Adoption Lag in AI: Q&A with Scott Snyder

Scott Snyder
Chief digital officer
EVERSANA

A recent report¹ suggests that while interest in AI remains high, adoption of the technology is lagging. Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with EVERSANA’s chief digital officer Scott Snyder about this issue and how the pharmaceutical industry is reacting.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How much of a cooling effect is there with excitement around AI?
Scott Snyder: First, it’s important to separate classical or “predictive” AI which has been driving value for over a decade in industries including pharma in areas like drug discovery, patient finding, ad targeting, and next-best action. Generative AI is really driving the latest wave with its ability to create, understand and even reason, but also comes with challenges like hallucination and unpredictability. While there is still plenty of excitement at the top with 85% of executives saying their companies are moving on generative AI, it seems that this is not translating into progress with only 11% of companies deploying Gen AI at scale.

PE: Does this signal a larger trend of a slowdown in AI adoption?
Snyder: It is more of a rationalization than a cooling phase.I think like many emerging technologies, GenAI created enormous excitement, especially given the incredible capabilities it provides to individual users like writing, image creation, coding and data analysis.However, the hype with these technologies and their perceived capabilities often overshoots the ability of organizations to adopt them and drive real impact. So, while we may see a longer time to impact in the near term, we should still expect massive benefits from GenAI in the longer term as it takes root across different parts of the pharma value chain.

PE: What are the reasons why people are showing less excitement for AI?
Snyder: AI is improving at more than a five times growth rate per year and the technology itself is capable of taking on a massive amount of the work human workers do today. But as a study from the Boston Consulting Group² highlights, the technology is only a small piece (30%) of driving real AI transformation. The rest is changing human behavior. Based on a recent Slack worker study, only 33% of workers are actively using AI at work and 48% are uncomfortable telling their manager they use AI for everyday tasks. A lot of this has to do with the lack of AI training and literacy, clear incentives for delivering benefits for AI, and co-creation of AI solutions to build ownership and trust. At the company level, challenges include a lack of responsible AI guidelines, not picking the right use cases where AI performance and errors can be tolerated, and limited ability to measure ROI.

PE: Do you still expect the Pharma industry to continue to embrace using AI for new applications and purposes?
Snyder: Yes, without a doubt, AI will continue to be embraced across the industry. There is simply too much at stake to not move forward on AI.Companies that wait and refuse to embrace the change run the risk of being left behind. McKinsey recently estimated³ the potential benefit of gen AI for pharma to be as high as $110 billion per year.Companies that recognize that now is the time to focus on organizational change and the human dimension as much as AI technology will separate themselves from the pack as the technology continues to improve at an even greater clip towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

We owe it to all stakeholders across the pharma ecosystem to continue to push for adoption, but especially for patients. Finding new, better and faster ways to do what we do today can make a huge impact on how they receive important medications and care options. That’s something we must never lose sight of.

Sources

1. The Fall 2024 Workforce Index Shows Executives and Employees Investing in AI, but Uncertainty Holding Back Adoption. Slack. November 12, 2024. https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/the-fall-2024-workforce-index-shows-ai-hype-is-cooling?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
2. AI at Work 2024: Friend and Foe. BCG. June 26, 2024. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/ai-at-work-friend-foe
3. Generative AI in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Moving From Hype to Reality. McKinsey & Company. January 9, 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/generative-ai-in-the-pharmaceutical-industry-moving-from-hype-to-reality