Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data will be the two most impactful technologies for the pharmaceutical industry for the fourth year in a row in 2023, according to a survey by GlobalData. The leading data and analytics company notes that 39% of healthcare industry professionals in the survey believed that AI would be the emerging technology bringing the greatest impact on the pharmaceutical industry in 2023, followed by Big Data with 27% of the selection.

GlobalData’s latest report, ‘The State of the Biopharmaceutical Industry – 2023’, reveals that AI and Big Data were trending as the two most disruptive emerging technologies since 2020, with a significant margin from the third choice in all four years.

Elton Kwok, Market Research Manager in Pharma at GlobalData, comments: “Drug-developing and other processes are complex and highly structured in the pharmaceutical industry. The processes generate a vast amount of data, especially in the current digital age; however, this data can be useless or meaningless if it is not properly analyzed. AI not only can help process the data more efficiently, saving time and labour cost; it can also produce analysis more accurately since it feeds on high-quality data, which comes from the proprietary datasets.”

Kwok concludes: “It might take some time for AI and Big Data to display their true power, but the two technologies together are expected to play an important role in the industry, in terms of optimizing the entire pharmaceutical value chain. This powerful duo can be applied to optimize a wide range of processes, from drug design to end-user reach.”