AI unchained: the non-data driven approach
As previously mentioned, determining your needs is crucial before embarking on AI. However, what happens if your data is entirely unmanaged? Or if you don’t have a coherent strategy in place?
NNIT’s Expectation Barometer 2023 survey indicates that only half of all participating life sciences companies have a corporate data strategy.
According to Sam Laermans, lack of a data strategy should not be a barrier to getting started with AI:
– There are so many experts and pundits out there saying that ‘if you don’t have control over your data, you’re not ready to start your AI journey’, which is probably right to a certain degree. However, in my opinion you can also use AI to improve your data, he says and gives an example:
– Let’s say your company has a thousand documents in various languages, but you don’t know what’s in them and how many of them have actually been signed off. In this case, AI can be used to solve the problem. So, my advice is: don’t let poor data or the absence of a data strategy be a showstopper. It is perfectly fine to build an AI strategy and begin to move forward without having your data fully under control.
Sam Laermans suggests perceiving AI as the capabilities required to solve your tasks, similar to when you employ staff, while the data strategy is more about ensuring that the right people have access to the right data at the right time.
With great potential comes great responsibility
One thing is getting the data foundation in order. Another is the people interpreting and validating the data. Because no matter how great a potential AI comes with, we must not underestimate that the human brain is still vital in a pharma company:
– I’m still waiting for a company to claim their drug was entirely developed by AI from start to finish, and the auditor raised no concerns, states Sam Laermans, further explaining:
– Pharma 4.0 is very much about the human dimension in a digital world, because at the end of the day, people making critical decisions are vital for the life sciences industry. While AI is progressing rapidly, no medications have yet been approved by the FDA that were solely developed through AI. But even though the human brain is still indispensable, paradoxically it also has the ability to intervene and disrupt AI’s ability to deliver accurate and representative results:
– An AI system, built and trained by humans, is influenced by the biases inherent in its human-generated data. This underscores the need for human critical scrutiny and judgment, such as ensuring a medicine is tested on a representative group of people, says Laermans.
The future of life sciences
AI has truly proven its potential, and the technology is going to have a profound impact on all of us:
– Just look at the adoption rate of ChatGPT in 2023, you have seen everyone using it, from my mom using it for spaghetti sauce recipes to my colleagues for debugging issues in the Microsoft Power Platform. It just goes to show how quickly the way we interact with computers is changing, says Laermans.
But where does that leave the life sciences industry?
– I’m a firm believer that in the upcoming years we will see drastic changes to the way companies in the life sciences industry work. The healthcare industry produces more data than Netflix, Disney, Facebook and Instagram combined. Therefore, I see the life sciences sector as a major candidate for embracing AI, says Sam Laermans and concludes:
– In the future, I believe many pharma companies will increasingly view themselves as tech companies that also happen to produce medicine.