AI Debate: Dreamers vs Realists
I chaired this debate with a twist: panellists from Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Grünenthal and Within3 were assigned dreamer or realist positions, and only revealed their true colours at the end. Nearly everyone turned out to be a dreamer, grounded in realism.
What were the key learnings?
The motion: will AI fundamentally change how life sciences engages its customers within five years? Audience polls opened and closed the hour, with a strong majority backing “revolutionise” from the start, which handed the assigned realists the harder job.
The assigned positions produced genuinely useful arguments on both sides. For caution: pilots that never scale because the data foundations underneath them are missing, hallucinations that make the news and feed public mistrust, the ecological cost of AI at scale, and the fear people bring from a lifetime of science fiction. For ambition: the tech industry’s annual AI investment exceeding the combined R&D budgets of the top twenty pharmaceutical companies, compliant AI analysis of open-text feedback that had previously been too risky to collect, and consent done with full transparency, even at the cost of half a mailing list.
My summing up: keep humans in the loop. As a leading cardiologist once put it to me, a dodgy doctor harms one patient at a time; a dodgy algorithm harms thousands at a time. Generative AI is an even sharper knife than social media, so be careful how it is deployed. And the genie is out of the bottle: only a year earlier, most of the senior leaders at a round table I moderated had not even tried ChatGPT.
