The MM+M AI Deciphered debriefing

[00:00] Here in terms of AI everyone’s talking about it. Everyone’s grandparents are talking about it. What’s really exciting is that we see the opportunity to apply conversational AI in healthcare with pre-recorded content that’s connected to a personalized experience externally facing chatbots, right anything that interacts with a customer or patient on the company’s behalf. This has really interesting effects on how individuals interact with your company as well as the risks that are posed. Hey, it’s Marc last week. Mmm held its inaugural AI deciphered Summit in conjunction with sister Brands campaign us and PR week the day opened with AI proponents Ashish success keynote on keys to AI success and closed with MasterCard CMO. Raja rajas fireside chat about adapting to the new AI era in marketing in between those two formidable bookends came the individual subject tracks and the mmm one yielded a few key themes one was the brand portfolio marketers perspect. [01:00] on the mlr process [01:01] Mlr speed and efficiency are of course the aim for most health marketers when it comes to getting their content out into the world, but medical legal regulatory review is often a roadblock. It’s exacerbated by the challenges of launching multiple products in a compressed timeline periodically having to address label and isi updates also in a short time window and the fact that marketers are leaning more into digital and social channels that are optimized when content is executed and deployed in real time. Whereas closest possible simply put a 12 or 16 week content development time line doesn’t cut it anymore. Therefore the marketing Community finds itself in significant need of tools and approaches to create efficiencies and improve speed to Market enter AI which has the potential to address these challenges by helping simplify the review process. [01:45] A second major takeaway involve the need for guardrails on AI due to the Marriott ethical Regulatory and privacy concerns raised by Advanced Atlantics, of course compliance already plays a heavy role in most by a farmer companies and ethical challenges raised by AI from algorithmic bias and adds to chat about interfaces underscore is the role of legal experts to ensure that companies tap into the explosion of AI but without compromising ethics or stepping outside of regulatory guardrails to that end by self and Senior editorship moderated panels on these two topics and debriefed with a couple of the panelists when they stepped off the stage. We’re going to play those interviews for you as we devote this week’s show to our AI decipher conference wrap up. We hope you enjoy [02:27] I’m Marc Iskowitz editor at large and welcome to the MM+M Podcast medical marketing media showed at Healthcare marketing writ large. [02:47] Hi, I’m Lecia Bushak senior reporter at MM+M and we’re here live at the AI Deciphered event. I’m here with Nevada Health director of digital privacy at Merck Nevada. Good to have you here. [03:03] So glad to be here. [03:04] You are just on a panel earlier today about the guardrails and regulations around the use of AI in healthcare marketing. What were some of the main takeaways from you from that panel. [03:15] I think some of the main takeaways are that as an industry. We are still struggling to fully understand. The implications of AI. There are so many potential use cases and so much excitement here. You can feel it. There’s so many ideas different approaches different uses of it. But the laws are just starting to pop up. They’re just starting to come into play and we have best practices ethical principles to follow and while we can interpret some things according to existing laws like the EU AI act a lot of times we’re sort of trying to act in a predictive manner for what’s going to be the legislation in the future. So I think that’s the most important thing which is just try to do your best and maintain a good audit log and inventory of the AI systems. Your company uses. You definitely captured the energy here. A lot of people are just kind of excited to have conversations about the New Uses of AI the different ways that companies are implementing it you yourself mentioned your excited to kind of learn and see what other [04:15] Companies are doing you know, it’s 3 p.m. Now. You’ve had a chance to sit in a few panels. What were some of the main highlights for you. Did you learn anything exciting about what people are doing with AI? [04:27] Yeah, I think one of the most interesting things I heard of was improving how we message hcps. [04:35] It’s something that you know is a widespread this email fatigue that Physicians are constantly batting away all sorts of incoming messages. [04:44] Now with more tailored advertisements based on previous behaviors AIS are really going to help reduce the amount of information workload that Physicians have both in terms of marketing messages that were receiving as well. As you know, basic administrative tasks and the office and entering medical records things like that any sort of assistance you can get to make your physician less fatigue and burned out is going to lead to better patient outcomes and quality of care. So I’m really excited to see that there is a lot of passion around that topic and a lot of focus on it because I think it’s really going to help improve patient lives. [05:20] Absolutely and kind of going back to the governance side of things, you know, we discuss in our panel how crucial it is for marketers to kind of self-govern in absence of larger federal laws around AI regulation. What would you say are kind of the best practices as marketers start to do that? [05:39] yeah, so I think the simplest solution and there’s a lot of [05:44] advice you can give but I think the most fundamental one is human in the loop is your best Safeguard not letting ai’s especially now that they’re so fresh and young that. [05:58] Having a human being check outputs before it goes out. The door is really important, right you can have all sorts of improper messages or images be generated and just that final check of having a person there can be a game changer. So yeah, we have like very novel uses of AI possible right now chatbots tailored advertisements all these sorts of things, but that’s where the danger comes in because it’s more difficult to have a person in between the AI and the end consumer. Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I keep hearing as the common thread in almost every single panel if every single conference I’ve been to about AI it’s always that we need the human there and that isn’t going to go away that’s actually very crucial to the process. [06:46] Nevada is there anything else that you want to mention any other highlights for you that really stood out today or anything that you’re kind of excited to go home and explore more. I think all of the different Avenues. [06:56] That people are discussing today are fascinating and I think one of the more fun things that I’ve heard is return on investment is not always paired with expectations. And I think that’s just sort of part of the fun of exploring this new topic, right? You can invest a huge amount of money into creating something that is just the same process now with AI [07:22] versus somebody doing something tiny and one corner of your organization suddenly that blows up and becomes something that changes the entire way. You do business. It’s never going to be what you expect and I think we’re going to see fundamental ways changes to the way we interact with each other and our customers based on this new technology. [07:44] Well, thank you so much, Nevada for being here for providing your Insight and hope you enjoy the rest of the events. [07:52] or do it [08:02] Kelly yeah, nice to talk to you again likewise Mark. So we were on a panel this morning devoted to talking about how AI can add efficiency to the mlr process which of course is the process by which Pharma marketers get compliance approval for from medical legal and Regulatory for their content. Sometimes that’s an internal process. There’s also an external process of submitting items to the Food and Drug Administration, but the promise of AI holds holds a lot of potential for relieving the bottleneck and you all did a wonderful job of describing that bottle like from a volume perspective as well as just the sophistication of the type of marketing that now needs to get mlr approval with just the system was not designed, you know to sort of accommodate. So why don’t you just kind of ask you, you know, we had a panelists from various points on the AI adoption curve. You have experience from small biotech now large farmer. [09:03] Up centers of excellence in AI but were your main takeaways from from this morning’s talk. Yeah Mark, I think that this panel was critically important especially at this point in time a lot of organizations small and large have been making significant Investments for many years into digital transformation from a marketing perspective. The mlr process itself is one process a part of a much larger content supply chain workflow. [09:31] And the panel discussion today was really focused around. You know, how can AI improve mlr which is very important because from content creation to contents assembly. I think that most organizations have done a fantastic job at you know, bringing the right people the right tools the right processes the right data in to make the magic happen and really deliver with the customers want but when we kind of zoom out from a macro level the problem statement here of like, you know, you can only be as fast as your slowest part mlr our colleagues, they’re truly they’re really struggling and they’re really struggling because of the volume of content and the speed that marketers really need these approvals so that way we can really deliver that right message at the right time. [10:18] Um, one of the main takeaways is the industry is all in this together. [10:24] And the mlr process is one of the most well-defined processes that Pharma has and it protects us, you know from any risk and make sure that all of the information is correct that we’re delivering to our Healthcare Providers and to our patients. [10:45] However, the process that was designed and all the policies around it and the adherence to the process was designed decades ago before the different AI Technologies really existed and today with you know, some of the newest most talked about AI Technologies such as a large language models and now the phenomenon of large action models and reinforcement learning being able to look at texts and look at video and actually have machines being assistance to a human maybe the mlr process was overlooked for a reason and I think it was probably a bit of Fate that we’re at this point right now where we don’t need to be piloting. How do we optimize mlr like this 100% needs to be a priority and has to be included in the long-term strategy for all organizations digital transformation. [11:46] It was also interesting to hear you talk about why mlr has not been prioritized up till now. What were some of your main thoughts there? Yeah. I mean the real why. [11:55] Is Big process? [11:56] Was very well defined and the ways of working and the people involved and a lot of the duplication that happens between marketing between agency between the mlr colleagues. It was just how we’ve always done it and I think it’s become something that we’re just conditioned to and we’re used to and it just wasn’t [12:20] it just wasn’t a clear problem when the original marketing technology digital Transformations were initiated over the past, you know, five to ten years sure. So prioritize mlr, you know, and [12:37] Modernize it, you know for today in terms of the volume and the sophistication of marketing content. That’s that’s got to go through mlr approval. What were some of your other takeaways? Yeah. I mean another takeaway, you know, we we polled, you know, all of the all of the attendees in the session on you know, how long end to end does it take you to get through mlr and we know that it takes between 26 and 55 days to get you know, a medium level of complexity asset through the process and that’s just not acceptable anymore. So one of the major takeaways as we shouldn’t be measuring the mlr process and days anymore. We really need to strive and figure out how do we get it down into minutes and how do we leverage technology? And how do we move into a more Atomic component based approach developing content? So that way we’re able to move into a more. [13:34] You know real-time Auto approval. [13:38] State and it’s possible. It’s not going to happen overnight maybe in the you know the next few years, but I’m absolutely optimistic with the technology and the advancements in AI that we will get there sure. I think most of the crowd when we pulled them. So it was taking almost two months for mlr review and content creation together. So and then what we ask the follow-up question, what was your aspiration not surprisingly no one was saying on the on the long end of the spectrum everybody wants short or they want quicker turn around and you’re saying ideally it can be done in minutes. That’s your that’s your aspiration. Absolutely. That’s really interesting. Okay, and I know you had a cross Brent conference here. It’s mmm joint together with the cars from Pierre week and campaign us. So we’re getting a little bit of a comms audience as well as the mainstream advertising audience. So there’s there’s people here from the world of of calms as well as ad tech and and the mainstream ad agencies. You had a chance to sit on a couple of those tracks. What were some of your takeaways [14:38] of interest there [14:39] Yeah, so the sessions have been fantastic this event was so well put together and you really brought in a lot of subject matter experts from many different Industries. Like you mentioned I had the opportunity to sit in on, you know, Sam’s Club and Siemens and understand like, you know how they’re leveraging some of the listening and AI tools to really understand the questions that their consumers are asking and they’re being able to you know, make sure that all their messaging strategies are extremely, you know, precise and answering the most important questions that their customers are asking I think that’s something that you know Healthcare and Pharma we can you know, scale that into our industry leveraging some of these other, you know, partnership or partner ability opportunities that I’ve been exposed to here have the opportunity to sit and listen to an NYU Professor talked about kind of the, you know, neurology side of behaviors of humans and sure AI can absolutely help when it comes to maybe not having [15:39] Sit there and watch hours and hours and hours of tape and it can actually, you know, actually watch that tape and give you as you know, a marketer or any type of content creator the ability to like understand people’s behaviors and why they do things and what was you know, what really resonated with me and it’s something that you know, I frequently remind myself of technology and AI it’s not going to replace the humans. It can’t replace humans. So it is so important to still maintain doing our small round tables and talking to people and not just depending on AI tools to give us answers or to create strategies. They should really just be used more as a assistant. So just being reminded of you know, keeping it simple and like not forgetting about the base six and making sure that we genuinely are talking with your customers and generating the those behavioral realizes for yourself. Yeah, right. That’s a really good takeaway. Was there something that sort of surprised? [16:39] You or scared you or you know something that you heard so far. I think it’s not that it was within one of the session but in the networking opportunities, they’re still a sense of [16:53] Not understanding or maybe being hesitant to technology and I think that one of the sessions brought up it’s really important that you have diverse teams. There’s a lot of different Generations that are now in the workplace certain Generations are a bit more digital first than others and I think that you have to make sure that you bring diversity into your teams because someone you know who might be gen Z coming out of school like that. They might be able to use Ai and actually teach us like we have to be lifelong Learners and we can’t be afraid of Technology. We have to embrace it Healthcare and Pharma does amazing things on the clinical side with AI but on the calms and on the marketing side, I think that you know technology is not a nice to have it’s a must have and we have to embrace it and we have to maximize it sure that’s refreshing. You hear that from from you coming on the former marketing side, which hasn’t always embraced technology with open arms, but just one last question to let you go. Just kind of like [17:53] Your general sort of takeaways from today your general Impressions. Yeah. I mean I think that today. [17:59] is me a lot of [18:01] Miss them. I’ve been deftly on more of the Forefront and you know a bit of a disruptor when it comes to trying to challenge the status quo within Pharma. I’m personally a millennial. So I was always very optimistic on cheese. Like there’s so many ways that we could be more efficient and I built a career out of this and it’s been a you know, a really [18:24] fulfilling experience and you know, you have to have a lot of grit and you know being here today like looking back when I first, you know, join Farm about 10 years ago, like having a conference dedicated to AI today and understanding the impact that can have and the value we can bring into the organization and the excitement here. It makes me excited. I feel like we are all really fortunate to be in the right place at the right time right now and being able to embrace this and I can’t wait to see what the future looks like. I certainly think that you know, it’s a bit of the Steve Jobs in the first computer came out like the computer came out to do a job, right and now computers. I mean they’re they surround us everywhere. So let’s see where AI takes us. The future is certainly has so much potential. [19:15] Indeed and with people like you at the helm, I think it’s going to be a bright future for the industry indeed Kelly. Thank you so much for joining us. Really? Appreciate it. Thank you Mark. You got it. [19:26] That’s it for this week. The mmm podcast is produced by Bill Fitzpatrick Gordon failure leshak, and Jack O’Brien. Our theme music is by cesium sewn rate review and follow every episode wherever you listen to podcasts new episodes out of your week, and be sure to check out our website. Mmm online.com for the top news stories and farmer marketing.