STRATEGY
Natural Intelligence
True AI is a distant promise for marketers Despite all the current hype, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in its infancy in the commercial part of the pharma value chain. Its benefits are in the distance and, for the foreseeable future, available only to special cases where there is lots of freely available data to work with. And this focus on AI can blind us to the hugely valuable resource that almost all life science companies have at their fingertips, their Natural Intelligence. Natural Intelligence (NI) is the ability to take the information we already have and synthesise it to create compelling and commercially valuable market insight on which to build our strategy. Brian D Smith, Principal Advisor, Pragmedic
D
espite the hype, the routine use of AI in marketing in the life sciences is a long way away. Much of what is sold as AI is, in fact, just old-fashioned analytics that, whilst useful, is not novel. True AI is already making some contribution in areas such
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P H A RM A F O C U S A S I A
ISSUE 38 - 2020
as drug discovery, where it can be applied to large data sets. But in marketing, where the problems are sociological rather than technological, and data are often Superfluous comma hysteria around AI is more of a distraction than a benefit. In particular, the bubble around AI often
draws attention away from the value that can be added without big data, massive processing power or expensive consultants. For most marketers in pharma and medtech, there is a more practical approach. Millions of years of evolution have gifted life science marketers with
