How Moderna, Home Depot, and others are succeeding with AI

When pharmaceutical company Moderna announced the first clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine, it was a proud moment but not a surprising one for Dave Johnson, the company's chief data and artificial intelligence officer. Listen to or read a transcript of "AI and the COVID-19 Vaccine: Moderna's Dave Johnson." When Johnson joined the company in 2014, he helped put in place automated processes and AI algorithms to increase the number of small-scale messenger RNA (mRNA) needed to run clinical experiments. This groundwork contributed to Moderna releasing one of the first COVID-19 vaccines (using mRNA) even as the world had only started to understand the virus' threat. "The whole COVID vaccine development, we're immensely proud of the work that we've done there, and we're immensely proud of the superhuman effort that our people went through to bring it to market so quickly," Johnson said during a bonus episode of the MIT Sloan Management Review podcast "Me, Myself, and AI." "But a lot of it was built on … this infrastructure that we had put in place where we didn't build algorithms specifically for COVID; we just put them through the same pipeline of activity that we've been doing," Johnson said.