We believe that AI’s most valuable applications lie in the wilds of the relatively unexplored middle ground. That’s not to say it has no transformative potential – but instead of replacing humans or performing miracles, it is removing the boring parts of work that is stealing our creative energy.

Say a major haematology conference drops 6,000 new abstracts. Traditionally, you’d have an ad hoc team of ten to read them all, identifying what’s relevant to your brands and therapeutic areas – necessary, but often inefficient and hard to get done on a sensible timeline. Now, we’ve applied AI to the grunt work, and it’s exceptional: digesting; categorising and summarising those abstracts with remarkable accuracy in seconds, rather than days.

The best part, though, isn’t just the substantial time savings for you and your team, but what happens with that freed-up brainpower. Those same medical experts can now focus on deeper analysis, strategic implications and creative applications of the findings – the work computers can’t do.

It’s like an adventure into your own day job: instead of hunting through your calendar for a free half-hour to capture some headspace, you’ve handed off the repetitive tasks to AI, leaving your brain and calendar free for things that actually demand and benefit from human creativity.

This is the unromantic reality where AI proves its worth in pharma – doing the dull stuff that drains your mental bandwidth. The best AI implementations aren’t replacing people – they’re enhancing what those people can accomplish.

So why isn’t everyone embracing these tools? The hesitation makes sense. Pharma professionals have legitimate concerns about compliance, data privacy and accuracy, which don’t disappear into the undergrowth as soon as leadership offers grand proclamations about AI transformation. Yet these fears can be mastered, and there are companies – like Jazz Pharmaceuticals – who are exploring the real freedoms AI can bring, with stellar results. But how are they doing it?

The companies succeeding with AI implementation aren’t stretching for billion-dollar moonshots. They’re giving teams permission to pilot these tools on manageable challenges, building expertise and confidence organically through quick wins rather than failing on a grand, over-ambitious expedition.

Our advice is to start with the boring stuff, rather than the flashy applications. Identify the repetitive, formulaic tasks stealing your team’s creative energy. Draft a brief plan to test AI solutions on one of these challenges. Then, set clear guard rails for appropriate use, considering what data can be processed and what systems are approved in your company. And finally, continue to experiment – thoughtfully – and learn continuously.

Then, maybe, we’ll see that $300bn technology can indeed transform pharma; not by replacing your job, but by freeing your teams for truly human explorations.

Alex Legg is one of 15 speakers at Adventures In Pharma on 1 July in London. Join him there to explore the ways AI is transforming our connections and communications across internal teams, HCPs and patients. Limited tickets remain at adventuresinpharma.com