No longer a far-off futuristic idea, artificial intelligence technology has seen its popularity skyrocket in recent years. Its usage continues to grow rapidly and exponentially: According to IBM’s most recent Global AI Adoption Index report, around 42% of large businesses are actively using AI, up from 35% just one year prior and 31% the year before that.
Amid all the AI hype, pharma marketers are taking a more cautious approach to implementing the technology. In interviews with Fierce Pharma Marketing at Fierce’s annual Digital Pharma East event in Philadelphia last week, marketing leaders from Bayer, Daiichi Sankyo and argenx discussed that slower integration of AI as well as the many opportunities for the technology in the realm of pharma marketing.
The cautious approach is par for the course for the industry. As Mariel Maling, director of healthcare provider marketing at argenx, noted, due to strict regulations and other tightly controlled factors, “pharma tends to be a little behind in the digital space.”
And even as adoption slowly ticks upward, companies are still trying to figure out where the technology would make the most sense and produce the most beneficial results.
“I’d say we’re kind of at the peak of this hype cycle, where everyone’s talking about [AI] and trying to figure out how to use it to unlock value,” said Brian Cantwell, vice president of digital strategy and product operations at Bayer. “What you get from that, though, is a lot of tech for tech’s sake, which is not the most impactful way to approach it if we want to really deliver value for the people we’re trying to deliver value for: the patients, the consumers, the healthcare professionals.”
Amid all of those ongoing attempts to pilot new uses of AI—including at Bayer—he said, “what I’m not seeing is a lot of practical examples of it delivering value yet.”
“What we’re seeing is dramatic efficiency improvements, but not with the accuracy or the quality that we would need to scale,” Cantwell continued. “But I’m confident that a year or two from now, that quality is going to continue to improve exponentially. We’re going to get to a place where the quality is where it needs to be, and then that exponential efficiency gain is going to be unlocked.”
Daiichi Sankyo is also in the process of researching and testing out various ways to add AI to its marketing efforts—though Kara Reheis, Daiichi’s VP of marketing, said the company’s current marketing strategy in that respect is still “evolving.”
“We’re starting to integrate more and more AI into our campaign evolution,” Reheis said. “With that, though, organizations need to shift. It changes your medical legal review process, so it is a huge undertaking. And we have to make sure that our patients are really ready for it. That’s our North Star with any technology—we want to be here for the patients.”
At the same time, that patient-centric focus includes following them to new media: “We want to grow with the patient—as patients take in and consume AI, we want to match that behavior as well,” she said.
As for those areas where AI seems to offer the most potential to pharma marketers, Reheis said Daiichi is exploring how AI could “allow us to create personalized campaigns and personalized provider emails and visuals” that reach individuals through a variety of media, rather than creating a standard set of campaign materials that go out to the entire audience.
Content marketing is another area rife for an AI overhaul. Every single step of the content creation process—from brief creation to creative design to medical, legal and regulatory affairs review to publication—“has an opportunity to be accelerated with a level of artificial intelligence,” according to Cantwell.
“Content is a huge opportunity, where we see the ability to probably cut time and cost in half with artificial intelligence, while ultimately responding to a customer insight that makes that content more impactful to a particular customer’s needs,” he said.
Elsewhere, Bayer is already using AI to aid in data analysis—though Cantwell clarified that it’s not the flashy new generative technology that’s currently dominating the AI conversation.
“We’ve been doing predictive modeling, we’ve been doing machine learning in the data and analytics space for many years now,” he said. “That’s a really powerful area where AI will continue to make our insights that much more powerful, that much more impactful, that much more real time in the way that we’re able to understand a customer’s needs and respond to them.”
Samarth Virk, director of nonpersonal promotion and healthcare provider marketing at argenx, also highlighted that analytics-focused, “less exciting version of AI,” which the company is already using to better leverage real-time engagement data.
“A lot of data is now available. You can buy it, or you gather it—whether it’s someone saw a rep, or someone did action X on a website, or whatever it is—a lot of that information is available, but actioning on it in real time, collecting it, consolidating it, is a place where we are starting to get into,” Virk said.
As Virk and Maling explained, analyzing that real-time behavioral data allows them to improve their market segmentation and then create customized content targeting the specific behaviors of each audience segment.
“The more we can continue to mobilize and use dynamic content, and work with our partners to find those solutions, we’ll get to a better experience for our customers,” Maling said. “The more we can learn about them, we’re going to create a better experience for them.”