- Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are evaluating how AI can improve their business.
- Eli Lilly’s CEO said he expects AI to revolutionize productivity in the workplace.
- Pharmaceutical giants are investing in AI, machine learning and automation.
- This story is part of our “What’s Next?” series, which asks CEOs of prominent companies across industries about how rapidly evolving trends are impacting their approach to leadership.
The pharmaceutical and biotech industries have already started using artificial intelligence to improve how they operate, how they develop drugs, and ultimately to make their employees’ jobs easier.
A handful of biotech companies are testing AI-developed drugs on humans. Meanwhile, digital health companies, healthcare providers, and insurers are finding ways to use technologies like ChatGPT to speed up tasks like assessing patients and completing medical records, while maintaining patient safety and privacy. It is working.
According to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, the technology has the potential to transform the industry. Eli Lilly has dozens of drugs in clinical trials and expects to bring in more than $30 billion in revenue this year.
Ricks told an insider that AI is “one of the most exciting tech movements” he’s seen.
“I can only think of two other things in my adult life that compare to this,” Ricks said. “One of which was his on his iPhone and the other one when he first started visualizing the Internet.”
Eli Lilly, with a market value of more than $420 billion, sells blockbuster treatments for diabetes and cancer. The company has already started investing in a number of AI-focused projects. A company spokesperson said Lilly is investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning in areas such as drug discovery, natural language generation, robotic process automation and chatbots.
The goal is to expand what Lilly calls a “digital workforce equivalent workforce,” a concept that the company says is the time saved by using technology to replace human labor. It helps in quantifying. Lilley said the effort, which began in 2022 and now spans more than 100 projects, is equivalent to about 1.4 million hours of human activity, or about 160 years 24/7.
Lilly told an insider that his goal is to get that number to 2.4 million hours, or about 274 years, by the end of the year. Lilly declined to say how much he invested in the effort.
3 Ways Lilly Wants to Leverage AI
Ricks said he sees three main ways Lilly and the larger biopharmaceutical industry can take advantage of AI.
Initially, this technology could take the first mundane steps in tasks such as contract manufacturing and the mechanical part of administrative work.
“I think the most short-term application of these is not to replace entire roles for people, but rather to improve human productivity, and start with the simplest problems,” he said. “I think it will happen soon.”
Second, AI could also help automate repetitive business processes in industries with heavy regulatory scrutiny.
“This is a good target for some text-generating AI tools, like Chat GPT, because they can tell you what to do with the data, and actually create value for the patient. It helps us produce documents that aren’t available much more quickly.
Ricks said the final use case is drug development. AI models can generate ideas based on data sets that chemists would never have been able to see or visualize. In May, Lilly announced a $250 million partnership with pharmaceutical technology company XtalPi to harness AI to discover potential new drugs.
“The discovery process requires extensive leaks,” Rix said. “Once upon a time, humans probably only thought about what they already knew. Machines don’t. I can come up with it.”
While the structure is far from being a real drug, Rix said it would give chemists a starting point — a “new void” — that they could eventually use to develop new drugs.
“I think this is a game changer and a big shift in productivity in the workplace. As a result, people will spend their time on more interesting and valuable things in the short term,” he said. Told.