The race to explore and harness GenAI in healthcare

Like the switch from silent movies to talkies, from black and white to colour TV, low resolution to high definition, AI has graduated from being a procurer of efficiencies to seemingly an enabler of unimagined possibilities.

The race to harness and exploit generative AI (GenAI) in healthcare is at a feverish state, with agencies and pharmaceutical companies building platforms and creative departments plundering dictionaries for fancy brand names.

It’s been progressing through ever-advancing digital tools and capabilities over the last decade, but now it appears to have reached an inflexion point where the natural hesitancy at the heart of healthcare has been jettisoned.

The market for GenAI is expected to rise from $1.1bn to £17.2bn by 2032 as it ignites an iris-popping firework display of insights, pathways and engagements across a spectrum engulfing HCPs, patients, pharma field forces, industry strategists and public policy.

Expect to see the word ‘pivot’ a lot more in company literature, but now it is justified rather than a cover-up for the mundane. The global agency Havas is investing €400m over four years for its new AI product suite, pledging to become an ‘AI-driven organisation fuelled by human ingenuity’. It is a proper pivot.

CEO and Chairman Yannick Bollore framed the landmark development recently by saying: “We are now moving beyond creating efficiencies to exploring entirely new frontiers.”

Dimitri Challouma, Digital Creative Director at Havas Life, observes: “If you go back two years, even just 12 months ago, everyone had concerns and GenAI’s potential was an elephant in the room with worries about privacy and how the large language models (LLMs) could be trained. But that view has definitely shifted and we are finding that clients are now building their own platforms that can be trained on in-house data.

“The core benefits are still the efficiencies from using GenAI and its ability to research and produce content and images in days rather than weeks, releasing time for us to be creative and work on strategy.

“We have massively embraced it at Havas and it really feels like GenAI is offering transformative possibilities in terms of our scope for creativity and how we reach HCPs and patients. When ChatGPT was released, it forced an honest moment of reflection about the future of creative roles. But the human element is still the most important factor and it really means that I have more tools at my disposal as a creative director. AI allows us to operate much faster and free ourselves from mundane tasks, but it doesn’t give you the creativity and ingenuity – that comes from human input.”

GenAI has already been deployed widely in R&D and in healthcare settings such as cancer screening, surgery and medical education and it is an established desktop diagnostic tool for doctors. Its reach into healthcare is becoming more comprehensive, with most organisations using some form of AI and actively looking at expanding its digital footprint.

It is a fast-paced market but also a crowded one, with new applications and platforms bumping into each other in the quest for advantages. Dimitri adds: “It is advancing with something new every day, so it is important to identify the right tools that work for you as an agency or a pharma organisation. It is difficult to keep track when it seems that as soon as one tool lands, another one arrives promising more.

“We have developed proprietary tools such as one that amalgamates the top LLMs in one place securely. It doesn’t replace what is done by our people – it enhances what they can do and accelerates processes. It amplifies what we can achieve.”

He cautions that an education uplift is needed across healthcare to ensure that people, at different stages and levels of contact with digital, can engage with its capabilities, and limits, and not see it simply as an ‘AI button’ that is activated to save time and budget.

“Alongside the release of our proprietary tools, we embed training into our people development programmes to ensure that not only are the tools available, but that our people understand how and when to use them most appropriately. This is a necessary part of the evolution of GenAI,” he adds.

“AI doesn’t get it right all the time and is not always the answer; it certainly cannot be creative in a human way so we have to remain cautious and careful how we use it. Any project that has an AI input always has a human element and that will not change. Human ingenuity and human touch remain fundamental to everything we do.”

Andrew Hastie, Chief Technology Officer at 11-London, the creative healthcare agency that has a 50-50 split of clients from pharma and patient groups, agrees on the need to be critical on which tools to deploy. He comments: “The speed of AI capability development is impressive, but there is an important job of understanding which ones are the good tools, which ones are giving the most depth and value to what we’re doing, and trying to work out how to collect and connect those different tools together.

“We can build tools that we need for a particular project or ones that we can generally use across the whole business, so we are using AI like an agentic Lego, plugging different things together to build bespoke systems that deliver what we and our clients need.”

11-London is revelling in the amount of time and mind space AI is liberating. A recent project required the assimilation of 800 pages of content that would have been creative quicksand but for a tool that researched, collated the relevant data and served it up in a fraction of the time.

“No-one could have held that much knowledge in their head. But now you can create mini experts, such as in prostate cancer or other conditions, and have a conversation with them to glean the information and insights you need,”
adds Andrew.

11-London is also finessing GenAI capabilities with its launch of 11 Minds, enabling virtual ad boards where personas, built to meet bespoke criteria, can respond to questions and challenges to generate insights and responses across information and creative concepts.

“Trust is at the centre of conversations we’re having with clients in the healthcare space, which is why we do a lot of internal validation to know that we can trust these AI insights. A lot of time is spent ensuring that these personas do not hallucinate. We invest time and resource to programming our LLMs to make them transparent,” says Andrew. “These validations, guard rails and testing are essential to give credibility and legitimacy.

“The human element is still critical and there is a backlash when something looks clearly artificial and obviously AI with no humans involved.

“We find GenAI also enables us to look at patterns of behaviour and wade through data so we can use our creativity in a targeted way. This provides huge benefits across all areas and particularly in rare diseases, where we can create patient personas and get a voice heard across a wider audience, raise awareness and improve patient outcomes.

“If we bake in the validation, the testing and the human aspect, as we do, we can really go places.”

Veeva Systems, a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry, is investing heavily in GenAI to help deliver business value to its healthcare and pharma-wide clients, with Senior Vice President Andy Han heading up a new, dedicated, fast-growing division to maximise its impact.

“GenAI is fundamentally changing the way healthcare works at the highest level and how we help our clients meet their goals. It’s having impact across the entire chain,” says Florian Schnappauf, Veeva Systems Vice President of Commercial Strategy Europe for Veeva AI in Europe. “We want to enable AI to take on the busy work so that humans in that chain can focus on the relationship element, which is so important,” he says.

“Agentic AI integrated into daily field workflows with secure access to company data helps field reps surface intelligence and capture insights faster than ever so that they can focus more on those important personal, relationship-driven elements.
“Veeva AI is the single biggest initiative and investment we have launched as a company and we are gearing our solutions for customers with AI working hand-in-hand with humans to generate exciting and effective content.”

Florian believes GenAI can enhance the scientific and medical conversations between HCPs and pharma field forces by empowering understanding and encouraging a smooth flow of data, information and insights. He comments: “We’re raising the bar of what these conversations can produce in terms of value for the doctor and the patient. We are integrating AI into our systems and workflows so that our customers can use it naturally and help better decision-making among HCPs and the pharmaceutical industry to the ultimate benefit of patients.

“There is now an openness to AI among HCPs, with doctors incorporating technology into their work. It is our job to make sure they get the best possible information and context.”

Veeva Systems recently launched a long-term partnership with the clinical decision support platform OpenEvidence to create a new AI platform, Open Vista, to supercharge a range of healthcare imperatives from recognising unmet needs and drug discovery to better use of existing medicines and increasing patient access to clinical trials.

“Physicians can ask questions and the LLM derives answers from the scientific universe and Open Vista produces accurate replies. It is important to have a professional source of truth for the information doctors will act on. This will enable them to have more comprehensive scientific conversations with MSLs and other clinical specialists to exchange ideas and insights and understand better what treatments are available for patient populations and sub-populations.

“It is biggest single area of investment for us and we believe that, with safeguards and human input, it can only improve relationships and engagements, and elevate levels of care for patients.”

Abigail Stuart, who co-founded the agency Day One Strategy with Hannah Mann, believes AI’s potential is advancing at speed and early adopters are reaping rewards. “We are now seeing an acceleration and a compounding of knowledge, and it is no longer the territory of pilots and innovation projects,” she comments. “It is scaling enterprise solutions and projects to meet specific business goals and objectives.

“There is a divide over AI; it is speed or fatigue view, with some people not appreciating AI’s worth, but we are firmly in the speed box and can clearly see an acceleration of the value.

“AI is an opportunity, particularly as there are considerable market shifts, such as launches not achieving expectations since COVID and changes in HCP and physician behaviour, and you cannot necessarily engage with them in the same way.

“The clients we are working with are obviously on the optimistic side of AI, which is the right side to be as the future is bleak if you are pessimistic and do not seize the opportunities. Markets are volatile and highly competitive with multiple launches and doctors cannot keep pace, so how you use this AI revolution to meet your business challenges is critical.”

‘AI doesn’t get it right all the time and is not always the answer – it certainly cannot be creative in a human way’

Day One Strategy, an award-winning insight and strategy partner dedicated to healthcare, works across digital disciplines with a wide range of industry clients deploying strategy, data and innovation across all commercial phases of product journeys.

It uses GenAI to broaden its thought horizons and even created virtual entrepreneurs, based on global business titans, to inject radical idea streams. “The aim was to bring someone into the room to help us think more laterally so we trained the AI agents on famous entrepreneurs, which was useful and fun as part of a brainstorming operation,” adds Abigail. “We’ve also been talking to a big pharma client about deploying synthetic ad boards for them. They have huge indications with multiple launches and cannot reach the number of KoLs they need in the right time, so this offers an effective route forward. But we are not saying ad boards are broken, it just gives us more scope.

“One quote that sums up where we are is that AI is not a cure for thinking. It really stuck with me because it can be dangerous when people rely on AI and don’t engage their brains. Human thinking is still 100% involved in everything we do. We are not asking AI for the one truth, we are using it to stretch our thinking, to help us look at data through different perspectives, to ideate.

“We still have to challenge AI. Just because it sounds really impressive and comprehensive doesn’t mean it’s always right. AI is a tool. In terms of idea stretching, it can generate hundreds more scenarios than we would have been able to come up with in the time but it is the human being who has to work with the context, the knowledge of the market, knowledge of the brand and therapeutic category, and decide which set of those scenarios actually makes most sense and which ones are true. There is a lot of validation and a lot of checking.”

Abigail concludes: “We are very optimistic about the benefits AI can bring and believe that it will only enhance our critical thinking and capacity to help clients. But we have to proceed with caution as a sector and ensure we have good governance, ethical guidelines, accuracy and trust because we are dealing with people’s lives and cannot afford to get it wrong.”