The biopharmaceutical sector is facing digital disruption from multiple sources, the chief among them being artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud. Deloitte predicts that in 2019/2020, all industries will accelerate their use of cloud-based AI software and services, including biopharma companies. Among companies that adopt AI technology, 70 percent will obtain AI capabilities through cloud-based enterprise software, and 65 percent will create AI applications using cloud-based development services. In order to keep up with the changing competitive landscape and customer expectations, biopharma companies will need to accelerate their use of AI-enabled services. Biopharma organizations have started using scaled versions of AI over the last 1-2 years in some areas.

This week, we have launched the first in a series of reports on artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential impact in driving the digital transformation of biopharma. This overview report, Intelligent biopharma: Forging the links across the value chain, explores the challenges and opportunities in AI adoption and the potential ways that AI might impact the different segments of the biopharma value chain (see Figure 1).1 The pace and scale of medical and scientific innovation, together with increasing competition, lengthening R&D cycle times, shorter time in market, expiring patents, declining peak sales, pressure around reimbursement and mounting regulatory scrutiny are challenging the existing biopharma business and operating models. These challenges have also had a massively negative impact on the expected return on investment that large biopharma companies expect to achieve from their late-stage pipelines. Consequently, companies are looking to digital transformation as a key differentiator and essential part of their change management strategy. AI technologies are some of the most anticipated of these digital technologies.