Bill Berry, general manager life sciences and healthcare at Constellation and former head of US general medicines business operations and transformation at Sanofi, said one eye-opening thing marketers can do right now is ask ChatGPT to describe your brand. Or better yet, just Google your brand. Either way, you’ll see an AI-generated summary, which, going forward, will be the first thing customers learn about you whether you like it or not.

“These platforms will develop a narrative for your brand if you don't,” Berry said. “So, be thinking about the fact that these [large language models] are actually a new audience for you. So, when you think about digital marketing, it's not just the individuals that will be your audience. What's going to be your strategy to make sure you're putting content in the right places in the right forums to shape what those particular narratives are?”

“Do not assume that in big pharma we know better than you,” he told the crowd. “You could be more agile, quick on your feet, incorporate new technologies, and think about better ways to reach the market, as opposed to the rigid way that big pharma has been doing things. You have less money, but sometimes less is much better because then you prioritise, then you choose your target more efficiently. You're not just shooting all over the place.”

Kigel believes that in five years AI will have transformed everything about how pharma does business, so the opportunity to apply it faster and to have that advantage is naturally limited.

“At the end of the day, specifically when you work in big pharma, those are companies with 100,000 employees,” he said. “It's a big ship to steer. There is a lot of politics, a lot of chain of command, a lot of processes. It's very different than working in a small biotech.”

Marty Kovach, global content strategist at Merck, told Future Pharma attendees to “beware of generative AI”.

“I am very sceptical when someone says to me, I'm going to skip modular content. I'm just going to go to generative AI,” he said. “At your own peril, because generative AI will never give you the consistency that your reviewers are going to need, and the content that you might get will be hallucinated. And are you going to train the generative AI LLM with your label? And if your label changes, guess what? You're going to start from scratch. So you have to be very careful and get really smart around generative AI, what the cost is, and what the effort is, and what you're going to get out of it.”

“I do think about the whole spectrum of innovation and, of course, it takes a village,” she said. “We think about vendor relationships, strategic partnerships, corporate venture capital, seed funding, and incubation as well. There's a wide variety of levers you can pull, and it really depends on what sort of impact you want to have. But our approach is a very multifaceted one.”

But how does big pharma select its innovation partners? On the same panel, Bristol Myers Squibb's head of digital and IT, Jalpa Dave, says they’re always making sure that new technology is in service of larger business goals.

“Right now, our targets, our consumers and our doctors are scattered all over the world, all over the web, and they are loyal to a couple of places, but they may go to multiple,” Heath Morlok, the associate director of integrated customer engagement in oncology at Merck, said. “And so we really have a hard time being everywhere at once. So, the solutions that really help us simplify things, help us be present in those multiple places. Where I think AI as a tool may help is to get us in just more quickly, condensing some of that information, some of that data, and being present.”

When it comes to patient services, AI is being used already in lots of ways, Louis Savant, director of patient access transformation strategies at Teva, said. It’s a speed play, but speed really matters.