Content generation: The low-hanging fruit

Medical affairs teams spend a lot of their time generating different kinds of content, including regulatory writing, educational materials, and conference presentations. Although this content certainly needs to be reviewed by humans for accuracy, AI can be, and in many cases already is being, used to speed up the process of content generation.

“If someone today is a medical writer at Pfizer and they're drafting peer-reviewed publications for Pfizer's phase 3 clinical trials, the drafting of that publication is a total waste of time,” Katz said. “AI could draft that publication quicker, faster, better, and the person should be a reviewer instead of an author, basically. Their function changes. That's a good example. Another example is someone that's creating a poster for ASCO. Why are you formatting this thing? AI can create a much prettier poster in 10 seconds than you can ever create, and you should edit it instead of author it.”

MSLs themselves also need to generate a lot of content to do their work connecting with HCPs.

“Generating content is a large part of what we do,” said Malloy. “Patient lay summaries, manuscripts, you name it. We are trying to augment their capability to do exactly what they've been doing for years.”

Administrative support: A huge opportunity

Stewart mentioned that her early career as an MSL involved a lot of spreadsheets and detective work. But increasingly, that work can be done by AI systems. 

“It's cut the administrative work down significantly, and we're able to do things much faster and be more agile with that work,” Stewart said. “I mean, of course, what I'm finding is there's always a need to validate the information that's given to us when it's generated through an AI model, but it's such a time saver. We're able to get way more done with fewer people on the team than we were when I first started.”

But administrative support goes beyond insights generation. AI can also help MSLs manage their schedules and responsibilities more efficiently.

H1’s whole business is built around creating a database that makes it easier for MSLs to find out everything they need to know about healthcare providers, from their areas of expertise to what conferences they’re planning to attend. Now they are building AI agents that sit on top of that database.

“For BioMarin, we created a digital MSL who basically every day monitors the latest HCP's information, recommends what you should do with that HCP, it predicts what that HCP will do,” Katz said. “It can then automate all your emails that you want to send them, do follow-up meetings, monitor the latest scientific literature. You can have it draft or automatically send the emails. It just reduces everything that an MSL needs to do. It sits on top of an MSL. Each MSL is paired with a digital MSL, and boom, that's what they do for you.”

Training: Improving MSL soft skills

While information management is a huge part of an MSL’s job, equally important are the soft skills of connecting to healthcare providers, gaining their trust, and building a rapport. This is the part of the job where the human element is the most important. But AI can still be helpful.

“Because they are so well-versed and they do that constant upkeep and research into their field, MSLs have an understanding of the science that's really very solid,” Malloy said. “But it's in that relationship management, conversational skill building that we noticed a real gap. That's where the MSL Interact tool really comes into play. It's filling that gap, that need for MSLs to feel confident.”

MSL Interact is a training platform developed by Inizio that leverages the ability of large language models to take on different personas as they interact with users.

“What we're doing is taking generative AI, training it, giving it a persona, ingesting information that is both publicly available and that is client-specific. We're targeting different therapeutic areas. We're engaging clients. They're giving us their specific information,” Malloy explained. “We're able to create this HCP persona that maps to different types of doctors or healthcare providers that these MSLs may be meeting in the field. Then the MSLs can come into the tool and actually have a practice conversation.