Industry Outlook 2025: The Rising Prominence of AI in Pharma

“Undoubtedly, 2024 was the year of AI [artificial intelligence] in pharma,” notes Ben Sidders, chief scientific officer for Biorelate—an AI platform company that provides data solutions to pharma companies—when discussing the key trends of the year. This trend has manifested in several ways, he notes, from the rise of AI-first companies that have shifted the way drug discovery is undertaken, to the increasing use of AI across traditional pharma processes, and the rise of digital health and the use of real-world data.

“AI will obviously continue to rise in prominence and to dominate, and I think this will be driven by three major areas,” Sidders continues. “So, the first is data and its availability, but also the maturation of pharma’s data strategies. [… The] second area is really around the models that are available. I think the realization has been quite clear that causality is key, and so we need to develop a move towards [AI] approaches that embed the underlying causality […]. And then finally, I think probably it's around the culture. So, the culture of these pharma companies will continue to develop in 2025, really adopting a new paradigm driven by a top down mandate, where AI is put at the center of the research programs, [and] also of organizational design […]. And I think if all of this happens, then we'll actually start to realize some of the value and the efficiencies from AI, and I think that evolutionary process of adopting AI into pharma will really start to fulfill the promise, and maybe not all of the hype, but some of the hype that's been around over the last few years.”

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About the speaker

Dr. Ben Sidders, Chief Scientific Officer for Biorelate

Dr. Ben Sidders is the Chief Scientific Officer for Biorelate, which is an AI platform company that provides data solutions to pharma companies. Ben has 20 years of experience in industry, working for both AstraZeneca and Pfizer, most recently as the head of data science for AstraZeneca oncology research functioning.