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The “Exoskeleton”
I like to think of AI transformation as three horizons: the “exoskeleton,” the “airplane,” and the “spaceship.” The “exoskeleton” is taking something that a human already does and helping them do it maybe faster and with less work. So, for example, there is increasing use of the “exoskeleton” across every industry, including biopharma. You can think of it as process improvement. So for example, you know, people are combing through patient records for patients that comply with recruitment criteria for the clinical trial and I used to have a bunch of, like, nurses looking at those medical records and identifying the ones that are likely to pass your recruitment criteria. And now we have an LLM that’s doing that and is doing it faster and better and more reliably. And that’s awesome because it shaves the amount of time that’s required to recruit the trial from, you know, whatever, eight months to two months.
As leaders think about this technology, obviously, the first thing you should be thinking about is the broad deployment of the exoskeleton. How do you give everybody in your organization the exoskeleton to make your organization better? And that adoption is not going to, by and large, happen organically. One needs to train people, identify use cases, have people who are early adopters spread the word internally. All of that requires change management, which is not something that just, like, happens magically on its own.
The “Airplane”
The next level, which I would say is the “airplane,” is doing something that only very few people could do before, like travel from one continent to the other. And, sure, was it possible to do that before there were airplanes? Yeah. But it was really rarely done and very difficult. And that, for example, is something that has seen increasing adoption in molecular design, where the machine can sometimes identify molecules that a chemist wouldn’t have normally looked at. Would some chemists have gotten there? Perhaps. But it would have been a long and laborious journey, and sometimes the machine can see those molecules for the first time, in some sense. Your role as a leader is to figure out what are the places where your organization truly benefit from an “airplane,” where the AI can truly shift how we do things in a dramatic way that could be transformative to the business.
Empower leaders elsewhere in the organization that — because they are closer to the actual work — they can come up with, “Oh, wow — we have this process that we use on our factory floor or this logistics process that right now is kind of inefficient and annoying. And if we could only do it so much better, it might be really significant to our business.” In those cases, I think one needs to act thoughtfully, but decisively and sometimes might even say aggressively, in the sense that you might need to tear out part of what you are already doing. Might require restructuring an entire unit of your business to operate in a completely different way potentially with different people. And I think that’s a critical realization and requires courage.
The “Spaceship”
Then the “spaceship” is doing something that was simply not ever done before. The real transformation to my mind is when we are able to take diseases that have not previously had any meaningful treatment and do something for those patients for the very first time. And I think the work — I’m hopeful that the work that we’re doing in ALS, for example — is an example of that. ALS is a devastating disease where there are, I think, three or four approved therapies that extend lifespan by maybe a couple of months. And we believe that by the use of AI tools that we’re able to see things, in this case, in cellular data from ALS genetics and non-ALS genetics, we were able to see subtle patterns that people hadn’t seen and identify intervention points that were entirely new, that we were able to kind of create something that didn’t exist before.
I don’t know entirely what the “rocket ship” will be for a lot of industries in the same way that in the early days of electricity, nobody really foresaw computers as being the thing that was going to happen. And so the more people you have who can understand the potential of technology and identify opportunities for deployment, the better off you are. And then give them license to reinvent. The “rocketship” is probably where we’re getting to entrepreneurship land. And, of course, it can be intrapreneurship as well, but where you’re really getting to, “no one has ever thought of doing this before.” What are some of those truly transformative opportunities? And those are ones that when you have one of those, like, an “Oh my god!” moment.