Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence in 2020: The Sector is Heating Up For Investments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a top trend in many industries lately, attracting massive media attention and investments. Over the last decade, this complex area of research has rapidly progressed from being a "resurrected cool technology from the past" to a full-blown driver of nothing less than a new industrial revolution -- a digital one. As of today, AI is widely commercialized in such applications as manufacturing robots, smart assistants (e.g. Siri), automated financial investing systems, virtual travel booking agents, social media monitoring tools, conversational bots, surveillance systems, online security systems, language translators, self-driving cars, and much more. In some industries, AI (including its many technologies and sub-disciplines, such as deep learning, recommender systems, and natural language processing), is becoming a standardized component rather than a cutting-edge innovation it once was. This rapid progress in AI adoption is also seen in the pharmaceutical industry -- not without caveats, however. Unlike "mainstream" use cases, like image recognition or spam email filtering, drug discovery research appears to be a much harder case for several reasons.