Insights / Function
Posts carrying the Digital Transformation tag.
16 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
Last week, OpenAI made two moves in pharma within 48 hours — a flagship enterprise deal with Novo Nordisk and the launch of GPT-Rosalind — and the sequencing tells a deliberate story about how they're building a verticalised commercial infrastructure for life sciences. Having sat on the pharma buyer side, I break down what that cadence actually accomplishes.
14 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The hyperscalers are moving on drug discovery from every direction — Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio, and AWS just launched Amazon Bio Discovery with 40+ biological foundation models and integrated CRO partners. I still don't think the commercial model of pharma is under major threat, but the R&D part is clearly heating up massively.
17 Mar 2026 · 2 min read
Roche just announced pharma's largest hybrid-cloud AI factory, combining 2,176 new NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with an existing footprint that now exceeds 3,500 across the U.S. and Europe. But after years of watching these waves from inside pharma, the pattern is clear: the announcement is the easy part — the hard part is getting a large organization to actually change how it works.
3 Mar 2026 · 2 min read
Lab-in-the-loop gets talked about like it’s a model problem. The Roche/Novartis/Microsoft panel at health.tech | global summit Basel made the real point clearer: it’s an operating model problem. Most orgs are at Level 1–2 maturity, and that’s already useful — the first big value isn’t more hits, it’s faster, more confident kill decisions.
17 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Barely a month goes by without another billion-dollar AI discovery deal. But Takeda’s deal with Iambic isn’t about buying AI — it’s about acquiring binding intelligence. If it works, portfolio strategy shifts from option value through volume to option value through precision. The hard part is industrializing it.
15 Jan 2026 · 3 min read
I taught myself to code as a teenager, then spent 25 years away from it. This week I tried Claude Cowork — agentic AI for non-coders — and shipped a working Chrome extension over lunch.
9 Dec 2025 · 3 min read
Most AI drug discovery decks assume chemistry will keep up — but small molecule chemistry is still slow, manual, and spread across vendors, which is where a lot of AI 'efficiency' quietly disappears. I look at why fixing chemistry first may be the real unlock, and at the teams finally treating it as the main problem to solve.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an interesting talk by Roche's Pierre Fischer at BioTechX about their Data Mesh Operating model, covering domain ownership, a dedicated data marketplace, and how their platform reduced dashboard delivery from months to under a week.
25 Sept 2025 · 1 min read
The NHS is building AIR-SP, a national AI screening cloud that lets every trust plug into shared, real-world trials — starting with a breast-cancer study involving nearly 700,000 women. I think the overall approach makes sense, and I'd love to see other countries adopt something similar.
12 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
One of the biggest paradoxes in health data is that the most valuable insights are locked within the most sensitive and difficult-to-access information — a natural brake on innovation. I explore how the new Atropos Health and Databricks partnership takes a meaningful step toward solving this.
6 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
I share a quick update on ELSA, the FDA's new GenAI tool powered by Anthropic's Claude, and why I genuinely appreciate the FDA's decision to launch it despite early imperfections — because in healthcare, the biggest challenge with new tech isn't the technology, it's the change management.
27 Mar 2025 · 1 min read
Bill Gates predicts AI will replace many doctors and teachers within 10 years — but I think he may be underestimating how hard it is to fix systems that are already deeply broken. The technology will be ready; whether our dysfunctional healthcare systems will truly change is another question.
4 Mar 2025 · 1 min read
I've written several times about the power of AI agents, and I remain convicted that they will bring a fundamental shift in the way we work — including in healthcare — in the next five years. Healthcare may be sleeping on this shift, but the time to start exploring Agentic AI is now.
28 Jan 2025 · 2 min read
Everybody is talking about DeepSeek and how it just erased a sizeable chunk of NVIDIA's market cap — so I asked DeepSeek R1 itself what this means for AI's future energy consumption. The answer is nuanced, and I'm quite impressed with what it came up with.
9 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
I recently gave Gemini Deep Research a try after it came up in three separate conversations, and I'm glad I did. It produces detailed, long-form research papers with referenced sources in minutes — a great tool for quickly getting a comprehensive grasp of a new topic.
12 Dec 2024 · 1 min read
I've written before about AI agents and their transformative potential to take action rather than just engage in conversation — and the industry is rapidly validating this vision. From Meta's Yann LeCun to Salesforce's Marc Benioff to Anthropic's Claude, the signals are clear: if you're not experimenting with AI agents today, you're falling behind.
28 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
Just back from the Global Health Exhibition in Riyadh, I was inspired by the 'can-do' mindset driving healthcare advancements across the GCC. AI and digital health solutions are making a tangible difference in patient outcomes, and Saudi Arabia is fast becoming a global example of digital transformation in healthcare.
16 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
I fed Google's NotebookLM the entire 144-page EU AI Act and the result was a genuinely jaw-dropping podcast-style conversation that made learning feel effortless — this might just be the future of learning with GenAI.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
At BiotechX in Basel, Gilead's Patrick Loerch outlined what it really takes for AI to create value in biopharma — from systemic business impact to decision-making influence. I found his take on centralized vs. distributed AI models, regulatory coordination, and clinical value chain opportunities particularly compelling.
22 Jul 2024 · 1 min read
I've been following the debate around whether enabling patient interactions with GenAI is a net positive or negative — and a recent study suggests machines can sometimes outperform overworked hospital staff on empathy, understandability, and tone.
1 Jul 2024 · 1 min read
AI agents — systems that don't just converse but actually do things for you — are the next frontier after GenAI, and I predict we'll see the first pilots for administrative tasks in healthcare within the next 2–3 years.