Meet Dianne Kokotoff who was recently awarded Leader of the Year at the SS&C Customer Excellence for her amazing work, including AI innovation.
With over 25 years of experience leading IT operations across global organizations, Dianne currently serves as the Executive Director of Enterprise Solutions and Automation at Wellstar Health System. Her impressive background includes service in the U.S. Army as a Signal Officer and over a decade at Equifax, last role as VP of Global Service Management.
At Wellstar, Dianne leads seven high-performing teams responsible for automation, application development, ServiceNow, support of external website,and IT internships. Under her leadership, Wellstar has launched a series of transformative automation initiatives, including:
- 23+ RPA processes saving over 213,000 labor hours and delivering $23M in ROI
- AI chatbot and workflow automation handling over 500,000 tasks annually, saving 250,000 hours
- DevOps and QA automation for public web and mobile platforms
She’s also worked with clinical and business leaders to create innovative tools like Clinical Hand Hygiene tracking, Professional Practice Evaluation, and community healthcare trend analysis.
When asked about the role of AI in healthcare, Dianne is clear about the mission:
“Automation and process improvement have been a core vision in Wellstar. Our focus with AI and automation is to enable our staff to focus on our patients rather than administrative tasks. Even before AI and Agentic AI became a household name, Wellstar had implemented Moveworks in 2019 to reduce ServiceDesk calls.”
“Strategically, we have initiatives centered around AI or have some component of AI embedded. We have created a Chief of AI position as well as an AI team to evaluate AI products and maintain governance over implemented products. Wellstar’s vision is to use AI in the most creative and secure manner possible to enhance the health and welfare of our patients.”
Among the many innovations in play, Moveworks continues to be a core driver of efficiency.
“The AI Assistant platform from Moveworks continues to be our most transformative product. It empowers our team members to swiftly obtain answers and file tickets, ensuring vital information is merely a question away thanks to the advanced GenAI models.”
Of course, launching AI initiatives doesn’t come without challenges. Dianne shares how her team tackled the nuances of preparing knowledge for AI systems:
“A key hurdle with AI has been documentation. Using gold sources to connect into the AI Assistant require data to be formatted with enough contextual information. We have found where the information in the knowledge article makes sense when you read the whole article, but when applied to the AI assistant, the outcome didn’t necessarily match the intent of the article. Using Knowledge Studio, we have been able to enhance that documentation and get better results.”
Wellstar also overcame technical limitations by extending their AI Assistant into new systems:
“We encountered challenges with data repositories that lacked Moveworks connectors. To address this, we utilized Creator Studio, integrating several applications with their unique knowledge sources into the bot.”
For organizations just starting their AI journey, Dianne offers this encouragement:
“My first advice is ‘Don’t be scared – just implement it.’ Initially, we were concerned about the quantity and quality of our knowledge articles so we focused on the most popular topics – PTO, Holidays, access, and get help. From there, you will be amazed at how quickly it takes off. People will ask the questions that will become your next knowledge article.”
“Utilizing the Employee Experience Insights product in Moveworks, we have been able to focus our roadmap based on the data output.”
So what’s next for Wellstar?
“More Agents. We would like to create other agents to continue to transform and automate repetitive tasks. While we don't expect bots to handle all work, we aim to maximize our team's efficiency with their help. As healthcare costs rise, we must do our part in managing these increases, and AI will play a crucial role in achieving this.”