Klick Health announced the three winners of the first round of the $1 million Klick Prize competition Tuesday morning.
In December, Klick Health co-founder and chairman Leerom Segal unveiled a $1 million prize to employees who present the best AI ideas as determined by a judging panel of C-suite executives at major life science companies.
At the time of the announcement, the 2023 MM+M Agency 100 honoree pledged to invest further in evolving these ideas into prototypes and eventually even products or services.
Segal announced that among the more than 200 submissions, a judging panel consisting of executives from bluechip pharma and biotech brands like Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Novartis and Pfizer chose three winners.
The top winner was a project dubbed “GuardRail,” which was awarded $100,000 to a pair of members of Klick’s medical team as well as a tech developer and a project manager.
Segal said the pharma marketing compliance tool offers insight into how generative AI can work within a compliance environment, specifically for legal and regulatory workflows in the life sciences industry.
GuardRail automatically analyzes submissions and layers in a client’s compliance posture and history to automate the entire approval workflow for assets.
Segal told MM+M that a key benefit to the project is it makes generative AI possible while ensuring compliance.
“The most important and unique part is that because we’re using a decision intelligence approach as opposed to a large language model, [GuardRail] becomes a glass box, so you can see the entire decision tree,” he said.
Additionally, Klick awarded $50,000 to the two projects that tied for second place: one is a personalized AI training concept for pharma sales reps, while the other involves digital twins, which have taken off in popularity among health brands in recent years.
Importantly, this marked the conclusion of round one, but there are still two more rounds taking place over the summer, which are now open for entries.
The agency is set to award another $200,000 in both rounds and the first place winners will then compete for the $400,000 grand finale later in the year.
For Klick, this ongoing competition represents its commitment to researching, innovating and investing in the potential of AI. Since its first experimentation with AI in 1999, Segal said Klick has dedicated itself to exploring this technology and incorporating it into its operations.
Coinciding with the generative AI boom that started in earnest in late 2022, Klick has been one of the most active medical marketing agencies leveraging these innovations on a practical basis.
In September, the agency unveiled its ChatGPT plug-in for U.S. life sciences companies and then rolled out its generative AI tool Genome Perspective to improve project planning two months later. Just this spring, Klick launched an AI social media comment moderator for its life sciences clients.
From Segal’s perspective, Klick expects to see more submissions focused on creative use cases for generative AI that can make the business operate more efficiently. Perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the contest has been the feedback not only from participating employees, but also the panel of industry judges.
“They’re mostly presidents or CMOs, so seeing this innovation through their eyes helped us appreciate the degree to which we’re raising the bar on innovation because they clearly get to see what’s out there in the marketplace,” he said.
