How It Started: The Recruitment and Broken Promises of CAIS

In October 2018, Dr. Reid Conant—a Nuance CMIO moonlighting as CEO of his startup, Clinical AI Solutions (CAIS)—began aggressively recruiting me. His pitch? To revolutionize healthcare through AI-driven tools and exciting work at the confluence of medicine and technology. What followed was a calculated campaign to exploit my expertise, relationships, and trust—all while devoting his loyalty to Nuance. 

October 2018 – December 2018

Reid’s first move: hiring me as a contractor while I maintained my full-time job. The goal? To leverage my reputation and connections immediately.

• The Bait:
  
  • Promised Vision: “We are going to get amazing work done in the exciting and confluent area of medicine and AI-based technologies!” (Reid Conant, June 2019).
  • High-Pressure Recruitment: “Though the hourly rate you are looking for is higher than expected, you are seen as having the potential to bring unusual value to this organization.” (Reid Conant, October 2018).

• The Hook:

             Reid instructed me to use his CAIS email exclusively, hiding his Nuance ties:
             “Please use ‘reid.conant@clinicalaisolutions.com’… You sent the Agreement back to my       

              Nuance address. 😊 Important we keep it separate.”
             — Reid Conant, December 28, 2018

Behind the scenes, Reid was already using his Nuance position to broker CAIS deals.

June 2019: The Nuance Partnership and Urgency to Sign

By mid-2019, Reid intensified pressure to lock me into a full-time role, dangling a newly signed Nuance-CAIS partnership as bait:

“We signed the Agreement with Nuance today! This is great news for CAIS… I am really looking forward to working with you on this important and very productive work to come!”
— Reid Conant, June 21, 2019

But his true focus? Monetizing my relationship with the CIO of HealthQuest:

• The Demand:
  Reid pushed me to strong-arm the CIO into signing a CAIS contract amid HealthQuest’s merger chaos:
  *“I wonder if CIO would be willing to contract with CAIS for 2-4 weeks… so we could count on your commitment to CAIS.”*
  — Reid Conant, June 23, 2019
  I resisted, warning:
  “I don’t see CIO turning around and executing a short-term agreement with CAIS… He wants to sign once he gets past the merger.”
  — My response, June 23, 2019

Reid’s reply? A thinly veiled ultimatum to prioritize CAIS over ethics.

The Reality vs. The Promise

While Reid sold visions of cutting-edge AI, CAIS’s “innovation” was a sham:

• College Student: A college student and son of CAIS’s product manager built CAIS’s Workflow Guidance tool—not engineers or AI experts.
• No AI, No Scribe Replacement Program, No Strategy: The “AI-based technologies” Reid promised never materialized. Instead, CAIS became a front for Nuance to outsource fixes it couldn’t execute.

1. Dual Roles, Divided Loyalty:
   Reid’s insistence on hiding his Nuance email exposed his conflicted priorities. He served two masters—CAIS and Nuance—while I unwittingly bridged both.
2. Rushed Signatures, Empty Promises:
   Reid demanded I sign a full-time offer by *“EOD Monday, 06/24/2019”* with vague equity terms (2.5% stock options > increased to 3%) and a rushed start date.

This wasn’t recruitment—it was corporate espionage in slow motion. Reid Conant used CAIS to:

• Extract my labor and client relationships under the guise of “innovation.”
• Mask Nuance’s failures by outsourcing critical work to CAIS.
• Build IP that Nuance and DeliverHealth later stole outright.

The emails prove a pattern: CAIS was never about AI. It was a pipeline to funnel our work—and our trust—into Nuance’s coffers.