Democratizing Artificial Intelligence: Giving Power to the Masses to Accelerate Progress

No organization can enable artificial intelligence (AI) to reach its full potential for clients unless it democratizes its use, broadening access to AI and machine learning tools beyond the select few experts who would typically employ it. 

At Real Chemistry, democratizing access to AI has been a critical step in realizing AI’s commercial benefits. But, we know first-hand that making AI accessible and usable across an organization is no small feat and cannot be accomplished through a top-down approach.

The democratization of AI requires organizations to empower employees to learn and leverage AI tools, to partner with platforms that work best for your business, and to shift organizational culture to embrace exploration and collaboration.  

In this second article of our three-part series, we share Real Chemistry’s playbook for democratizing access to AI with these three key steps all organizations must take to capture its full potential. 

Engage All Employees, Beyond Technical Talent

Innovation in large language models (LLMs) is advancing at a rapid pace. The good news: Generative AI can increase your employees’ productivity and yield rewards for clients. The bad news: Generative AI will require major investments from your company and major buy-in from your workforce. 

At Real Chemistry, we started our own organizational shift back in 2020 and are continuing to democratize access to AI today. This shift has increased efficiency and improved decision-making, from creative departments to deep data. And this first step, putting accessible, relevant tools into the hands of all employees, has been key. 

In 2021, we launched the Real Chemistry Insight System (RCIS) to give everyone at the company access to AI-driven insights about the specific providers, payers and patients who matter for the treatments our clients are developing. RCIS helps quickly find the hidden connections in the billions of data points we have. Our use of RCIS has led to deeper interest in AI among employees, as well as our ability to fine-tune parameters specific to our business and clients. This kind of relevancy is key to enable AI to work for our business in the ways that matter for our clients. 

This year, we went even further, providing all of Real Chemistry with generative AI capabilities. We added RCIS Workspace, a secure, enterprise-grade generative AI workstream management system powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT and other foundational LLMs. Workspace includes advanced data and website integration, prompt engineering and other collaboration tools that make it easier for every person at Real Chemistry to make the best use of the power of generative AI. Our teams are using Workspace to quickly gain valuable insights into patient populations for any therapeutic area, for example. And to understand what and where patients and healthcare professionals are having conversations in social media and other online forums. These and many other applications are providing valuable insights to our teams and driving adoption. Over 200 RCIS outputs have been delivered to date.

Our power users are already spreading their know-how throughout the company, as they latched on within days to coax ChatGPT into distilling the rich data of RCIS insights into readable highlights. This kind of adoption, however, does not happen simply due to internal accessibility. 

Partner with AI Platforms that Work for Your Business

AI adoption has happened at Real Chemistry because we ensure our platforms are specifically tailored to our business. In healthcare, specific regulations and complexities need specific and tailored solutions. 

So to help with content creation, Real Chemistry formed a strategic partnership with the leading AI-assisted writing platform, Writer. Our partnership with Writer expands our AI products and services portfolio, which includes conversationHealth, Integrated Intelligence, IPM.ai and Swoop, as well as RCIS. 

Together with Writer, we will build proprietary and custom-trained generative AI functionality specific to the demanding needs and complexities of the regulated healthcare environment. This partnership gives everyone at Real Chemistry two important advantages: access to advanced writing style management and healthcare-specific capabilities such as claims detection. 

We’ve also partnered with Whiz, AI, a leading AI-powered analytics platform purpose-built for life sciences and healthcare. Together, we’re building a dynamic patient journey visualization and analytics solution that uses Real Chemistry’s robust AI and analytics engines. The new offering will make it easy for clients to access accurate, contextual insights and visualize the process patients go through from diagnosis to treatment to better understand access, affordability and adherence to treatments.

These platforms are only as good as the people who use them, which is why we have also invested in our culture to extend AI democratization with a model encouraging cross-functional cooperation and learning. 

Shift Internal Culture to Embrace Exploration and Collaboration

Democratizing AI goes beyond finding the right partners and opening access to employees. It requires a cultural mindshift that starts with empowering teams to share ideas, learn and efficiently use this new technology across the organization. 

At Real Chemistry, we have hired generative AI experts and are continually training our workforce. We've introduced GUILDS that encourage cross-functional collaboration to further accelerate the use and benefits of generative AI for everyone at Real Chemistry and our clients. 

Proof of how well this has played out is in the programs that wide cross-sectional teams have developed. For one client, we’ve used IPM.ai’s real-world data to find healthcare practitioners who are near clinical trial sites and who may have highly diverse and medically eligible patients. Working in parallel, our Integrated Intelligence team is using AI and machine learning tools that can engage those HCPs to enhance the diversity of patients most likely to enroll in the trials. 

The healthcare and digital ecosystems are changing rapidly, and some of this cultural shift requires rethinking core business processes for organizations and identifying new skills their workforce will need. But those who start to operationalize AI are already ahead of the game. In our next article, we’ll focus on how leaders can prepare their organizations to take better advantage of AI at every step. 

This is the second of three articles about how AI and machine learning are driving a sea change in how Real Chemistry works with life sciences companies to help connect life-changing treatments and interventions with patients and physicians. The first focused on Real Chemistry’s five-step framework for leveraging the latest AI advancements for healthcare commercialization. Want to get hands-on with AI and Real Chemistry? Click here to contact us.