A recent survey has found that pharma marketing and promotional review professionals are skeptical of the outputs of artificial intelligence models, with 65% of respondents saying they don’t trust the technology to create regulatory compliance submissions.
Klick Health and Momentum Events collected responses from 40 people in the U.S. for the survey. Their widespread distrust of using AI to generate regulatory compliance submissions reflected a laundry list of concerns about the veracity of the tech’s outputs and the opacity of the processes that models use to generate materials.
The survey revealed 40% of respondents are concerned about hallucinations, a term for the propensity of large language models such as ChatGPT to fabricate information. Other top concerns included the lack of audit trails and explainability, named as issues by 20% and 12.5% of respondents, respectively.
“These findings reinforce the critical need for healthcare marketing compliance tools that provide both visibility and accountability in their decision-making,” Alfred Whitehead, executive vice president of applied sciences at Klick, said in a release.
Respondents were more open to using AI in other contexts—for example, half of the industry professionals surveyed said they trust AI for reviewing materials. Conducting reviews may be seen as a lower-risk, less-sensitive task than creating regulatory review packages and submissions, leading respondents to be less wary of the risk of AI making things up in that context.
Almost 38% of respondents said their companies review more than 100 assets each quarter. At the other end of the scale, 15% of people said they review fewer than 25 assets per quarter. The volume of assets reviewed at some companies points to the potential for technologies that save time or effort to impact operations.
And companies are pursuing those efficiency gains. While only one of the 40 respondents said they have fully deployed AI for asset review, most of the others surveyed said they are working toward that goal. The survey found 55% of organizations are currently exploring AI for review purposes, while another 25% of companies are already piloting AI, and 5% of organizations have partially deployed models. Just 12.5% of companies lack an AI project.
That lines up with the findings of another recent survey from Define Ventures, which found that pharmas are overwhelmingly looking to roll out AI across their organizations—specifically in “low-risk, high-efficacy” areas. Around 70% of pharma leaders said in that survey that they view AI as an “immediate priority,” and more than 80% of respondents said their companies are increasing their AI budgets either “somewhat” or “significantly.”