Demystifying AI In Pharma

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a term so overused and misunderstood that it has lost its meaning. As a data scientist who spends a significant amount of time thinking about how and where to apply machine learning to challenges in life sciences and the pharmaceutical industry, when the majority of individuals say AI, what I feel they really mean is technology that can simulate human intelligence. By that definition, everything from a simple calculator to a recurrent generative adversarial network (and beyond) could be considered AI. But thinking of AI as an algorithmic method may not be the best way to recognize its value. Economist Theodore Levitt once said, "No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole."