The impact of artificial intelligence on the pharmaceutical industry

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, João Afonso Duarte Gonçalves e Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30245
• topic: Inteligência artificial -- Artificial intelligence; Indústria farmacêutica -- pharmaceutical industry; Profissional de saúde -- Healthcare professional

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained great importance in all business sectors, revealing enormous potential in the competitiveness of companies. In the pharmaceutical industry, innovation has been a keyword and it’s at the forefront with regard to the adoption of cuttingedge technologies (Malerba & Orsengio, 2015). With the appearance of AI emerged 'Pharma 4.0', characterized by the digitization of the structures in the industry. This investigation aims to assess the state of modernization and the influence that AI has on pharmaceutical companies. It also intends to assess future perspectives taking into account AI-based technologies and the benefits they can bring to the pharmaceutical industry. For this purpose, the topics were carefully considered in the literature review and deepened using a qualitative method through semi-structured interviews with 17 stakeholders in the pharmaceutical industry, including CEOs and Digital Strategy and R&D professionals. The data collected revealed that the pharmaceutical industry in Portugal is in an early stage of AI deployment, with Big Data, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Robot Process Automation being the most implemented technologies. Some barriers that delay this modernization are related to financial and reliability reasons, however the benefits that AI brings are several and it is expected that investments will grow in the future. Overall, workers in the Portuguese pharmaceutical sector consider AI to be a disruptive technology that can boost healthcare to a greater degree of quality and innovation, but that there are also some constraints that need to be resolved.