Faruk Capan:

I think it's even bigger than a revolution. It was initially, as we all jumped into building agents and doing certain tasks faster. And better. But actually, the vision is much bigger than that.

AI actually helps us to change how we work, how we actually build new workflows, and make it not just cheaper and faster, but better for our patients and doctors as well, too.

So, I'm very happy that we're on the right track and, actually, we've proven to our clients that what we are building for them so far is really working.

In the lab, things work really well, but in real life, it's very different. The biggest lesson that I learned is technology is not the problem. AI is going faster, developing, getting better every day. But the human factor, we should never forget.

That was the biggest challenge – the adoption to the speed of these changes, the new workflows – it was tough for our clients, as well as our own employees. We need to communicate and educate them really well, and it takes time – the cultural shift of doing things differently to 20 years of doing things the same way. It's very tough for people to change.

We can build the best tool, best platform ever, but if you don't educate, you don't communicate with your employees and your clients properly, it won't succeed because it's a major shift in their mindset.

All of us are scared at certain points, right, about our jobs – our future. But I promise you what we learned, and I tell our employees too, is that this is not about cost reduction. We are just changing, adapting to a new world. And we are all going to be fine as long as we are open to changing ourselves.

We were so worried about whether somebody would see it, see our screens and how we built the interface. Would they be able to easily reverse engineer it? And then we did a big announcement with Google where we had really limited time to showcase.

It was nerve-wracking because live demos sometimes goes wrong. Even Apple, even Tesla, when they do live demos, things don’t always go to plan. We were so worried about that, but we said to our teams, “We're going to do this live. It's not going to be a screenshot. It's not just going to be a PowerPoint presentation”. So, it was very scary, but it was also very exhilarating. I'm very proud that actually it helps us be a better team, better group actually, not just a better product.

I'm kind of like Iron Man. You can call me a hero or a villain, right? Let me tell you the hero part. Twenty five years ago, I built an agency from scratch, and it turned into 1,500 people. And today, I feel like I'm the villain, the bad side of the Iron Man, because I literally feel like I’m killing the whole model.

Basically, we are going from a typical agency to almost a new model that replaces the agency. I feel bad about it, but to be honest, it's exhilarating to see that there is also a lot of pushback. Oh, this will never work. You can never replace human. We never said, "We're going to replace you". I keep saying to people, it's just going to change your job, what you do today. You don't have to write the first draft. You don't have to create the first image.

We can actually assist you. We can do things faster.

So, I also love amazing those naysayers slowly becoming part of our adopters and becoming our spokespeople. It's been a lot of learning.

As I said, the human part, to me, is the most difficult part throughout the whole process.

So, 80% AI, 20% people doesn't mean that 80% of the people are going to lose their jobs and 20% will stay. That was not what we meant to say.

Rather, 80% of the work is done by AI, but I also feel like the 20% of the human part is very hard because you are making decisions. You need to make faster decisions in our system now. If I give you a draft of a document, you need to be faster to decide, too. You cannot take a few days off and come back to say, “Oh, okay, I'm going to make one change.” So, the responsibility of the human increases alongside AI adoption.

We increase the value of their intelligence. I'll give an example. You don't have to make a photocopy of a submission to a client or in PDF and make screenshots. The AI does most of the work for you. You just need to be there to give advice and say, “Does this make sense as a human? Does it really help the client?” Now, we're going to take this to client and talk them through the document. We just reduced a lot of labour that doesn't have to happen in modern life.

We work for the pharmaceutical industry, right? You cannot hallucinate, you cannot make numbers up. If you do that once, they're not going to ever try to use your platform again.

So, when we built our platform, we made sure that it had restrictions: “This is the data that you are allowed to use. This is the content that you need to create”. We also put in a lot of basic transparency, so the human can look at it and say, “What did agent use? What did they look at? What data? What other agents did they use to be able to get to this information or this outcome?”.

So we added all this information for the user, so they don't have to just read a document and approve. They can also ask, “What are the bibliography references? What are all those details? Where did they come from? Which scientific document did you guys look at to do it.” And I'm proud to say, actually, this is the future, and not just for marketing.

I think even the term 'agency' might not be relevant in the future. It was initially about AI use saving time. It was very sexy. But AI is almost like building a new way of commercialisation.

It's no longer silos of people. Now, we are building enterprise memory in a sense that the enterprise learns, like we do. It's very different than an agency. I almost think that agencies, in their current form, won't exist in a few years.

But truly, the job of an agency, the job of a pharma company, is changing; the way we can access the data, the way we use AI, our job. So, from a simple AI agency model, now we are going to full commercialisation automation, full commercial thinking.

I'm super excited because this AI is just becoming a vehicle for us rather than the showcase. AI is just a vehicle for us to get to a bigger vision: how we can help patients faster.

It materialised because clients are keeping us to our word.

But what I think is more exciting is that, once people get those savings and see the speed themselves, there is a bigger value than just that outcome, like how we can use this to create better commercial messaging to our patients. Helping patients, faster, means better sales, better numbers, better outcomes overall.

When they see this, the conversation moves beyond cost savings of 20%, 30% – that's a given, that's not a problem for us – to how can we actually help you guys operate better.

I was shocked. I've been through the internet wave, mobile wave, social wave, and pharma, as you all know, is very conservative, and rightfully so, because we just cannot be on the cutting edge.

In this AI movement though, there was amazing response or demand of ,“Can you show us more? Can we see it? Can we have a meeting? Can we find out more?”, which doesn't happen in real life.

People have their own vendors, their partners, their technology limits because AI raises questions – a lot of questions – around security, safety, and reliability.

In three, four months, we had around 300 meetings with new clients. So, on that side, yes, that was amazing.

There's also a small group of people who are still naysayers, but it's very normal. There are adopters, there are laggers, and there are naysayers. But, overall, it's amazing that 80% of existing clients and new clients are super excited to find out more.

We don't recommend that you go and build fake human beings or images and use them to talk to patients.

But, say you have a key opinion leader expert – we can record them once and with their approval, we can create different versions in different languages, and with their 100% likeness and approval. It's all copyrighted, everything is correctly done. That's what we do.

We try to walk the walk and talk the talk. What we tell our clients is, try us. Don't look at our presentation, or look at our demo. Let's do a hackathon. Compare apples to apples, bring other partners or competition, give us that assignment and let's see who's going to come up with the real regulatory approval content or strategy.

I love the hackathons now because when you do a pitch, in 60 minutes you can show a controlled presentation and you can win a business. But in our case we want to walk the walk. We tell clients, do a hackathon, don't do a pitch, so that we can prove it to you. That's how we answer those trustworthiness and reliability issues.

I believe in one thing: leaders are only as good as their peers, as they are also their subordinates. The team that I have is a dream team, and what they can create with AI is just mind-boggling.

Even over time, the quality gets better. I have felt like what we built is really going to change the industry. Of course, some people are going to, as I said, worry about their jobs. My promise to every single our employees is, if you allow us to train you, educate you, come be part of the solution, nobody has to worry about their jobs.

I am not hurting the humanity, I hope. And I think we are helping actually our industry.

I think what we are building with our commercialisation, the connected commercialisation, we're going to see in real life.

It's about AI and humans together. We call it a mind plus machine. So I would love to show you the results to say, oh, look at what happened to this company, why they skyrocketed like this, look at the success of the stories, the patient stories, physician stories. I think we're going to see in the real life that AI was a catalyst.

Now we're going to see outcome of those projects at full commercialisation and how we're able to make decisions better, how we are able to actually react to situations better than ever, how we do scenario planning and going beyond creating images and videos to amazing strategic thinking, medical documents that going to show us what happened next.

I don't work on the R&D, but I know that R&D side is going to be a whole explosion. It's coming from the side. But I would love next week, next year, to sit with you and show you how far and how many companies are using us, how many great stories as we come up there.