Ep.26: The Future of Pharma: AI, CRM, and Sales - Unveiling Strategies for Success in 2024

Speaker A: AI is not going to replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don't use AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. That's correct.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Pharma Sales and Tech Podcast. Join Artem, Stefan, Ruslan and Chris as we explore the latest trends and developments in the pharmaceutical industry with a focus on sales and technology. From cutting edge innovations, uh, to practical tips and strategies. Our expert guests will provide valuable insights to help you stay ahead of the game, tune in to stay informed, inspired and connected with the world of pharma sales.

Speaker B: Hello ladies and gentlemen. So today it's me again, Stefan, still working for platforms, doing marketing and um, I have a wonderful guest here. Without, without a further ado, I would like to say that in fact Florano is the highest leader we've actually had on podcast. So I was all nervous when I met him. So right now I'm excited because we had a little bit of uh, our chit chat before the podcast and I see that he's a very visionary leader. So right now Floran is working as a sales svp, commercial excellence at Green Intel Group. And Florian, first of all, welcome to the podcast and can you do an intro? Like what do you do? What do you like doing at Green and Tao, uh, group and so on?

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks a lot for the invite and thanks a lot for the nice words as well. So I have uh, I joined Elemental five years ago and I'm in charge of commercial excellence across the globe. So that covers a certain number of topics that uh, goes from insights, analytics, market research, data science, artificial intelligence, to capability building to everything that will be operating the platforms in the organization.

Speaker B: Awesome. Awesome. Okay, so you know what, we really had a talk going about AI. Right. So you know, uh, um, since that talk went really well, let's start with a little bit of a bottom up approach. So we're speaking about what. Okay, let's take the bull by the horns. What AI features are you going to be looking into? Like a software, a CRM CLM that you're going to be. What, what do you need the most? Right. Would you be.

Speaker A: So maybe I will talk to you about the approach we've taken first.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Which is, you know, we didn't want to start from the tool. We, I, I really think, you know, if there's one thing we can learn m from what happened in the past with CRM digitalization and all that, that if you start from the tool, you're starting from the wrong end, you develop something. There are some guys who do a pilot, they get an award, and then they move and the solution dies. And it's never scaled up. So we took it from the other side. We said, okay, what are the opportunities we want to exploit? What are the challenges we have today that AI could help us save? And so we went from like one potential use cases, we boil that down to, let's say, 10, 15 practical use cases where we know this is within reach. We're not trying to create a terminator. This is within reach and it will have an impact on the company. If we deploy it at scale, then based on that, you know, some of them are clearly in the CRM, CLM space. Everything around legal, medical, regulatory approach, approval, process acceleration, everything around, you know, next best action and next best content for the customer. Everything around analytics improvement. Today you drown in dashboards. In my, In a former life, I was in AstraZeneca and I was in Japan. My first job there was let's look at dashboards that the sales team carries. They were carrying more than 1,000 dashboards. They had access to ones because everyone builds dashboard and no one ever retires any dashboard. So they could spend the whole week looking at dashboard from Monday to Friday and never see a customer, and they would not have exhausted their list of dashboards. So it's like, you know, we need to. But now, today, what we can do, you know, you can put a layer of AI on it and the AI will tell you what are the relevant data you need to, like, imagine if Pharma was designing a car today, the car dashboard would be zillions of Excel files with lines and curves and cells and, um, instead of having a green red light, drive, don't drive. And I think that's really the mindset by which we need to approach AI implementation.

Speaker B: Um, I agree. You know, one. One really practical case would be, for example, you have a dashboard and then based on the data you have, you could get insights from AI. Like, based on the data I see you have an increase this much percentage, you have a decreased much percentage, blah, blah, blah. Right? So that would be one real good use of dashboard. Because everyone on Farmer says, well, we're having power bi, we're having MySQL this and that, and we have thousands of dashboards. Okay, the question, the question at hand is not, do you have that information? How are you using that information? That's a different question. Because, uh, decision making, you need to bring that into decision making, right? Absolutely.

Speaker A: You need to integrate it in the work process of the people. But I would say in this, I think in this migration or this integration of AI in the commercial landscape. The toughest challenge will be the people and will not really be the technology. I mean the data is a challenge. Of course we've got ethics and guidelines and stuff like that. But changing the behavior of the people, making them trust the system is going to be the most complicated challenge to solve.

Speaker B: Correct? Yeah, that's, that's for sure. Um, just getting back to our conversation. So you mentioned about uh, the an AI for content approval. Uh, uh, and what other features would you see AI could take over? For example like where, where is used to be the pain in your company?

Speaker A: Well, we, so we have, we have many. So for instance, you know one a simple challenge but that really appropriate for AI in pharma. We do a lot of market research. A market research by definition is on a subset of customer with question. We are talking about unstructured data, right? It's, you know, we generate insights from that and it's text based, you know, M. On the other end we've got through for instance stuff like customer data platform or Viva CRM. We got very detailed information on our customers at ground level, what do they interact with, what they are interested with, you know, in and stuff like that. We never found a way, a smart way to reconcile the two. So the marketing teams use marketing Persona. Uh, this guy is a neurologist, he's 45, he's got a wife and two kids. He likes King, you know, whatever to define campaigns. But then when we land that on the real world there is a complete disconnect because we don't have that level of data and we cannot connect unstructured data uh, with the structured data. So there's a delusion in the chain and we end up you know, spreading the same message over everyone. Imagine an AI that can both tap in the structured data and the unstructured data and say, you know what the top Persona that you need to tap on is this type of customer because they have this need with this type of patient. And, and your message should be this one. You have your marketing strategy focused and centered on the customer and you have the execution plan directly into the system. You just have to push the button to launch the things on the customers. So that's just a different approach that AI enables.

Speaker B: Yeah, so that's basically, that's what I see omnichannel multi channel going. So you have all that information coming from sales. So you have the same, let's say they go to the same doctor, the same geographical regions all the time and you have all the info about like the behavior of those like you know, doctors, particular doctors, let's say ophthalmologists or whatever. Yeah. And then once you have all that information it just, you know, it goes into your CLM and then you have to send some manually messages. But what if like AI could help basically create personalized messages based on the patterns, how the presentations are reviewed, how sample management is handled for those particular doctors, what sort of questions do they give? If all of that could be like, you know, could be aligned altogether it would be such a great like multi thread sort of like AI insight based maybe marketing flow where you would basically would tell you okay, we've seen that based on this data, uh these sort of doctors tend to be more open to this brand message and then you basically as a head of commercial excellence and like marketing.

Speaker A: So the thing is we will always need, as far as we see, we will always need a uh, human supervision of anything that goes to customers. Like we cannot trigger dramatically things. What we think is we'll be able to have uh, the content. If a customer is proactively looking for something, the AI will help us sell that content, content to the customer in the right spot, on the right channel and they can consume it in the right format, the format that they want. But you know, for compliance reasons, for also respect of the customer reasons, we think we will always need the ultimate decision to be taken by a human. But the all the preparation was done by the AI. I know we don't have slides but you can maybe visualize the way we approach. The thing is we say we're going to put our people at the center, the employees, our employees at the center and then we're going to build around them m a layer of AI assistants, coaches, co pilots and others that's going to help them be more efficient, more impactful, more creative and all that. And we really try to approach that change from the human side. Absolutely. But when you look at just you know, the Microsoft Copilot functionality with the email where the tool is, you know, scanning your emails and checking, you know what, you sent a uh, mail to Stefan three weeks ago and it didn't answer to your question. Do you want to send a reminder on that question? This is brilliant. I mean you, the time you save, you don't have to follow up directly with the people, you just can follow up based on the recommendation of the system. So that could be huge productivity improvement. Yeah. So I've got a good story. So we know we are in, we are in Japan and Have uh, the best uh, proton pump, uh, inhibitor in the market. Who is leading the market. And we hear that a, uh, Japanese competitor is going to launch a product and that this product seems quite similar to our product. But given that it's going to be a uh, Japanese company, the likelihood it gets adopted, highly important. What we did was to see and to understand, okay, what were the main concerns of the physicians and their patients when they were using our product and potential computer product. And we launched uh, a campaign that was orchestrating unscoring those needs to make sure the patients were treating better. But what we did differently from usual is normally you just give you know, a new leaflet to the sales teams and they go around there. We united forces across all channels to make sure that the message would be consistent and would be followed and, and that the, the customer would, you know, wherever they go or interact with our company, they would be able to get that message and get all their questions answered. And the outcome of that was that ah, the launch was not as successful as the forecasters were saying and we could keep the position and the patients stayed on treatment and benefited from our product. So I think this one for me really demonstrated that you can be successful in pharmaceuticals mostly if you center on your customer needs in their personal and professional life and if you focus on their customer satisfaction with the product which is patient need to get the benefits from the product.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: Well, the first thing is I'm listening to a lot of podcasts that wouldn't surprise you. Well, right, right now I really enjoy the podcast that is um, done. I can't recall her name. The, the lady who is working in Salesforce and is in charge of artificial intelligence Salesforce and she's inviting, you know, a lot of people from different, you know, industries and to talk about, you know, AI and what, what can change into the business. I can't remember the name on top of my head, but that, that's really, it's, it's a nice and cross functional and cross industry podcast. Uh, and where she, she, she has people with vision and I really enjoy that. You know, it's a nice one. I'm not going to mention yours or mention other, but I think that that, that's really the one that comes on top of my podcast when I'm walking or biking or going to the gym or doing stuff. So it's a good thing, really good thing. But the other approach is to go on the company, you know, intercompany leaders like Reuters, like Next Pharma and others because you can meet a lot of peers and discuss with them and it's pretty safe environment for the people to share their experience and what they have tried and where they fail. So it's really useful. And we have some vendors who do some nice, you know, closed room discussions with people from the industry which is even better. Like you know we have, they have the one uh, around Puja on the Innovation Council and stuff like that. We can really you know, try to solve problems together. Because at the end of the day yes, we have competitors, we have competitors but I mean it's not like we were selling you know, encyclopedias and putting the foot on the door. Uh, and um, it's those type of sales that work today. You know that that used to be maybe was the formula from the 80s but it's totally not working today.

Speaker B: Just continuing to switch with Lauren and ah, Jeff Casper. We're talking about the sales experience. A friend of mine had selling educational books in the Ozarks in Missouri in the US And I was going to ask him about because I assume Greenland Palfarma has a lot of sales reps. And my question was like how do you guys at Greenland Town, how do you use your data, uh, that you have about sales reps uh, from their visits to their sales field and so on and how does that, does that help you inform your basically your sales strategy and your marketing strategy, your omnichannel strategy?

Speaker A: So. Well that's a broad, that's a broad question. So we have around 1,000 sales reps worldwide, a little bit more than that. And right now given our portfolio they are mostly key account managers. So their job is not only you know, in the past the, the role of the sales rep was more or less to go around and repeat marketing messages and make sure the physician look at the detailed and understand the marketing messages. Now their role is more to help the physician set up his practice so that the patients can access the medicine and that they can get all the benefits of, of, of the medicine they are, they are taking. So it's slightly different uh, in terms of skills, in terms of mindset as well. And what we are trying to do is to bring all the data that we can get from the interactions between the rep or the cam, um and the physicians. And also everything that we get from the online channels like the webinars, the web visits, the education materials, all that together so that we can understand what the physicians want to consume, how they want to consume it, what type of information they are interested in. And it's very different. HCP by hcp. So some would be more scientific, some would be more interested by patient materials to explain to their patients. So and this evolves as well. Many of course are interested by, you know, new studies and things like that. So we are trying to tailor what we give to the people based on their demand. So going closer to consumer good in fact than from the traditional marketing message. Repetition. That was the fabric of pharma.

Speaker B: Mhm. So my question is, so you are the ah, SAP. So you're responsible for sales. How do you, in your company are you responsible for marketing? And how do you make sure that you build a sequence where marketing and sales communicate to each other that the information you got from the field goes into everything?

Speaker A: Basically that's, that's a very, very good question. So we do that. Yeah, we, because that, you know, I mean let's, let's not hide it. In most of the case in the past that was marketing, preferably sitting in Global spend $1 million on market research. They generate beautiful insights that they turn into uh, a message, uh, to be delivered on fantasmatic Persona that don't exist in the real world. That beautiful plan is presented and uploaded in a board. Then it's handed over to the affiliates who take it, they put it on the lower shelf, they forget it and they do their local plan. That is not any better because when they hand it over to the sales team, the sales say, well you know what, those customers, I have no idea who they are so I'm going to keep doing what I was doing on my old customers in the same way. So that, that was like you know, five, six years ago. That's exactly how it was happening. And it was happening like this more or less everywhere. So now what we try to do is we try first to have the voice of the reps and the voice of the customer inside the inside generation. Because they have in their head so much information about uh, the customer, their daily practice, their struggle, their challenges and what they need. We need to have them in the market research at the beginning and the definition of the concept. Then we make them in fact accountable for the relationship with the customer. Which means they are the ones that are organizing the omnichannel activities around the customer. So they will sit like in January together with the marketing teams and say for that group of customer, this is a sequence of things we want to do in the next six months. These are the contents that we're going to use and we are going to load that in the system this way. So it's really A close collaboration which is far uh, better uh, in terms of adding value in fact for the customer and also for the company. Better knowledge of, of the customers.

Speaker B: Mhm. The question also this market research you're, you're doing, you, you're saying about the fantasmagoric client Persona. My comment that would be. I've heard about many client Persona research is done in pharma. You spend a bunch of money doing that and then in the end you get like a unicorn doctor.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Which does not exist. And then when sales reps go into chills, they get to know other people. But I think that's a, I don't see an uh, active marketing role here. Like, I don't see marketing talking to salespeople and like helping them craft a message. And how my, my problem with all of this is like how is marketing helping deliver a better brand experience through these sequences with the help of the data they get from sales? Do you maybe have some insights about that?

Speaker A: So again really for us, now that we have moved to a real omnichannel implementation, the cams and the reps are one channel among many. So the marketeers get data back, okay, from the field, but also from the other channels. And because the cams, uh, are the one orchestrating the different channels, that information, the data is always relevant for the marketeers. But you know, for the marketeers, our lovely friends in marketing, for them to be efficient today, it's really important that they pivot from I love my product to I love my customer. As long as uh, they start thinking my product are uh, both features and I want to post those features down the throat of my customers. It's never going to be a great customer experience if they think it the other way around. Which is this guy is, I don't know, a pain specialist. And this guy is a gp. And a GP has uh, different problems managing this type of pathology than the specialist has. Uh, because they are different levels, they uh, have different resources. So I need to deliver to them, make available to them something that is different. It's a beginning of creating a better customer experience. And the field people know it because they do that naturally. Because when they come with, you know, a size 35 for a guy who is doing 43, the guy says just I don't want your shoe, I'm not interested. And, and, and really establishing that, it's not easy. I won't, I wouldn't say we are get it 100% of the time. But establishing that dialogue is super important. And the only way to do it is for the people to use the system so that we have a reliable base of data and insights.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, I agree with what you're saying here. Oh, I think in pharma often I would say marketeers forget about the customer because they're not so connected to the customer like you hear from them. Oh, like this brand. I want you to deliver this brand message which I know maybe doctors are not really interested in hearing out. Uh, so poor sales.

Speaker A: No, you know, also because let's be transparent. In many market research, you asking a panel of doctors, those doctors become professional panel members. The only thing they do in life is to answer panels. They don't see patients anymore. You know, some of them, I mean it was really interesting to see that our best, you know, performing HCPs in terms of knowledge, key opinion, uh, leaders and publications and stuff like that. You don't find them on the market research panels very often. Both guys, they just don't have the time. They have to manage their patient, they have to manage their studies, they have to have a life as well. And it takes time to answer um, you know, surveys from IQVR or you know, any other vendor. So then in this case sometimes you have people who elsewhere who may not be exactly the customers you are after. And that's a challenge when you want a uh, relevant outcome for market research.

Speaker B: Yeah, imagine I imagine how well accurate it is. You know, like I did marketing in school. So like how I usually heard these researches or made it's like to a focus group. Right. And then uh, the focus group is like this is the question, uh, so you have to answer. And I think the answer is in this sort of focus groups explicitly we're talking about doctors are very biased. So even without knowing what the other person will answer, even if you do it in a closed group, wherever the answers will be very biased. So, and you might think that's not the best way.

Speaker A: Uh, it's an interesting perspective to have because it helps you drive your thinking. But you need to validate it with field level insights that are collected from. Because once you have let's say 200 sales reps giving you feedback on interactions with doctors and telling them, you know what, 80% of them are interested in this, you know, it's real, that's it. So it can confirm or challenge your assumption coming from your market research.

Speaker B: That's true. Well, platforms is, is partnering with a company called Solomon and um, the founder of Solomon Takeshi, he's in Mexico, he says that pharma sales is like really behind tech sales. So he says what's my secret? He says my secret is I go and I read a book about sales and tech and then they translate it to pharma and they sell the course to pharma and then they're like wow, what an innovation. You know. He's given an example about the challenger sale. It's a uh, it's an old book, older book and they even had the challenger organization. Challenger organization which basically taught how the book, how the way of how the book describes to different sales teams in the whole world. And Takeshit said that it was really, it was really eye opening to know that the level of the salespeople they were, they took the bible. Oh wow. We've never heard about this. This is so, so amazing, so interesting. And my question with this is produce this. How would you think in, in many cases I hear founders, other like uh, people who work with sales saying salespeople don't want to learn new tools. Sales people don't want to learn new approaches. What is your approach to culturing like innovation terms of sales value add up sales, other ways, how you can experiment to grow results in the sales team.

Speaker A: I've been doing that even before trading rental but I was doing it when I was in AstraZeneca as well. We tried to build on the best people. You know when you want to design a coaching program, you take the top 15 first time managers, you bring them in a room and you tell them okay, we are going to codify what you do, tell us how you do it. We don't want to bring in McKinsey, BCG and those guys. They have a value when you structure your approach. But when it comes to the nuts and bolts of doing it in the field, you need to learn from the salespeople. Same thing when we were an elearning system for the sales team, what we did, we took the top 10 sales reps, we brought them in a room and we told them we want to design with you an e learning system that will allow you to learn while you're on the road, while you're in the car or in the waiting room and stuff. And we did that with them. They came out with a uh, lot of ideas that we in headquarter would never have had. And the system got a huge success and you know is being used by all the sales team because it's made by them for them. So I really think that that's, that's how you know how we try to do it which is to listen to the people, bring them external perspective and then mix all that in something that is resonating with them. I don't see how, how you can do it differently, honestly.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think m basically having the buy in from sales people is the way to do it. At the same time I'm seeing a lot of, so talking to companies in the pharma field. I'm seeing a lot of problems while training new sales reps. And new sales reps were just starting with pharma work where you know, they need to, they need to level up their sales career in pharma. And I'm seeing some hardness in how pharma trains them because there are a lot of organizations like where what they do say they um, have a lot of salespeople and they rent it to pharma companies. And from one side I understand because this is okay pharma, you basically have a salesforce. You can give them a salesforce, you can give them your product, you don't sell it. But at the same time I see a huge, a huge minus here. Hey, they're gonna be selling five different brands, five or six different brands and products. They don't know your brand very well. They might be selling it in their own way. Like any certification or whatever certification, you're gonna be asking them to go, they fake it or you, uh, at the end you don't know how it works. And my question to you is like, are you, what's your approach? Do you usually, let's go back from green telepharma, but if you were, let's say you were an independent contractor, you wouldn't have to choose one way or another because of like budget or something. How would you go for it? Would you train your own sales team or would you go for a contractor who has like sales reps and like why would you do one or the other?

Speaker A: Very good question. I uh, think the, for me, the decision what type of portfolio do you have and what type of customer do you need to sell to? The closer you go to specialty care specialist in hospitals and all that, the more I think you need an in house sales team. Because the combination of adding the right mindsets and the right behaviors, the right culture, the knowledge on the science is super important and that takes time to learn. Knowledge on the medicine, understanding the customer needs, but also all the ecosystem around him, like, you know, what are uh, the constraints in terms of walls and the constraints in terms of being on the formulary and supply and all that type of stuff so that you can add value to that customer. When, when you see an oncologist and he gives you 10 minutes, it's very, very valuable time for it. So you need really to bring something and I think that you can build over time. The more we are in primary care, the more we are in generalist GPS interactions or the more we have on I would say simpler drugs where what matters is to inform on how to take the product, what could be the side effects, what are the contraindications, what are the interactions with other medicines. Then the easier it is for you to outsource this to an external team. It's not a question of, you know, judgment between the two groups. But I really think if you want to create that personalized relationship with a doctor that make them understand the value of your brand and of your company, you need an in house field force for that. The rest is more to create awareness and adoption of your by gps and people who don't need such a level of complex interactions.

Speaker B: So the more specialized the product is, the more, the more knowledge you need to know about that. The, the portfolio. Okay, that makes sense for me. And uh, still I don't know why, why pharma still goes for all of these uh, companies. You have thousands, um, of thousands of other brands. And me as a pharma company, if I had to choose to build my own salesforce or I would go with like this, I wouldn't say distributors, but there are companies who rent their sales reps. I would really, to be honest, I wouldn't really trust them. Maybe it's cheaper but I wouldn't really trust them because the brand and then rems suffer.

Speaker A: So this is interesting. We still have, you know, that notion of top of mind product still plays a role in the prescription pattern. Um, and those external field force are very good for that. If you take Latin America for instance, for many reps, that's what is happening. They just go to see the doctor every other week and they just mention their brands so that he stays on the top of the mind of the physician and he's gonna, he's gonna prescribe it. This is radically different than you know, selling a uh, a biologic product in a uh, a specialty care environment in hospital. I mean you can mention m the brand 20 times. If the physician is not deeply convinced and understand the science behind, he will not prescribe the product.

Speaker B: It's uh, just a different approach. In, in India they have remote visits where you have one minute per visit like the Indians. Okay. You have one minute.

Speaker A: Yeah. So yeah, I know, I recall When I was in Japan, you know, the waiting, going with reps and waiting at the door because the, the sales rep knew that the physician would exit by that door and enter the other world by that door. And then you know, walking with the physician from one door to the other while the sales rep was detailing the product and then the physician goes through the door and then the call is over and you're just like this is different selling than sitting with an oncologist and going through all the clinical study result of uh, you know, the phase three of an oncology product.

Speaker B: It's like running, going on a running meeting all day.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So uh, right now we are in sort of a recession and maybe the sales numbers are more high and you as a head of sales, you have to keep them motivation up there and you know, even when there is a lot of rejection, sales of the hard job, your sales reps get a lot of rejection. How do you personally, how do you maybe what's your mentality found keeping the mentality sales like high with your reps?

Speaker A: Well, so we try to uncouth everything we do into the patients really by adding you know, definition of patients very clear. In the educational matter, you're even for our own team, you know, but also in the discussion and to really put the emphasis more on the patient case resolution and on the improvement for the patients rather than just on the sales figures. I mean it's a sales team, right. So they still have sales target to reach at the end of the year and of course, but what we really try to make them is to make them being valued by their customers. It's only, you know, when you were a sales guy and you got a customer giving you positive feedback and saying that you bring interest and that is not making difficulties to see you again. It's a very, you know, feedback, feedback loop for yourself on your performance. So that, that's what we try to do, really anchor on the patient and the relationship with the HCP to spin it positively. So yes, we still have, you know, incentive schemes that are made at regional level sales and all that. But honestly I don't think that's the main driver for the performance of the people anymore. Some companies, like I was the one from a Swiss pharmaceutical company and they have got rid of the incentive schemes at all. Like the sales team in that company hold uh, a uh, bullish at the end of the year. That is calculated in the same way as the people in the headquarter. So overall it's on the company pll so it's on the company profitability, but it's not individualized by people in the team. And that could be a direction where all the industry will go one day.

Speaker B: Interesting. I'll tell you this, like as an example, in, in sports, I don't know if you watch uh, like say football or, or hockey or something. In uh, comparison sports, basically 30, uh, percent of your or of your revenue comes from things, your personal incentive that you have, like the voting system that you have scoring goals and so on. 70%. 70%. 70% comes from the goals that the whole team scored and the companies and the clubs did for total, like the goals that they reached by. Because personally you can be very motivated. Of course you can. But if you're not a team player, and I think that's very important, then it's not going to go very well for the company.

Speaker A: It's totally right. I mean, you know, today you cannot be successful at the sales guy if you are not collaborating with your msl, if you're not collaborating with the market local market access manager, uh, if you're not working together with your peers on that territory. Because what sells is no more repetition of marketing messages. But it's adding a value proposition that works for the customer and that's what really makes a difference. And you cannot create a value proposition just by yourself because they need everything, everything around us.

Speaker B: Ah. Um, okay. So I was thinking we, which we touched upon the uh, subject of AI beginning. So are you inside the company? Are you using any sort of AI, maybe not on a cloud basis, but on your servers? Are you using CHIP or any sort of something like that?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, so we, we have seen project surfacing. So I'm not going to talk about RND because those guys have been using AI for, you know, ages in terms of molecule selection and drug design and these type of things. Those are, you know, specialized models. But I would say the more general AI that we see occurring everywhere, and specifically generative AI now we have projects like for instance, we have Persona generators. So you select your criteria and it's going to tell you the story of a Persona, uh, and you can decline it in various formats and stuff. Like. So I have what we call, we are building some bodies so you can have for instance, a product buddy. And it's very simple. It's an LLM model in which you dump all the data you have on your product and all the studies and everything. It's a constrained environment, so you control hallucination. And people can ask questions like, you know, okay, talk to me about the efficacy of our product versus this product competitor. And the system can tell you, well, this were the studies where they were compared. These were the primary endpoint. This is the upside, this is the downside and style things. It's like, you know, we call them the buddies because you can actually apply them in many, many domains. Like Compliance Buddy is one the, my, my preferred one, which is you dump into it all your standard operating procedures and you can chat with the buddy and ask, okay, I've got this problem. What is a compliance way to solve it? And the system can tell you, well by this sop, this is what you should do and you should warn this person and you should be doing this and filling the document and all that. So, and this doesn't require any money actually. I mean what you need is a model, a data scientist to educate the model with the data and have your data in a correct format so that it can be ingested and, and then tested. But now we are going more at scale, exploring things like next best action, exploring, you know, competitive intelligence using AI and all. So we have now 10 to 15 projects that are going to take off, uh, six months to go at scale because we want all of our people to be familiar with AI. We want to debunk the Terminator is coming for you mindset that people are scared that AI is going to replace them. AI is not going to replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don't use AI.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's cool. That's correct. I was thinking, uh, an interesting AI feature would be that based on what the person a, uh, certain doctor prescribed in the future, in the past, you could make a prediction of how he or she, what would be the message you want to come to him or her to sell a certain drug and that you want to sell them a new drug is coming according to the history that he or she like let's say you tried to sell them this drug they didn't prescribe and you sell them that drug, but they prescribe it based on that data. I would be curious to see what AI has to offer, like maybe a new, a new way how to sell or a new approach.

Speaker A: So I think we need to learn from the consumer wood in that space because as much as they, they can get close, like you know, the suggestions on Amazon and stuff like that, and they have a lot of data points about us. Me as a consumer, I've left a lot of things, they don't get it right all the time. And so we need to be really careful. And that's why you are not. Again, we are not trying to push too much, but to get some pull from the customer. So we give them a panel of things that they can consume and then we can see what they are interested in and then we can propose more of them. But if you try to push down to the people, I'm not sure it's going to work also because every, by definition, every customer, every doctor is going to be different. Different patient pool, different geography, different personal experience with the different products. So we need to make sure he's going to use the right product for the right patients.

Speaker B: That's for sure. Okay, so I have the last two questions and my question would be this. Considering it's the uh, end of 2023, Merry Christmas by the way happening here, what do you think would be the new and upcoming things in 2024 and what new trends are we going to see in wow.

Speaker A: Predictions for 2024? So that's so I see a uh, violent, uh, violent period winter of AI in pharmaceuticals because the height has gone so high that people got all of excited all over the place. The hopes are super high. And then people will realize that they don't have the right data or that their data uh, is dirty or that the models are more complicated to manipulate than what they thought. And uh, uh, you know, we have done that in the past CRM, we've done it with digital and we've seen the backlash coming. The C suite wants to understand what's going to be the return on investment of those stuff. So if people start to invest a lot of money in AI and there is no return, I bet that before the end of 2024, some chief financial officers and some CEOs are going to ask really the question, okay, was that worth it? You know, should we not just stop all those fancy stuff? So if it could generate another AI winter in the business, specifically in, in pharmaceuticals now what I see also is we will clearly winners and, and losers in that space in a sense that overall on the long term, if people don't move now, they're going to come in too late and the, the, the heart will be investing where you can make a difference, where you can be competitive, create an advantage, but not investing where someone else is going to bring the solution. You know, one of the hottest topics right now I was mentioning is legal medical regulatory approval process of the content. The key question today for everyone is do you build in house a system that can facilitate LMR approval process and therefore generate help You Generate a lot of content super fast or do we wait for one of the key players to come with that solution in standard, proved validated and then you just use it. And my just word of question would be to everyone, pharmaceutical companies are very good at ah, creating drugs and pharmaceutical products. We are not tech companies, we are not the Silicon Valley. So I, you know, I'd rather have the hairdresser, uh, take care of the air of the people rather than becoming singer on tv. And I think, you know, everyone needs this field of excellence.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. So everyone has his own specialization, right? If you're not doing something good, you'll be replaced by AI.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, last question. Considering the predictions, what would be your advice you would give? Let's say pharma companies are doing like a lot of mistakes. What would be your advice to pharma companies? Something more or less generic or something that you see a mistake happen over and over again?

Speaker A: Well, very deeply that will be. It's time to double down on AI, uh, in a smart way. This technology will be bringing molecules, better molecules faster to the market. Better drug designs, better fit with the patient population, better commercialization, better, better production as well, better quality control. So these have the possibility to improve everything on the whole value chain of the pharmaceutical company. For the first time we will be able normally to predict this is going to be the societal value of a product. This is going to be the impact can have on the society and therefore this should be the price the company can offer so that the society can pay for it and make value out of it. Today we, you know, it's very difficult for a payer to pay for performance to say, you know, you're saving me 1 billion, uh, here, so I can offer you 500 million in terms of sales. No one can actually do that, but I'm pretty sure that with a predictive chain we will be able to get there. And then everyone wins. The patient win because he got better product. The physician wins because he's got better treatment for the patients. The payers win because they save money for the health. And the pharmaceutical companies stop wasting a lot of money and invest in products that are going to win. So it's kind of AI can help us improve all that. So it's time for the people to get educated and understand really what it is and how it works.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much Laura for this episode. It was amazing hearing listening to you and hopefully we'll do one more episode next year, maybe at the end of the year.

Speaker A: With great pleasure. Thanks a lot for inviting me, and have a beautiful end of year.

Speaker B: Uh, see you then next year in 2024.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Bye. Bye. Thank you.

Speaker A: Hi. Have a good day.