Drugmakers are down with AI, experts agree. They're just not sure what to use it for

Pharma’s plenty enthusiastic when it comes to artificial intelligence. The thing is, companies aren’t exactly sure yet how they should be using it.That was the prevailing opinion at a recent roundtable in the AI hotbed of Montreal, Canada, where the Government of Quebec which recently rolled out an ambitious plan to become a top-5 sector hub in North America by 2027 assembled pros from across the field to discuss the state of AI today.“We get requests from pharma companies who say, ‘OK, AI is so hot in Montreal. We should be coming to Montreal to do what?’ They don’t really know. They don’t really have a strategy trying to figure out what they could do with it,” said Frank Béraud, CEO of Montréal InVivo, an economic organization that fosters growth of life sciences companies. Sarah Jenna, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of bioinformatics AI company MIMs, agreed that “there is currently huge excitement” around AI, but there’s “a lot of education to do” around what’s feasible to do with it.