This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
A lot of attention is being given to the role that artificial intelligence can play in helping to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Much of it been focused on areas with a high degree of what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call sex appeal: A.I. that can spot and track emerging epidemics; A.I. that can help with contact tracing and social-distancing enforcement; A.I. that can possibly help diagnose COVID-19; and, perhaps most importantly, A.I. that might find possible treatments or vaccines.
Last week, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence held a virtual conference in which researchers discussed many of these uses of A.I. (If you didn’t catch the live broadcast, I highly recommend watching the recorded version here.)
This is all important and potentially game changing. And I don’t want to belittle the work of these researchers and companies in any way. But much of the technology is relatively immature and unproven. It will likely take time to validate and perfect. A lot of these machine learning techniques will probably be more helpful in ensuring we can beat the next emerging epidemic than in fighting this one.
If you want to know where A.I. might be able to have the biggest impact in the battle against coronavirus, it might be wiser to look at some uses of the technology that are more mundane and, frankly, boring.
To show you what I mean, I want to tell you just a little bit about my wife. After having spent the better part of two decades in the diplomatic service, she recently retrained as a medical doctor. She’s now a junior doctor here in London, and she’s working, like most of her colleagues, on the front lines of this pandemic. Last week, she worked three consecutive overnight shifts in her hospital’s intensive care unit.
What is one of the biggest challenges her hospital has faced? Scheduling.
