Is AI Set to Revolutionise Medical Affairs?
I moderated this webinar for a live audience of around 450, asking whether AI is set to revolutionise Medical Affairs. We dispelled myths, walked through use cases already running inside pharma, and explained hallucinations in plain language.
What were the key learnings?
The panel brought together leaders from Roche, GSK and Kite (Gilead’s cell-therapy arm), plus the chief executive of a medical-AI platform company. The framing that stuck: medical decision-makers are drowning in an ocean of information, and in this field wasted time equals wasted lives.
Use cases already live in 2023: AI-assisted literature review (medical knowledge doubles every 73 days), turning dashboards of KPIs into readable narratives for field teams, channel-preference models, next-best-action tools designed so the MSL stays in the driving seat, and chatbots giving patients reliable answers around the clock.
The governance half of the hour: hallucinations explained as an engine motivated to give an answer whether or not it knows one; focused, well-tuned datasets beating the one-model-to-rule-them-all approach; and the acceptance that you never fully de-risk AI, you mitigate it with human judgement in the loop. My close as moderator: the ship has sailed, so learn the tools, because the adage holds in Medical Affairs as much as in medicine. AI will not replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace doctors who do not.
