Inside Corewell Health’s AI Modernization: Foundations as a Feature

Aaron Tellis

Sr. Data Engineer, Integrated Data Analytics

Corewell Health

Aaron Tellis is a Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Senior Data Engineer and AI Lead for the Development Center of Excellence at Corewell Health, where he leads AI initiatives by equipping developers with AI tools that improve development and DevOps workflows. Outside of his day job, he writes about machine learning systems, AI tooling, and enterprise adoption.

Most organizations treat AI modernization like a single initiative. In practice, it's a collection of very different people with very different workflows, all expected to benefit from the same strategy. At Corewell Health, we challenged that assumption.

This session shares how the Development Center of Excellence identified the friction points holding different developer personas back and started building AI capabilities designed around how each one actually works.

The goal isn't just better tooling. It's a fundamental shift in what the developer's job looks like when AI handles more of the execution. The playbook is being written in real time, and this is an honest look at the problem we set out to solve, the approach we're taking, and what we're learning along the way.