Artificial Intelligence in Pharma: Set Your Expectations Appropriately

In a recently published article on Fortune.com He begins by noting that data science and analytics has been in the "dancing bear stage" and that it's time for it to "demonstrate its ability to materially impact health and disease." Much of the article focuses on parsing an Andreesen Horowitz podcast interview with Vas Narasimhan, chief executive officer at Novartis, and his views on the (limited) successes and (undoubtedly expensive) failures with data science and analytics deployments in pharma. Early in the article, Shaywitz quotes a paper by Dr. Sachin Jain, former CMIO at Merck and now CEO of CareMore Health: "The conference circuit is now exploding with "AI and pharma" conferences… consultants excitedly discuss pharma's digital transformation (and convince each pharma brand they're distinctly behind), and exuberant stories about the power of data and AI resound almost daily across social media." This question of the progress with applying artificial intelligence in pharma is not solely a digital transformation issue.