The power of AI lies in its ability to find patterns in data. In the era of COVID-19, the copious amounts of data around symptoms, diagnostics, fatality rates, and more offered more data around an illness than ever before, ultimately allowing a vaccine to be generated in record time. Listen as IT expert Stuart McGuigan talks about how far AI has come and the true impact it had in helping make a world beyond the pandemic seem possible.

Key Takeaways:

[2:28] Stuart discusses how AI is impacting work and changing industries right now, and how it has been more of a continuous evolution than people may think. He uses an example of a cat identification project to show that in order to have a model, we must have data.

[5:00] Stuart has applied AI in research and development at companies like Johnson & Johnson and discusses what considerations are relevant when pharmaceutical companies adopt this type of technology. A pharmaceutical business or medical device might consider AI to shorten the time that it takes to get their breakthrough product to market. They would continue with their clinical trials and efficacy protocols, but getting the product to market safely in a quicker way adds value to customers, shareholders, and society.

[7:10] It’s important not just to show that a product is efficacious, but that it has a health economic benefit wherever it is launched. This is where clinical data becomes important, and AI can help to bring life-saving innovations to the market quicker.

[10:00] Many people are worried about bringing AI into health care, the pandemic is a very unfortunate yet perfect case study for how we can use machine learning to learn and process information quickly.

[13:37] Even smaller companies are able to take advantage of AI, but we usually find that AI is supporting them in decisions behind the scenes rather than making brand new flashy decisions.

[14:20] No one should ever feel they are moving fast enough, says Stuart, but are you doing things in the right order? If you “peanut butter” your resources, you are spreading things too thin and not using your resources appropriately.

[17:23] Yes, you need accurate and representative data, but there are also important organizational characteristics if you want to make the best of the technology at your disposal. For example, companies have to experiment, but they must have a culture of evidence-based decision-making where they have the courage to pivot and change course if they need to. Second, they must know why customers buy their products, and maybe even more importantly, why they don’t.

[19:35] You still need human intelligence to determine a gap in the market, as AI doesn’t know human pain points or what they may feel like. We’re counting on humans to use their intelligence and take advantage of it, and the way AI can help us process data and implement that judgement is a nice marriage.

[22:18] Stuart sees AI automating the least interesting things we do that are repetitive which can make our jobs overall more exciting and free us up to do even bigger picture things. More often, fear is born from not understanding how powerful but actually how narrow machine learning is. It’s more like a laser than a spotlight, but we need our human intelligence to know how to properly focus that light. The net effect of AI is enormous, but most applications of AI are behind the scenes, rather than attention-grabbing.

Quotes:

• “If you don’t have the data, you don’t have the model.” - Stuart
• “It’s important not just to show that a product is efficacious, but that it has a health economic benefit wherever it’s launched.” - Stuart
• “These things bring in many cases, life-saving innovation to the market faster, and that’s where the excitement is.” - Stuart
• “AI isn’t at all like what we see in the movies. Data, machine learning, analytics, that is the stuff of real AI innovation.” - Jo
• “The secret to effective AI is having great data. You need it to be voluminous, accurate and representative.” - Jeanne
• “If machine learning is the laser Stuart tells us it is, imagine what else we can do if we just know how to aim it.” - Jeanne
• “In my mind, AI is one of the most exciting technologies there is. Who hasn’t longed for their own R2D2? It’s hard not to have huge expectations for what AI may do for business and society in the future.” - Jeanne

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Mentioned:

Stuart McGuigan