In early 2020, when scientists rushed to develop a vaccine to take on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19, it seemed like a really long shot. The fastest a vaccine had ever previously been developed was for mumps, back in the 1960s--an effort that took 48 months. Still, just nine months later, in December 2020, the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a German deep-tech startup, BioNTech, had developed the first COVID-19 vaccine, validating the use of the new technology of mRNA-based vaccines. The first studies on DNA vaccines began 25 years ago, and the science of RNA vaccines too has been evolving for over 15 years. One outcome was mRNA technology, which required the convergence of advances in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, and has transformed the science--and the business--of vaccines.

At a moment in time when the value of business agility is becoming clearer than ever, a growing range of diverse brands and businesses are prioritizing agility and engaging in digital transformations. Business agility unlocks greater operational flexibility, more nimble and responsive pivots to new processes or priorities, and smarter and more strategic decision-making -- all of which is enormously valuable in an increasingly tech-savvy and competitive professional environment, as discussed in my previous article. One of the most powerful tools that can be deployed to make that transformation successful is artificial intelligence (AI). AI-powered tools and tech form the backbone of systems and solutions that help companies become more agile. What follows is a brief overview of how agile methodologies emerged and why AI delivers such valuable synergies with agile business.

BenevolentAI, founded in 2013, creates and applies AI technologies to transform the way medicines are discovered and developed. BenevolentAI seeks to improve patients' lives by applying technology designed to generate better data decision making and in doing so decrease drug discovery failure rates, lower drug development costs and increase the speed at which medicines are generated. The company has developed the Benevolent Platform - a discovery platform used by BenevolentAI scientists to find new ways to treat disease and personalise drugs for patients. BenevolentAI is HQ'd in London with a research facility in Cambridge (UK) and further offices in New York and Antwerp. BenevolentAI has active R&D drug programmes from discovery to Phase IIb in disease areas such as ALS, Atopic dermatitis, Ulcerative Colitis and Sarcopenia.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform nearly every industry. This post is from a talk I've given a few times about how to think about data, scarcity and intelligence in order to understand what's unfolding. Part 1: Where We've Just Come From: The Big Data Business Model The neural network algorithms that modern artificial intelligence uses, the ones that drive trucks autonomously or detect cancer more accurately than humans, have been known and existed for decades. What have brought us to an inflexion point are the discovery of computers many orders of magnitude more powerful at executing the needed calculations, and, more importantly, the availability of large datasets to feed the algorithms. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the AI revolution is coming hot on the heels of the "Big Data" revolution that's been taking place over the last 10 years or so.