By now, you’ve heard a lot about the potential of ChatGPT and open AI which is more generically called generative AI. The potential is enormous for sure, but like any other technology, we need to identify how to leverage it and how to get started. Here are just some ways generative AI can be applied in healthcare and life sciences settings as well as how to get started.

• Diagnose disease and disorders: Generative AI can generate high-res medical images and synthetic patient data which can be used to train machine learning models to recognize and diagnose, leading to earlier detections and treatments.
• Personalize medicine: Generative AI algorithms can analyze large amounts of data such as the relationship between genomics, conditions and drug-efficacy to identify optimal treatment plans.
• Drug discovery: Generative AI can quickly generate large quantities of electronic chemical representations, allowing for chemical structures to be built and tested in silico thus accelerating the drug discovery process.
• Accelerate clinical trials: Generative AI can speed up collection of clinical trials data and outcomes and allow faster advancement to next stages.
• Medical robotics: Generative AI can be used to generate simulations of medical procedures, which can be used to train medical robots for accuracy and efficiency of medical procedures, reducing the risk of complications.
• Predictive maintenance of medical devices: Generative AI can harvest data from medical devices to analyze and predict needed maintenance.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, generative AI will be producing 10 percent of all data (currently it is less than 1 percent) with 20 percent of all test data for consumer-facing use cases and by 2027, 30% of manufacturers will use generative AI to enhance their product development effectiveness.

How to get started

1. Keep trust at the core: Even as the current ChatGPT model (currently v3.5) is scaled, and the accuracy and relevancy of artificial intelligence improves, a human ‘copilot’ is essential. As Satya Nadella said, “AI is about alignment with human preferences and societal norms.”
2. Set the right foundation: Start simple in areas where you may have already deployed capability, like an existing chatbot. Select the use cases where introduction and integration of Open AI capabilities can be done in a modular and scalable way with continuous evaluation of the model’s performance.
3. Prepare your people: Generative AI is not all about cost cutting and automation. Change enablement will help users work iteratively from generated concepts that need to be tweaked, refined, enriched and approved. AI is the productive assistant, not the replacement.
4. Appoint responsible AI ambassadors: Select for specific use cases and consider the availability of quality, diverse data for the domain, and the ability to incorporate human subject matter expertise feedback (AI Ambassadors) for rapid, iterative re-training of the model.
5. Establish governance: Consider a centralized function to investigate, validate, refine and channel AI across your business. There needs to be a robust approach of transparency to and communication with customers, partners and employees on risks, limitations and uncertainties. Risk control and mitigation plans need to be aligned with the affected stakeholders and legal requirements.
6. Answer “Why Generative AI?”: Generative AI, as with all other technology trends, will only bring value if you understand why you are using it. What problem are you solving? Does the business case stack up? What outcomes and benefits do you really want to achieve? Being clear as to why this is good for your business and not just a thing to implement is fundamental to embracing generative AI.

Get started with generative AI now
Avanade has been working with OpenAI since its early integration with Microsoft. The AI models will become even smarter and more flexible and so organizations need to lay the groundwork and start testing now to leverage the best of generative AI in a responsible way.

Let’s get started, contact us.