easier, less hassle.
Paul Banco:
Everybody’s got it. Least common denominator.
Barlas Yuce:
And you have the fax business, and hopefully you can bring that over to your AI business.
Paul Banco:
That is the plan. There’s your entrepreneurial hat.
Barlas Yuce:
Very nice.
Paul Banco:
Yeah.
Barlas Yuce:
How is the legislation keeping up, is this something that you guys have had to worry about at all, with AI in legislation and HIPAA?
Paul Banco:
Yeah, 100%. It’s responsible AI, right? There’s no doubt in our world, because we’re not using AI to diagnose and we’re just using it for summarization, there’s a little bit more leeway. That doesn’t mean that we can’t just go willy-nilly out over the internet. Things have to be secure. We’re HITRUST certified. We’re FedRAMP certified. We’re PCI certified. We have governing control. So regardless of what the government says, we always treat every single document. We have no idea what flow store our network, but we always treat it as secure. So there are a lot of regulations around HIPAA. I mean, HIPAA is a guideline. There are organizations like HITRUST and PCI on the financial side and credit card side that are actually organizations that hold you to standards. So there’s a lot, and it’s nice to see that the leaders, the Elon Musks of the world, the Altman’s, the Bezos, the Gates, everything, all of these leaders are coming together to try and form a responsible AI architecture.
Barlas Yuce:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. Any plans to get into what we were talking or what I was talking about with the hardware and the software, or are you just guys going to stay just in the software drive?
Paul Banco:
We’re really good at what we do. I mean, we’re inventors. We’re software engineers. We’ll probably just stick on the software side of things. I mean, hey, listen, my crystal ball’s broken. Who knows what we’ll get into? But I could tell you right now, the five-year plan of the company is really just to make the workflow side of things more efficient.
Barlas Yuce:
That’s fantastic. Can you give us an example of what you feel that this particular industry is going to look like in the five years? How do you envision this company being five years from now?
Paul Banco:
First of all, I hope highly successful. Definitely going to be that. Yeah, I mean, we are generally at the forefront of innovation. Our CTO, our development team, we’re very agile, so we’re generally at the forefront of innovation, and we really look at ways to make people’s lives easier and more efficient, less errors. I think you’re going to see both of these organizations within the next five years just really continue to excel and evolve, listening to our customer’s needs and giving them what they need. I see both organizations as the hub and the plumbing to get a document securely from point A to point B with some information about that document. Perfect example, let’s just say, you go to a doctor and your blood results get faxed back and your blood results are now in with a thousand in the queue of a thousand other blood result tests that just came back. But wouldn’t it be nice if AI had the ability to go in there and flag something that says, Hey guys, you need to look at Barlas’ blood work right now. I can’t wait three days for you to look at this because there’s something serious here. That’s where AI is really coming into play in our world. I mean, it’s got so many great uses, but that’s just in our world.
Barlas Yuce:
Triage, AI, triage, what a great thought, great concept. Any thought to the responsibility of an AI triage putting, for example, the movie iRobot making somebody who is maybe a 50%, but a child at 20%, in prioritizing the 50% over the 20%. Is that something you can talk to?
Paul Banco:
Can you expand a little bit more?
Barlas Yuce:
I love movies and Will Smith movies are some of my favorites, but in the movie, iRobot, the Robot or the AI decided to save Will Smith, even though he could come out of this car that was in the water by himself, instead of saving the 10-year-old girl who had a 30% chance of saving, he saved the adult that probably could have saved himself. Is prioritization and empathy something that AI triage will add to your documents?
Paul Banco:
Well, yeah, it absolutely could, and the beauty of our product is you have the ability to program that through prompt engineering. Let’s talk about this a little bit differently because I think really what you’re referring to is Agentic AI or sentient. That’s where everybody probably heard the term. Elon Musk says, well, my new version 14 of full Self-Drive is sentient and agentic AI. I mean, it has all of those capabilities, autonomy, decision-making, learning and adoption and goal oriented action, and a lot of people are afraid of that. You’re a big movie buff. I mean, I think, and I can’t wait. I mean, you look at some of the things that, and I keep touting Musk because I think the guy is just an absolute mad genius where he’s going to have quadriplegics walking again. But let’s look at Matrix. When Neil went into the fight scene and they uploaded the Kung fu program, and within five minutes he knew kung fu when Trinity walked up to the helicopter and said, tank, I need to run ahead to fly this thing, and three seconds later, she was a pilot.
I mean, when you think about that, I mean, we’re not too far from that, and I’m excited about that. And there’s a lot of people like, oh, what’s AI? It’s making people dumb and this and that. Listen, you could argue that AI is probably a huge contributor to critical thinking, and we as humans are doing less of it because we have all the information at our fingertips like that. My one daughter’s in college, and I tell her all the time, I’m like, you know what? I don’t mind that you use it because before you would’ve broke out in my day in Encyclopedia Britannica, and then we had Google. Now all this information is at our fingertips summarized, so it’s exciting. We own five Teslas. I use full self-driving all the time. I love the AI technology in it. It gets better every single day. I’m really excited for what the future, I mean, we’re catching rocket ships on chopsticks. Come on. Did you ever think this in real lifetime? You would ever once see a reusable rocket? It’s believable, but man, we’re catching a rocket booster that’s 400 feet tall on a set of chopsticks. Come on.
Barlas Yuce:
Awesome. I never thought of it like that. Yeah, that’s so awesome.
We are living, we’re definitely living in the future, and I think that there’s a lot, especially in healthcare and me coming from Canada, especially in healthcare, there’s a lot to be done with AI, and I’m very, very appreciative of the line that you’re taking and which way you’re going. Let me ask you this question just to take a little bit of a different change to the type of questioning other entrepreneurs like you have been a startup of two companies now I have started three or four companies. None of them have been as successful as your two companies that you’re having right now. It’s tough to be a founder. There’s a lot of things that go on. Can you give us a little advice to startup founders on what you think they should be focusing on when it comes to their companies and AI in general?
Paul Banco:
Yeah. Don’t continue to throw good money at a bad idea, and in order to learn, you have to fail. In terms of AI, I think it’s going to open up a tremendous amount of opportunity for brand new investors. I think they can do more with less. Also know your capabilities of what your, I’m not an HR guy. I would never want to take on hr. Know your personnel really well and make sure you get the right individuals on the bus and the wrong individuals off the bus and surround yourself with the right people. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
When we, and be prepared to not pay yourself for the first two or three years because that’s what took from us. Have a great idea, but be true to yourself. Understand the market, understand the opportunity, understand how much you can capture, have reachable goals. Don’t say, I want to be 20 million in two years. It’s just not going to happen. Have obtainable goals and milestones and measure your success and your failures along the way. That’s what I would give to any entrepreneur right now, but I would also say, listen, entrepreneurs, we’re a special breed. I mean, we are risk takers. We are willing to put anything and everything into the business. It’s our business. It’s our blood, sweat, and tears. You have to make sure that you are number one in a position to do this. Number two, you have what it takes because you’re not going to be working 20, 30 hours a week. You’re going to be working 50, 60 hours a week, so you have to make sure that you’re ready for that before getting into any business. That’s what I would give. I do several talks around this, and a lot of people ask that same question. Everybody looks at, oh, what Paul? Now you work 20 hours a week and you’re always on vacations and you’re always touring the world, but you didn’t remember the time for the first seven years where I worked 80 hours a week and I didn’t take a single dime.
Barlas Yuce:
Yep. That’s the old adage. Work nobody wants to for a couple of years, so you can live like everybody wants to for the rest of your life.
Paul Banco:
A hundred percent. Yeah.
Barlas Yuce:
Well, let me ask you this question. This is the question that everyone’s waiting for. What is a unique AI use case that you have seen in the past, either you’ve done or you’ve seen as somebody else do or something that you’re currently doing right now or have seen a friend do or what you would like to see in the future?
Paul Banco:
Let me, and I don’t know if this is unique, but my wife, Rachel is an equestrian rider as well as all of my daughters, so thank you Wallet. My wife had fallen off of her horse during a competition more than once and really jacked up her ankle and she got the MRI results and took the MRI results with the report and actually threw them into chatGPT. Not only did it come back with a diagnosis, it came back with a treatment plan and it went, I was like, whoa, this is phenomenal. And it gave her a diagram of exactly what was wrong with her ankle. These are the tendons, this is what it’s going to take. She’s like, can I still play pickleball and chat B’s? Like, no, can I still ride horses? No, not really. And it explained everything to her in a way that she was able to relate with.
She then took this information, went to her doctor, and her doctor somewhat gave her the same advice, the same treatment plan, and she’s like, Hey, doc, I just want to let you know this is what I did. And the doctor’s like, wow, I’m going to be out of a job soon. My wife’s like, no, you’re not. Trust me, you got a long time. Don’t worry about, I don’t want no robot operating on me, but it’s nice to see that you guys are number one at least aligned, but I have a way better understanding because let’s face it, not all doctors are great in explaining what you have and how you do it. Sometimes you can’t even understand half of ’em. I can’t understand any of their writing.
Paul Banco:
That was phenomenal, and I was like, wow, that is just absolutely amazing there. I’m a big Grok user. Grok has GR doc on there, and I was recently on a plane, and I was a former EMT, but it was like 30 years ago, I don’t remember half this stuff, and somebody was having a seizure. I went really quick to GR doc and asked, what do I do for someone having a seizure within four seconds? It said, just do this. And we were able to administer help to this poor individual. I mean, I had a doctor access. What would have happened before if they had to wait 15 minutes for somebody to get there? I mean, all of the unbelievable use cases that AI is bringing to the table today, it’s exciting.
Barlas Yuce:
It’s exciting. That is excellent. Wow.
Paul Banco:
Yeah,
Barlas Yuce:
You give a great use case. My wife is very similar in the fact that she goes to gr, but she goes to Brock for a lot of things for diagnosis, and she’s diagnosed a lot of things that many doctors kind of miss. There’s a lot of doctors that are overworked and they might not know all of the things, but like you said, AI is 200 doctors with a thousand years of experience all rolled into one when answering and getting questions in.
Paul Banco:
When we were at this event, one of the CIOs for a major hospital out here in New Jersey said, we are reevaluating all of our vendors, and if our vendor does not have an AI play, they will no longer be a vendor. And people are like, oh, you want that doctor that used AI to pass the test? And I’m probably like, you know what? I think I do. I think every doctor now for really complex, maybe even non-complex. I mean, I have friends that are doctors that are using AI every single day, and it’s more just to check their selves, but it’s also, Hey, maybe there’s something out there that, like you said that I missed that I need to look at. Why not use it?
Barlas Yuce:
Well in this, especially in the United States where there’s such a litigious society and US courts are used to check, right? You get a lawsuit and then policies change. But if you as a doctor want your insurance premiums to go down, make sure that you make no mistakes and by checking every diagnosis you make with Brock or chat GPT or I use perplexity, bro, you could then go, look, I’ve checked everything. Here’s what it should. We looked, we did this, we did this, we did this. And it’s all documented really well.
Paul Banco:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I 100% agree. 100% agree.
Barlas Yuce:
So Paul, we’re coming to the end of the show. Before I let you go, I have a question about what are you doing next with your company right now with both of your companies? Are you going to be at any events? Are you going to have any webinars?
Paul Banco:
I mean, the next one we have is our partner event coming up which is only open to our partners, but I think the next event, which is our largest event is the HIMSS show out in Las Vegas. Usually it’s either in Las Vegas, Orlando, and sometimes Chicago. But this one’s out in Las Vegas. There’s 40,000 attendees coming. Both of the companies that I’m with will be represented and we’ll be showing all the new technology that’s out there. And it’s a great show. I mean, a lot of healthcare systems, the Epics of the world, the Cerners of the government, everybody in the healthcare field is out there. So that’s our next major show coming up outside of our partner event and company holiday party.
Barlas Yuce:
Thank you very much for everything. You’re always welcome back, and thanks for joining this episode of The Art of Intelligence Folks. Today’s discussion offered a deep dive into the world of AI driven innovation, leadership, secure digital communication, hearing firsthand about challenges and breakthroughs, shaping the future gives us all new perspectives as technology continues to transfer every facet of our business and daily lives. And as you heard today, our healthcare lives. And if you enjoyed this conversation, please subscribe. Share the show with your friends and colleagues, and don’t forget to leave us a review to help discover the art of intelligence. For more insights, resources and upcoming episodes, follow us on our favorite podcast platform and connect with us on LinkedIn. Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and continue exploring the intelligence behind today’s most impactful innovations.