How pharmaceutical companies are training their workers on AI
They hope that training thousands of employees on generative AI will boost productivity in drug development.
This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations.
Johnson & Johnson is embracing the concept of a bilingual employee — but not in the classic sense.
For the pharmaceutical company, literacy is needed in specialized and core job skills, including research, supply chain, and finance. Then there's fluency in AI technology.
"There are so many ways we've been using AI," said Jim Swanson, the chief information officer of J&J. "But to do that effectively, we had to really create a curriculum and a mindset around upskilling."
More than 56,000 of J&J's 138,000 workers have taken a generative AI training course, which is required before any employee is authorized to use the technology. After training, J&J's employees can utilize generative AI tools for summarization and prompt engineering, the latter a skill to ask the right question to get the best output from a large language model. A separate, more in-depth digital boot camp that covers topics including AI, augmented reality, and automation has recorded more than 37,000 cumulative hours of training from more than 14,000 employees.
Generative AI offers the promise of more quickly identifying compounds for new treatments and vaccines, accelerating drug development, streamlining regulatory compliance, optimizing which patients are best suited for clinical trials, and improving how new drugs are marketed.
Deborah Golden, Deloitte's US chief innovation officer, said these advancements were poised to change which skills the pharmaceutical industry prioritizes in recruitment. Biology and chemistry knowledge will still be needed, but it isn't as essential for newer roles like AI engineers, and other new roles might require a mix of traditional expertise and AI know-how if AI-driven drug discovery proliferates.
"When you think about how AI is shifting the balance and the talent requirements, you really need to be able to speak both the language of biology and AI models," Golden said.
Generative AI could save the pharmaceutical industry tens of billions of dollars each year through improved productivity within drug development.
J&J, the maker of treatments like the immunosuppressive drug Stelara and Darzalex, a medication for treating the cancer multiple myeloma, has used more traditional forms of AI for almost a decade. Use cases include AI-enabled software tools that can guide a surgeon through a procedure, speed up drug discovery, and help drug makers manage inventory more effectively.
In 2023, J&J piloted a six-week digital immersion program that focused on AI, data science, and other emerging technologies. More than 2,500 employees participated last year, taking 90-minute classes each week, and J&J is planning further expansion this year.
Swanson told Business Insider it was critical for company leaders to create a culture that promotes technological literacy. "We've been around 135 years. We've had to reinvent ourselves multiple times to stay relevant and current," he said.
The pharmaceutical giant Merck's early generative AI investments included the development of a proprietary platform called GPTeal. Merck — which is responsible for the HPV vaccine Gardasil and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda — said that GPTeal gives employees access to large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude while keeping company data secure from external exposures.
Employees are also using generative AI to draft emails and memos and for other productivity-focused tasks, but Merck's aspirations are also getting bolder.
"Now, the journey is clearly to identify, implement, track, and measure use cases that have a dramatic impact on our business," said Ron Kim, a senior vice president and the chief technology officer of Merck.
Generative AI allows Merck's employees more time to focus on higher-impact tasks. In drug discovery, for example, generative AI can help draft (human-reviewed) regulatory documents that are submitted to health authorities. "We felt like some of our scientists were taking time being copyeditors," Kim said. "That's not what they trained for."
Kim said more than 50,000 Merck employees were using GPTeal regularly. The company supported upskilling through a mix of self-serve digital training courses, monthly webcasts focused on generative AI, and boot camps for software developers that could last anywhere from half a day to 10 days.
Dr. Daniel Stevens, the chief medical officer at Blue Earth Therapeutics, said AI was alluring to the clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company because, as a small startup founded in 2021, it has to be judicious with how it spends capital.
"The application of artificial intelligence is of interest, because it may help us with some of our efficiency goals," Stevens said.
A $76.5 million Series A in October, which included funding from the healthcare investment firm Soleus Capital and the diagnostic imaging company Bracco Diagnostics, was mostly intended to support clinical trials that will assess the safety and effectiveness of new prostate cancer treatments.
Stevens said that with just 20 full-time employees, Blue Earth has not yet needed to offer AI upskill training. He added that when Blue Earth grows its employee base and is ready to offer instruction about the technology, it plans to use online courses and AI certifications from external vendors.
Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant behind treatments including the antidepressant Prozac and the type 2 diabetes and weight loss medicine Mounjaro, has used generative AI to support the research of both small and large molecules. The company also used AI to generate documentation for clinical trials and create materials for regulatory submissions.
After ChatGPT launched, major employers such as Apple and Amazon restricted employee use of the popular chatbot, with many citing concerns about data privacy. "We went in the exact opposite direction," said Diogo Rau, the chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly.
Rau encouraged Eli Lilly's workforce to embrace the tool without exposing sensitive company information, similar to how an employee might use Google Search.
"We told everybody you need to use it, you need to start bringing ChatGPT into your work," said Rau. But, he added, "Don't put anything in there that you don't want to get out."
The company also internally sought to bolster interest with an "AI Games" competition timed to the Summer Olympics in Paris. Contests involved using a chatbot to write a message to a colleague or relying on generative AI to make a quiz about Eli Lilly's history.
In 2024, Eli Lilly also encouraged all employees and managers to use generative AI for their year-end reviews. This year, the company is set to require all senior leaders and managers to obtain an AI certification.
"We've got a workforce that is embracing AI," Rau said, adding that employees often stopped him in the office or emailed him to share the ways they were applying AI to their daily work tasks.
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