I've always liked making things people use
I'm James Turnbull, CEO and co-founder of Camino, an AI trainer and speaker for pharma teams, and co-founder of Adventures in Pharma. I studied computer science and spent the first part of my career building websites, including e-commerce sites selling kilts and a social network for horses. These days most of my work is in medical communications, where I help teams work out what they can use AI for and build some of the tools to do it. There have been a few other adventures along the way, including a hip-hop show on student radio and a book about things you can see from space.
Computer science, and a bit of radio
I studied BSc (Hons) Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh from 1999 to 2003. Alongside the degree, I managed the website for Fresh Air, the university's student radio society, and hosted a hip-hop show. My work on Fresh Air's website was recognised twice for Best New Media at the Student Radio Awards. The radio gave me something to work on beyond the coursework, with a website to build and an audience to think about. Both interests have stayed with me through the various projects I've worked on since then.
Building for the web
After graduating, I worked on e-commerce and other websites in Edinburgh, first at Scotweb and then at LEWIS Creative Consultants. I was writing code, working with databases and building the features that helped people use the sites. When I started out, one person could build a website and ship it; as the work became more complicated, we needed teams with different skills to do it properly. That's part of why I've enjoyed working with AI so much recently: I can put together a small tool for myself again, while still knowing how much else is involved in making a system other people can rely on.
Google Sightseeing
In April 2005 my brother Alex and I launched Google Sightseeing, after Google Maps opened up a new way to look at the world. We started sharing the places and oddities we were finding in the satellite imagery, and readers sent in plenty more. The site grew into a collection of unusual landscapes, enormous structures, strange shadows and things you'd probably never notice from the ground, with contributors and readers around the world.
It became rather more popular than we'd expected. The site and its founders were featured by the BBC, The Guardian, Wired and many others, and in 2006 we'd written a real book: Not in the Guide Book: The Wackiest Sights on Google Earth. The same book came out in the US as Off the Map: The Most Amazing Sights on Earth as Seen by Satellite.
Digital healthcare and omnichannel
I joined the founding team at Incuna in 2007, building and leading a team of developers creating digital healthcare tools for pharmaceutical companies. In 2016 I moved to OPEN Health, where my roles grew from Digital Technical Director through to Global Head of Omnichannel Communications. We built websites, platforms and interactive experiences, and increasingly looked at how all that work connected to the other ways a company communicated with its audiences.
As someone who built websites, I would have quite liked the answer to every communications problem to be a better website. Of course, sometimes a rep visit is what someone needs, or a meeting, or an email at the right moment. The interesting work was understanding how those experiences fitted together and what would make them useful for the person receiving them. That's what drew me towards omnichannel, and eventually towards starting an agency where that thinking was part of the work from the beginning.
Starting Camino
Jess Blackwell and I founded Camino in January 2023 around the idea that scientific expertise, communications strategy and technology should come together from the start to do the best work for medical and marketing teams. We described it as an omnichannel-native agency because we wanted to think about the audience's whole experience. In practice, that meant asking whether our work was relevant, how it connected to everything else the audience would see, and how we'd measure whether it helped. It applied to a single email as much as to a large programme.
We've built a team around that idea (the best in the industry!), helping pharma companies communicate with healthcare professionals and patients through scientific content, meetings, digital platforms and AI tools. Goldfish started with a prototype I made and became a much more capable congress intelligence tool through the work of our software and scientific teams. EVA, our AI assistant for rare disease specialists, has won multiple gold awards. Alongside the projects, we're still hiring expert humans, winning new work and sharing what we've learned through Lúmina and Adventures in Pharma. The time saved gives us room to take on more of the interesting problems.
Sharing what we're learning
Alongside running Camino, I teach AI, speak at industry events and write about what we're finding useful. At one of our workshops, someone asked why I was teaching their team to use AI when I ran an agency: wasn't I showing them how to replace us? It was a fair question, but I think it helps explain our approach. When a task takes less time, we can be open about that and talk about what else we could do with the budget, including work that might not have been possible before. Sharing that knowledge helps us have a much better conversation with the teams we work with.
We do that through Lúmina and Adventures in Pharma, which gives us a whole day to bring people together and hear how they're getting on with AI. I'm also part of the faculty for CELforPharma's AI for Medical Affairs course and a member of the PM Society's Digital Interest Group committee. Across all of it, I want to share enough of the work and the decisions behind it that someone else can learn from our experience, including the experiments that took far too long to save anyone five minutes.
More about training & speaking
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.
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