I’m a dinosaur……and I think I've seen my extinction event!

My first job in the industry was working as a consultant at Pfizer’s headquarters in Manhattan.?The year was 1995 and my job was to provide one-on-one 'white glove' IT support to the executives.?On many occasions, I would be summoned up to the 37th floor to ‘help Dr. Keating with his Excel macros’ or ‘help Dr. Brady with his mail merge” (sadly in 1995, it was almost always a ‘he’ in senior leadership roles).?I would enter the office and after closing the door, he would turn to me with a sheepish look and say, “they just gave me this computer and I have no idea what to do with it or how to turn it on”.?I have spent countless hours playing Solitaire with senior Pfizer executives teaching them how to use a mouse for the first time….or showing them how to open an email.??Now I appreciate that this sounds kinda pathetic in 2023 but for these executives, they had been extremely successful over 20-, 30- or 40-year careers - leading massive global teams by dictating memos to be typed up and by holding conference calls.?Suddenly a new and disruptive technology had come along and some struggled to adapt…..some were too proud to ask for help…..and others just refused to even try.?But this technology did not replace them – for those who were able to use it and integrate it into how they operated, it made them exponentially more productive.?I have often wondered what the technology would be where I would feel like those mid-1990s Pfizer execs.?I think I found it…..

I spent this week up at the DIA Global Annual Meeting in Boston with 5000+ clinical trialists, regulators and external partners – all focused on how to streamline, expedite and overhaul clinical research to be quicker and more patient-centric.?Throughout much of the conference, the prevailing theme with attendees and exhibitors was how generative AI is rapidly changing how we discover and develop new medicines.?Now before you stop reading because you are sick of reading blogs about how ChatGPT has changed someone’s life, please hear me out.?This blog is not for those of you are enthusiastically using these type of AI tools….or for those of you who are experimenting but worried about the potential abuse or unintended consequences.?This blog is for those who think this will not impact you……or who are scared to try and begin to use them….or think they are overhyped and will have as much impact on your job as TikTok did.?For those of you who know me, I am hardly an early adopter of new technologies but let me give you a couple of applications just within clin ops (not even beginning to outline how to manage patient diagnosis and treatment):

• Explaining Complex Concepts in Simple Language.?Taking pages of complex medical information and using these tools to instantly simplify for patients.?Or taking complex regulatory requirements and simplifying them to explain to staff new to clinical research.?
• Employee Performance Reviews.?Input all the multi-source feedback on one of your team and it will consolidate and create a near-perfect end-of year summary.?Or helping you overcoming writers block when you are struggling to more clearly communicate a development area.
• Running Organizational Meetings.?Creating questions for a facilitated discussion on topics like how to embed DEI in our hiring processes or how to mentor employees.?No need to spend hours searching for a best practice or facilitation guide.?
• Writing Blogs.?I swear I wrote this by myself….but I guess a really clever AI tool would say that too…..
• Simplifying Study Protocols.?Taking a study protocol and simplifying both the language as well as the activities from a study coordinator or patient perspective.
• Identifying Quality Incidents.?Ingesting text from emails and monitoring visit reports and identifying quality incidents or assisting in assessing performance of staff and how well they catch issues.?

I am sure you can think of countless more.?But my point is not about the specific use cases - we will figure out many more of these in the coming months. It is to ensure that ALL of us are actively engaging, learning, experimenting, and embracing these tools and not being afraid of them as our extinction event.?Sign up for an account on multiple tools.?Learn how to write prompts and then adapt them to get the output you want.?Experiment with basic questions just like a mid-90s exec playing Solitaire.??Share your successes and your failures.?Most of all, don’t be embarrassed to ask for help.?Even the loudest and most annoying advocates of these tools have only been using them for 7 months!!!