Generative AI in the pharmaceutical industry

Moving from hype to reality
McKinsey Article | January 2024

Artificial Intelligence can offer pharma companies a once-in-a-century opportunity to transform their operations and innovation. The review is based on a survey of 63 generative AI use cases in life sciences, as well as interviews with industry experts and leaders.

Generative AI can create value for pharma companies by:

• Improving commercial affairs by generating personalized patient journeys and optimizing marketing and sales campaigns
• Accelerating drug discovery by generating novel drug candidates and reducing the time and cost of preclinical research
• Speeding up clinical development and approval by generating synthetic data and optimizing trial design and recruitment

Generative AI could generate $60 billion to $110 billion a year in economic value for the pharma and medical-product industries.
AI is not a silver bullet and faces several challenges, such as:

• Finding the right use cases that align with the business strategy and customer needs
• Building the required capabilities and talent to develop and deploy generative AI solutions
• Managing the ethical, regulatory, and quality risks associated with generative AI outputs
• Creating a culture of experimentation and collaboration across functions and teams

Benefits and opportunities of generative AI for pharma companies are best realized by moving from isolated pilots to organization-wide scaling.
​
Examples:

• A global pharma company that used generative AI to create personalized patient journeys and optimize its marketing campaigns
• A biotech company that used generative AI to generate novel drug candidates and reduce the time and cost of drug discovery
• A specialty pharma company that used generative AI to automate the generation of regulatory documents and reports

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/generative-ai-in-the-pharmaceutical-industry-moving-from-hype-to-reality

AI can provide a value of 18-30 $ billion for commercial alone. This can include AI assisted insights generation, advanced personalization and precise customer segmentation