When Motz Feinberg joined Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai Health System five years ago as vice president and chief supply chain officer, the organization was still figuring out how to function as a true health system and the supply chain was evolving with it.
Since then he’s been building the infrastructure to sustain growth. He developed a shared services model and sharper technology foundation.
Mr. Feinberg came to healthcare after stints in consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, consulting and high-tech. That cross-industry lens shapes how he’s approached the AI adoption question at the center of nearly every supply chain conversation in healthcare. At Cedars-Sinai, AI is not an enterprise initiative handed down from the C-suite but rather a collaborative decision-making process to ensure adoption.
“I use it every day, and it helps people at least get over the barrier of, hey, this is something that is a threat to me, versus this is something that can help me grow and help me be more efficient, help me be more productive and focused on higher value activities,” he said.
His team turned AI toward the necessary work nobody wants to do, like contract reading, parsing payment terms, comparing supplier language, reconciling what a contract says against what the ERP system actually reflects, and more, has become an early target. The tedium of it makes it a natural fit to ensure the easy things are done right.
“If a nurse is out of a supply, they want to know where that supply is, if any is coming, whether it is an ongoing back order, and if there are substitutes. As you can imagine, when you’re managing thousands and thousands of supplies within a hospital, knowing who to ask and ensuring that person has all the answers is pretty challenging,” he said.
Cedars-Sinai built an AI agent — developed in partnership with its IT organization — designed to handle exactly those queries. The tool can field questions without a part number. It knows that a nurse is asking about a specific type of product. It can report back on floor inventory, warehouse status, purchase orders and back orders. It can accept a restocking request directly, routing it into supply chain workflows without a phone call.
“It really streamlines all those communications tremendously, makes life much, much easier for nursing, and then it also provides very organized and ERP-like information back to supply chain so we’re not having to call the nurses and ask them what do they actually want because the agent is doing all that translation for us,” Mr. Feinberg said.
The tool is in pilot phase and expanding to include external supplier data that can widen what the agent knows and can answer.
Looking toward 2026, Mr. Feinberg is candid about the headwinds. California adds layers to the financial pressures most health systems are already carrying. The state’s Office of Healthcare Affordability introduces new cost constraints. Seismic regulations require hospitals to meet specific structural readiness standards, a mandate that translates into enormous capital investment. On top of that, Cedars-Sinai is running consistently over capacity and opening a new hospital within the year.
“We’re coming from a position of strength at this point and looking at ways to proactively find ways to improve our revenue side, improve our cost controls and efficiency side of the operations,” he said.
Supply chain is embedded in all of it — every construction project, every new facility, every clinical workflow change.
“I like to compare the supply chain to blood in the body. We need to be everywhere and make sure every cell gets the supplies it needs or the oxygen or nutrition it needs through the blood,” he said. “Generally, people don’t think a lot about supply chain until there’s a problem, similar to your blood. You don’t really think about it until you’re cut,” he said.
His biggest challenge in the year ahead, by his own telling, is less about any single initiative and more about what it costs his team to be that blood. Managing competing demands — the new hospital opening, the seismic investments, the AI build-outs, the relentless pressure on costs — requires not just operational bandwidth but human resilience.
“As you look across that portfolio of activities, I think one of our challenges is going to be balance,” he said. “To balance that with my initial thoughts around our people and how our people are able to handle all these different pushes and pulls for their time, for their mind, for their hearts, and make sure that we’re resourced appropriately as well.”
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