James Turnbull

AI for Medical Affairs. Training, keynotes, and making stuff actually work.

I'm an AI trainer and speaker for pharma teams, CEO and co-founder of Camino, and co-founder of Adventures in Pharma. I help medical and marketing teams work out what they can use AI for, get confident with the tools, and start applying them to their own work. Much of what I teach comes from things we've built or tried ourselves, including the bits that didn't go quite as planned.

Talk to me

James Turnbull speaking on stage in a rust-coloured jacket

AI training and keynotes for pharma teams

Through Camino's Lúmina workshops, we help pharma teams explore what they could achieve with AI and get involved themselves. That might mean developing an idea for an agentic workflow, building a prototype or finding a new way to bring scientific content to life. We give people room to experiment together and see where their ideas could go, with practical guidance from the team building and using these tools at Camino.

I also give keynotes and live demonstrations for conferences and team meetings, sharing examples from Medical Affairs, medical communications and our own experiments. There's a lot to be excited about, and I want people to enjoy discovering what's possible as well as leave with ideas for their own work. Across 24 hands-on workshops, we've trained 384 pharma professionals and achieved a Net Promoter Score of 78.

More about training & speaking

James Turnbull and a fellow presenter leading a Lúmina AI workshop in front of an audience

The Camino team with illustrated Adventures in Pharma characters

Camino: new adventures in medcomms

We founded Camino in 2023 around the idea that scientific expertise, communications strategy and technology should come together from the beginning to do the best work for medical and marketing teams. We've built a team (the best in the industry!) that helps pharma companies communicate with healthcare professionals and patients through everything from scientific content and meetings to digital platforms and AI tools.

That includes Goldfish, which helps teams find and prioritise congress abstracts, and EVA, our AI assistant for rare disease specialists, which has won multiple gold awards. We also share what we've learned through Lúmina and Adventures in Pharma. In 2026, Camino won Small Consultancy of the Year at the Communiqué Awards, alongside recognition for our projects and individual team members. Those are the people who turn all these ideas into work we're proud of, and it's been fantastic to see them recognised.

Meet the team and see our work

Adventures in Pharma

I'm co-founder and co-host of Adventures in Pharma, our annual AI conference for pharma teams in London. We bring together people from pharma, healthcare and biotech to share how they're using AI, what they've achieved and what was harder than expected. Case studies and demonstrations sit alongside hands-on workshops, so there's time to try things and talk to the people doing the work.

The next event is 29 April 2027 in London, and you can find the report from our last adventure, along with plans for the next one, on the conference website.

Explore Adventures in Pharma

A full conference room watching a session at Adventures in Pharma

Attendees watching a presentation at Adventures in Pharma

From building websites to building with AI

I studied computer science and started my career building websites, from e-commerce sites that sold kilts to a social network for horses. Eventually I focused fully on digital healthcare, but I still like getting my hands on the technology myself. In fact, I've written more code with AI in the last few years than I had for a long time before that. It's given me back the ability to make my own little tools, try an idea and see whether it's worth taking further.

Some of those experiments become useful projects. Goldfish, our congress intelligence tool, started with a prototype I'd put together and is now well beyond me since we hired our software team. We're exploring agentic AI workflows and creative applications too, including experiences that let people become part of the world we've built for Adventures in Pharma. Seeing an idea turn into something people can use and enjoy is a big part of why I keep experimenting, and it's an excitement I bring to my training and talks.

James Turnbull speaking on stage at Adventures in Pharma

Before all this

At the University of Edinburgh, I studied computer science, managed the website for Fresh Air student radio and hosted a hip-hop show. A couple of years after graduating, my brother Alex and I started Google Sightseeing, a website about the weird and wonderful things you could find on Google Maps and Google Earth. We launched it in 2005, it became rather more popular than we'd expected, and by the following year we'd written a real book: Not in the Guide Book, published in the US as Off the Map.

That brought some unexpected media appearances and quite a lot of time looking at satellite photographs. It also gave us the experience of building something in our spare time that people around the world wanted to read and contribute to. There are more details about that, the radio and the various jobs along the way in the longer version.

The longer version

Things I've written

View all writing

Talk to me about your event or project

If you work in pharma and need a speaker or have a project in mind, get in touch. Tell me what you're planning and what you'd like to achieve, and we can take it from there.

Get in touch on LinkedIn