McKinsey and Co’s Top 8 Priorities of CEOs in 2024 released in December 2023 names GenAI and outcompeting with technology as two of the priority areas. They identify the greatest added value for GenAI and technology for customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development, amounting to several $ trillion in value that could be unleashed. Through applications to research and development, the benefits from implementing AI can furthermore lead to step-wise changes in company growth beyond these estimates.
However, the report also highlights that realising the potential of transformative technologies including GenAI across pharmaceutical and medical product development requires overcoming three critical challenges, namely:
human expert-guided quality control, traceability and verifiability of results, and data confidentiality.
GenAI alone is not the solution, but a valuable tool with the proper implementation for the proper questions with human-guided validation.
Our experience working with confidential, complex medical data corroborates the importance of managing these challenges effectively. We know how critical robust data confidentiality protocols are, not only for data protection, but also for auditability of the data and results. The proper techniques ensure that the data pathway is always traceable, yet protected, and there can be no broken links.
Getting the right answer for the right reason is particularly necessary in the health and life sciences. We quality-control each workflow with human domain expertise to ensure the data integrity and verify results. Doing so has shown us how documentation errors in the raw data can otherwise cause considerable impacts on results, which subsequently can be difficult to distinguish from true outcomes. Likewise, inherent biases and errors in data are learned by algorithms and influence predictions unless an expert human eye intervenes. Therefore, our human-implemented quality controls and validation are a mainstay of our solutions to ensure traceability and integrity of data and results.
The stakes are high in health-related decision making: it can mean the difference between life and death. Similarly, in today’s increasingly competitive economy, effective use of data and implementation of data-driven insights can be make or break and mean the difference between massive AI-generated value versus misapplied technology.