Things I've written, and things we've learned

I've used AI daily for myself, the team and our clients, and it's brought me back to building small tools in a way I hadn't done for years. Taking those tools into reliable client use is a bigger job, and some of the things I automate take quite a while to earn back the time I've spent on them. This is my account of what's changed, including an agent's lengthy attempt to tackle a five-minute train refund form.

We've been asking pharma workshop participants about their understanding of AI, confidence using it and how often they use it at work. Usage has been going up, but confidence hasn't kept pace. I look at that gap, the changes we see after a practical session, and why giving people space to experiment with work they recognise can help them get more from the tools they already have.

Our AI photobooth started with an iPad, some astronaut pictures and a printer that jammed every twentieth print. By Adventures in Pharma, we were trying to bring attendees into a world created by an illustrator, which turned out to take rather more work than supplying a clever prompt. I wrote about the experiments, the models we tried and the human attention needed to make it an experience people enjoyed, including fixing the images when AI kept changing someone's hairstyle.

Alex Legg and I look at the gap between what AI is being sold as and what many pharma professionals are using it for. There are plenty of worthwhile applications in the everyday tasks that take up a team's time and energy. We explore how to choose one of those tasks, test an approach and put sensible boundaries around it, so the team gets more time for the work that needs their expertise.

After a year of early projects and pilots, we shared examples of how generative AI was being used in Medical Affairs and what other teams could learn from them. The article considers opportunities through efficiency, value and innovation, giving people a way to think about what a proposed project could achieve and where to start. I wrote it with Natasha Hansjee, Emma Vitalini and Jess, whose original byline was Jessica Ingram.

One of the first iPad detail aids I built consisted of 30 hand-coded web pages and a small database, and the iPad could barely cope with it. The technology has moved on considerably, but the challenge of connecting the different parts of HCP engagement has stayed with us. I explain how that experience shaped our thinking about omnichannel and why we built Camino around relevance, connectivity and measurement.