Nothing personal: The delicate balance of human connections

[00:00]
Recorded live at South by Southwest in Austin Texas it’s the MM+M Podcast. I don’t know for an appointment where we can actually start to use AI to not only create new content but actually deploy that content in a way that works within our current lmr processes by understanding what it is that we are trying to solve for in sick care. It allows us to look at challenges and opportunities in a very different way one thing we know for sure is AI plus human is always better than human alone or AI alone.

[00:43]
Hi everyone and welcome. You’re listening to the MM+M Podcast special edition coming to you from South by Southwest. I’m Steve Madden editorial director of Haymarket Media’s business media group and I’m with three completely smart people today to talk about AI for purposes of search engine optimization you’ll be talking about a panel called “Nothing personal: The delicate balance of human connections.” It’s brought to you by the CMI Media Group. We live in a world of personalization speed ever present technology data and AI and then that world there’s a delicate balance that needs to be struck between allowing automation to do its thing and knowing where and when a human touch is needed as we see AI become integrated into every aspect of Our Lives including marketing and healthcare the two areas where listeners at This podcast were it’s a good idea.

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To pause a minute to discuss when we need human touch and when we can benefit from a shift to digital Technology we already have robots in surgical theaters. Will we see them soon in the exam room doctors use AI for their notes and in some cases to make diagnoses are there other areas where AI should take over?

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And in marketing, where do we need AI the most and what areas should remain the domain of humans like guests today will explore the concept of human touch as a key differentiator in an evolving world powered by machines joining me today Dr. Susan Dorfman, president and CEO, CMI Media Group a WPP agency. Hi Susan also joining me is Tarak Shah, U.S head of customer engagement for Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Hi Steve thanks for having me. Thanks for being here and our third panelist is Oz Demir, head of digital marketing at Genentech. Hello Steve thank you everyone for being here. This is podcast is a recap of a panel that was presented earlier this morning and it was really interesting to hear how engage the audience to see how engaged the audience was with you and I’m I really I think because you guys are all such good speaker who will really be able to capture that in the podcast too. I want to start with.

[03:05]
Defining what exactly AI is. Can you please share some examples of where you’re seeing it in your world you want to start with that yeah sure so artificial intelligence or AI has been around for decades and by definition AI is systems and machines that are able to mimic humans by performing tasks like a human, so that’s the umbrella term but you have all these sort of subtypes within AI so for example machine learning machine learning is a type of AI where it’s more about how the systems and machines are learning over time and how they’re able to actually improve outcomes improve accuracy where you’re starting to do some predictions so in Healthcare for example using machine learning to actually predict the diagnosis that’s an example of machine learning and it proves accuracy as it’s getting more data over time then. There’s what we call deep learning.

[04:05]
Which is sort of taking machine learning to the next level and it’s about processing large amounts of data and being able to identify patterns within that data and then be able to hopefully use something with that again if it’s helping to diagnose a patient or detect different types of tumor types for cancer patients, but that’s where you’re really starting to get more into the complex world of working with large amounts of data and using more of like a neural network to be able to find those patterns, then there’s the more reasons gen AI or generative AI and that’s something that really exploded and when that really came to the forefront that brought all the AI with it so jennai is actually using AI to create different types of content so that could be texts that could be images that could be videos and that’s a really phenomenal thing for us in Pharma and health.

[05:05]
Because that’s a great opportunity for us to be able to use AI to to create content in a personalized way for our customers whether it’s for hcps or for patients. How are you seeing AI change healthcare and you’re in your little neck of the woods. Yeah great question I see multiple avenues for this one of them is my colleague tarik mentioned a little bit is how do you use all this data? Which can be ingested by AI to find the right patients really try to understand what kind of information these patients may need there are a lot of rare diseases that you know we don’t have a lot of information about these people but they need a lot of help from companies. You know like hours from other health systems where you need to identify. You need to be able to identify where they are what they need so it’s about identification the second piece which is more about generative AI how do you create so much content?

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Could be personalized her that patient type as We Know patience want to engage with other patients that look like them that think like them that behave like them and we cannot really use the old models where we rely on manual people labor to create all these content pieces because we may need 10,000 of them Jenny I can help us create these personalized content pieces whether it’s on social media. It’s a bannerad. It’s an email. It’s a video to really appeal to whatever information those patients need does it really important. This is not just for marketing. This is for making sure patients get information in a timely manner, which could either extend their lifespan and sometimes even save their lives Susan how are you seeing it at cmr? Yeah? This is beyond cmi, so I’m actually looking at it from a I’m going to say a different lens, so I’m going to say the lens of not looking at it. Just as Healthcare but actually looking at it a sick care.

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And for me there is a distinction while more and more we are trying to do more on the preventative side of not getting sick really looking at health and caring for ourselves not to get sick the majority of Opportunity actually exists when we are sick, so I’m going to call that sick care not health care. Can you unpack that because that’s a really interesting concept yeah? Yeah, so as we think about our own diseases as we think about where the world is headed unfortunately we’re getting sucker younger. We’re seeing much more chronic conditions in the world of sick care. You are not it’s not like buying a new card. It’s not like you are trying to get to a next state. You are trying to get back to your former state. You are trying to get better. So I think by understanding what it is that we are trying to solve for in sick care. Think it allows us to look at challenges and opportunities in.

[08:05]
a very different way and when you start with

[08:10]
People when you start with a precisely human perspective of how you’re going to use technology to solve for problems that we as humans face when we get sick. How do we hear our diagnosis what happens post diagnosis when we are trying to find our Solutions our cures our treatment options how we understand the information that we are consuming. How do we know the credibility of information? How do we get and how often do we see healthcare professionals what else do we do in the surround when we’re not seeing that doctor or nurse once every six months or once every year those are perfect opportunities for us to explore and then design.

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And use technology such as AI to be able to better that experience to help us get back to better based on what we need terc. What do you see is the opportunity here the idea? Is you know everybody working in the space wants to drive better outcomes. What’s what opportunity is AI present?

[09:22]
I think there’s significant opportunity for all different types of AI applications including jennai, and if I could just share a personal story just building off of you know Susan’s perspective, so my father is actually not in good health and he’s dealing with the number of of conditions and he’s in and out of the hospital and he’s seeing all different types of doctors Primary Care different specialists and whenever he goes to the hospital.

[09:52]
I am one of the caregivers so the doctor or the nurse gives me a call and it’s usually the same set of questions that they asked me you know it’s what’s your dad medical history, what’s going on with the doctor or your dad right now and you know what medications is your dad currently on and you know I think it’s partly because they just don’t have a lot of time to look at my dad’s medical history. I mean he probably has 20 pages of Clinical notes right in the you know EMR and you know frankly they don’t have enough time to kind of go through all of that so I see a very tangible opportunity for example in Healthcare where AI can be a tool that can actually help these doctors either in the hospital or the specialist of my dad is seeing being able to get that holdistic picture of what’s going on with my dad and be able to take his entire medical history and come up with a treatment plan or come up with a care plan and then what does that next step in that care plan for my dad and then hopefully that enables the Physicians to

[10:52]
To be able to to make decisions faster because the tools should help inform the right clinical decisions, but also hopefully it gives the Physicians more time to spend with my dad and provide more empathetic care having more of that kind of deeper conversation with with my father and with myself and with his family to see what’s the best path for for my father, so I just want to share kind of sure that relevant. You know I think there’s also as we talked about before from a farmer perspective significant opportunity, but I think there’s also conversations. We have to have from from a governance perspective from an ethicals perspective in terms of to what extent do we rely on AI

[11:39]
Not just in terms of you know creating algorithms that can help us you know find patients help us find Physicians at the right time at the right place to be able to deliver the right message right content but to what degree do we actually start to?

[11:55]
Allow the AI to to take more of that role and actually make those decisions for us and actually deploy that that content to the Channel because I don’t know for quite there yet because of where the technology is at this point so the examples you cite are really promising and a lot of the discussion a lot of the discourse around AI is that people are scared by because they’re afraid it’s going to take their jobs Susan you were saying you said this morning that you know AI shouldn’t scare us. It should scale us. What exactly do you mean by that?

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Yeah, so I think that throughout history. We’ve always been afraid of technology. We’ve always we I mean humans right are always afraid of technology, but not just technology other humans look at the rise of offshore Talent and collaboration people started to get scared of that and then you started to realize how globalization can actually help not hurt what it is that you’re doing. It’s the same thing from a technology perspective the more we can leverage technology to help us the more we can intertwine our work with what technology can do for us and with us. I think the better. We will become one thing we cannot and we know we cannot buy is more time. So being able to and we cannot split ourselves unfortunately or could not in the past what ourselves into two to try to be multiple places at the same time with the rise of genai and the promise of general AI in particular. That is going to

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Will deliver a much more humanistic capability to the technology to think to do we could consider the use of time being split in some ways because we could have our digital humans taking on things that a we don’t love to do B that. We may not be great at doing so there’s an amazing concept for the scale yeah, and you have to embrace it. I mean you know we we will all have to embrace it. We will all have to learn to live with it. Just like we have with computers and cell phones and everything else that we’re doing so clearly it’s it’s bringing a lot of change Oz what kind of changes are you seeing yeah one change that I see is constant use of AI in almost everything that we do right. We know one thing which is there are areas where AI is much better than humans for example right now. We know AI can play chess much better than any human right. There are some areas.

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Humans are much better one thing we know for sure is AI plus human is always better than human alone or AI alone so one change that I see is doctors in the offices using AI to help them summarize things you know make make some treatments better make some decisions better. I see us in marketing use it again to make Better Decisions one thing that you said tarak. That was really interesting as how do we use AI right it comes to back to the how do we use technology overall we could use AI for Physicians to treat twice the number of people but I don’t think that’s what we want to do what we want to do is how can we make things that are harder for Physicians easier and faster so that they can spend more time with human beings so can use AI to make a better world with a better not just patient but human experience.

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So that’s a really important part of what you discuss this morning and I’d like to get into that a little bit and that is the human touch so like at what point are we able to have AI step side and bring in a human where the human touches needed and at what point like who decides that like now. We’re not going to do that AI is AI is going to take care of it and Susan I’d like to to throw it to you because in the panelist morning. You gave a great example of where AI wasn’t getting the job done and a human touch really would have helped yeah and frankly even the human touch with that was being instructed by technology and data to take certain actions was also not the most meaningful experience for me as a patient in my own personal experience or in your experience and everyone’s experience we we can all agree that we have all been sick.

[16:25]
Whether it was a cold or chronic condition or something we all understand what it feels like to be sick and just want to be better.

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And in Healthcare there, is this empathy need and there’s only so much that a machine could do and I think training machines to know at what point of voice inflection button inflection these are simple things that today can be done do we need to bring in a human faster without me having to scream operator pressing buttons saying curse words or anybody else, which I often do sometimes in public I think and I do what really loud yeah, and my mother. Who’s a foreigner and when she like she she representative really really like and she doesn’t so loud and she screams it in the phone and it’s just comical but I think we all do it and I think being able to train machines to know when what are the points of empathy and what are the signals to empathy that are needed these are easy things that can be done right.

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But it does start with understanding art the needs of a person when they become a patient and depending on the health condition and the diagnosis and where they are in their diagnosis or living with their condition. I think it becomes important to start with that first as opposed to technology and then help determine what experience are they when they are in need when there’s a critical need when they’re living life. How do I help them? But when there is a critical healthy attention? What can I do to interject value? Not just efficiency tarik from your perspective. When do we need the human touch? Yeah, I think in the the Pharma commercial side. I would say what’s great about these AI tools is it can help with being able to take all of these different data sets and be able to provide recommendations to provide insights.

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Very fast and hopefully meaningful way, so when I think about our sales representatives for example. You know how can we help our reps with their pre-call planning because they have access as part of the digital transformation that we’re all going through they have access to all this data about our customers, but how can they process that in a very efficient way and be able to come up with the right sort of Engagement for that customer when that rep is going to see that doctor next and so I see a lot of opportunity there even also in the digital markings marketing space in terms of how we can leverage these AI tools to be able to personalize experiences with our customers through through digital channels, but I think where the the human Element is going to be important is that ultimately it’s going to be I give the example of the sales representative. It’s going to be their call right so we could provide them with the insights to next best action the recommendation, but you know they.

[19:33]
Know their customers the best right and so they need to be able to say okay. I’m going to use this I’m not going to use this this is this is used for me. This is not useful for me right. So you know and then I think with regards to more of the digital space. This is where I think we need to have those conversations with our legal Partners and lmr. Because right now. I don’t know for at a point yet where we can actually start to use AI to not only create new content but actually deploy that content in a way that works within our current lmr processes. Do you think that do you think that the day is coming when mlr is handled by AI

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I’m optimistic. I think it’s look I mean AI is it’s such a big area right now and I think everybody in our industry is getting educated on AI the different applications including our legal medical and regulatory Partners and so you know I think it’s really working together and figuring out. How do we how do we do this in the most compliant and ethical way as a question for you does it make sense? Is it like you know if you think this all the way through does it make sense that AI gets trained up on empathy is that is that too scary a thought? It’s a great question. I don’t think we should have categorized questions as scary or not because these are real questions. I think AI will be able to mimic empathy to a great degree. So it’ll not it’ll say I understand how you feel and it’ll try.

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Will make us feel calmer it can change it’s like voice and tone by understanding you know our mimics if you get teary eyed but vs. Humans know it’s it’s just a trek right. It doesn’t have emotions AI will not feel sad it’s gonna understand you feel sad and you you know it’s gonna basically understand how to react back to you. This is the reason why sometimes in human beings are not always rational right sometimes we complain about something or we’re in a struggle and we tell this to our partner our friend. We don’t want them to give us a solution. We just want them to listen and not an acknowledge and that’s everything we need if they AI if a robot machine does this for me. It doesn’t mean anything for me because I know it’s not based on any emotion or not that it cares for me. So yes, it will be able to highly mimic empathy but I don’t think it will ever get there because you know what vs. Humans don’t understand. How empathy works we don’t even understand.

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Most of our brains work, so I don’t think we’ll be able to a code something that can learn how to do that and authenticity right you were talking.

[22:28]
Just recalled my last exchange with Amazon where it was lovely gentleman who was helping me but clearly reading a script of the kinds of things that he could say to me to make me feel better and throughout the whole process. I actually had empathy for him because he was limited by Script and what he could say to me and authenticity of that support. Just wasn’t there and when we talk about secure when we talk about people’s lives when we talk about disease desperation being at our lowest kind of critical emotional moments that authenticity matters even more so I think your spot on with with what you just shared. I do want to get back for a second if we can to the mlr question sure so as during the panel. You were talking about the next billion dollar company. I don’t know if it’s billion, but I will say worldwide the mlr process the way that we review in a highly reg.

[23:28]
Ulated space the way that we review approve and submit content some of the learnings that we have because it’s so people based is actually prime for the use of especially gen-a-i to be able to get us better and could 80% of that work be done by machine.

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And then the remaining 20 for routing like talk about elevation talk about escalation talk about those moments opportunities. I would say yes and if anybody has any ideas or thoughts on how to build a company of that nature. We need to talk because it’s it’s huge potential worldwide and not only for the efficiency of it, but actually to be able to get the right information to the right people in a much faster timeframe. We don’t have six months to wait for a content component to be approved submitted and then made available Susan I’m only actually excited about this and I am getting our medical Legal regulatory people excited about it as well because what I’m imagining is not the automate every single thing on lmr. We automate the things that are so boring and so tedious and so long.

[24:50]
Where you take everything word by word? You know has this been said before these are all things AI can do but our lawyers are are medical people that are highly trained and highly smart they can actually decide on things that are on the edges and things that really require you to think about is this a reputational issue is there’s a cultural sensitivity issue where you know your brain is always working on the high level challenges. Not did you say this exactly with the comma in the right spot? I think that’s a great point Oz and I think that’s the evolution of the lmr. That’s the that’s the process within organizations that I think needs to really change in order for us to truly utilize the AI capabilities and tools that are in front of us because we have that ability to to use Jenna I to create all this great content personalized content and be able to deploy it across our different channels, but we have to create the right framework and the right governance with our lmr partners, so

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That when that type of content goes through our review process we have to do it in a way where you know content that is not really deviating that much from a previously approved content which should be much easier for lmr to to be able to approve versus new content like truly new content that really is different from previously approved content that requires more in-depth review and discussion and I’ll also add that.

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pharmaceutical

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companies nurse

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Of data, that is sitting through.

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All of the change requests that have been coming in and actually from a Pharma perspective you own these and regardless of what systems they are fed into to be able to Leverage that knowledge stream to be able to go back in history and actually understand. What has been approved. What hasn’t been approved. Why it hasn’t been approved. That is a fuel that is priceless to be able to make this happen, so one last question we’ve got to look toward look toward the future and the future when we’re talking about AI the future means next week right. I mean it’s evolving that quickly. What’s your dream for AI and you know how do you see it improving outcomes for both you know in healthcare and then marketing and for this audience specifically for healthcare marketing. What’s the dream state? I’m gonna take that Turk yeah sure I’ll take a step at that so I think about I really think about the people and

[27:31]
I think about like our organizations and marketing and I and I hope that with new AI technology. That’s really starting to become more mature and really started to see applications of it in Pharma that I think it’s going to help raise the bar and really help our marketers.

[27:55]
Think more about data driven and personalized approaches to engaging with customers because I think that the tools are there the technology is there we’re starting to build the the processes but ultimately from a capabilities perspective it comes down to our people it comes down to the change. We’re trying to we’re trying to drive why that change is important for us. What’s the value and impact that’s going to create for organizations and for our customers and ultimately what is that going to mean for our people like our marketing teams like our commercial operations colleagues like our it like our legal medical and regulatory partners right. So I think all of us really need to understand this landscape really think about the value that we can create with these opportunities as well as the processes and the governance we may need to have to make sure we’re doing it in the most compliant ethical way and from a skill development perspective you know hopefully that’s going to help.

[28:56]
All of us in the industry, I think just become just raise the acumen in terms of how we can actually start to use AI and enable ai-based engagement with our customers. What’s your dream vision for my dream may need a change in direction of how we look at technology because the more technology we use the more distant we get from each other and other human beings because now you see a lot of people just on their screens all the time social media my dream is that we use technology and AI to create a lot of space for us to build those connections so that our lives are easier our lives are much more efficient in things we have to do and they’re not efficient at all in things that we want to do right. That’s the that’s the dream. I have AI helps US technology helps us be better humans and have time for more connections. Maybe work less.

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Work less I’m all for it Susan how about you all right? I’m gonna talk about my dream and the dream actually is about figuring out and continuing to push the envelope on how we can with that. I’m going to say my nightmare. Yes, because Dreams Can Be nightmares is the words why it cannot be done. Why not? I don’t believe in the why not I believe that. We need to we need to look forward and we need to figure out how we can and how we can do things in you know clearly ethical ways in non-biased ways how we can leverage data. How we can continue to push the envelope on the technologies that are out there. How we can make lives better healthier. I will also say less lonely.

[30:40]
And from what we do I like to believe that we are the enablers of knowledge and hope and I just want to see us continue to Leverage everything that we have especially the incredible medications that are life-changing to get them to people faster and if we could do that with the power of AI and the power of people combined we want I love ending on an optimistic note that that’s great. Thanks very much everyone this has been a really interesting conversation every time I think that I’ve got my hands around AI or I’m starting to get my hands around it. I talked to smart people and I realized that. I’m not even scratching the surface so I really appreciate your time. You’ve been listening to a special edition of the MM+M Podcast coming to you from South by Southwest and brought to you by CMI Media Group my guests have been Susan Dorfman, president and CEO of CMI Media Group, Tarak Shah, U.S. head of customer engagement for Ferring Pharmaceuticals, and Oz Demir, the head of digital marketing at Genentech. Oz, Tarak, Susan thanks very much. Thank you.