Around the world, countless organizations are regularly making important decisions about how to best deploy AI across their operations. As a biopharmaceutical communications leader, I can tell you that we’re leveraging AI in our function, our company, and the broader health care industry in very dynamic ways.

At Merck, we’re using AI to help us discover, test, manufacture, and distribute a growing and robust portfolio of advanced medicines and vaccines. Big picture: we believe AI can help advance our purpose of using the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world. 

As a company, we’re building on a longstanding legacy of innovation in discovering new medicines and making them as widely available and accessible as possible. We view AI as another tool to advance this journey and accelerate our progress and value delivery to patients. Indeed, we are already using AI and genetic data to unlock a new generation of medicines. 

Within Corporate Affairs, we’re implementing a collective, strategic, and creative approach, leveraging AI to enhance our effectiveness and efficiency. At a strategic level, we’re deploying AI in three fundamental ways:

1. Tracking trends. In public relations and external affairs, we’re working with agency partners to leverage AI as an efficient, supplemental way to track reputational and societal issues that may be emerging or trending in various geographies around the world. As a global business, we need to know what’s happening around us, in every country and community we serve, all the time. This is no small task, but AI is helping us stay ahead of the curve.
2. Managing risk. In risk management, we’re leveraging AI to access incremental insights and analysis. While we continue to use more traditional and well-established risk management tools, we see the vast potential of AI technology to help us identify and analyze potential risks earlier than ever before. With the help of AI, we can more quickly and efficiently understand what’s happening, respond as needed and mitigate any possible negative impacts to our business or reputation. 
3. Supporting HI. AI is a dynamic and promising tool in the hands of humanity, one with the power to augment but never replace what I refer to and emphasize as HI (human intelligence). Some of the current hype around AI might suggest otherwise, but people are creating it, people are using it, and people will chart its future. For our part, we are tapping AI to free up more HI to take on more valuable and essential work, understanding that human intelligence, compassion, and care cannot be replicated or replaced. At a practical level, this means using AI to handle necessary, more straightforward tasks like creating meeting summaries and transcripts. We’re also leveraging an in-house AI tool as a thought partner to help us begin to craft narratives and avoid “blank page” paralysis. In media relations, we’re using AI to help leaders and spokespeople prepare for interviews and interactions by analyzing past stories to anticipate possible questions and areas of interest.

Today, the many unknowns around AI continue to spark fear in people and organizations. While this is understandable, we are choosing a different path, as a company and a function. To us, the potential benefits are just too great to stand on the sidelines. Instead, we are suiting up, stepping onto the field, acting with care and integrity, and implementing AI tools we believe can help us become a faster, more nimble, more efficient, and better company. 

The truth is, there’s a lot at stake. In our business, commercializing and bringing new treatments to patients can take 10 or more years. With the help of AI, we believe we could safely reduce the length of this process by 10 percent or more. Of course, such time savings would be beneficial to our business operations. However, even more importantly, expediting discovery and access would help our current and future patients and people around the world in acute need of life-changing and life-saving treatments. 

For us, that’s AI’s ultimate allure: the potential it offers to accelerate our ability to save and improve lives—and make a long-lasting positive difference for our patients, their families, and communities everywhere.

Cristal Downing is the executive vice president and chief communications & public affairs officer at Merck & Co., Inc., where she leads global communications, ESG efforts, and public affairs. A trusted advisor to Merck’s CEO and board, she has driven key initiatives, helping Merck earn accolades such as Fortune’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” and Newsweek’s “Most Responsible Companies.” Prior to Merck, she held leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson, where she managed communications during major global crises, including the Ebola and opioid crises. Downing has been named one of PRWeek’s 25 Women of Distinction and is a member of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women. She is a member of the USC Center for PR board of advisers.