The Future of Life Sciences: The Expanding Role of AI

Executive summary

• The life sciences industry faces both intense pressures and immense scientific and technological opportunities, with economic volatility and profitability challenges highlighting the need for innovation.

• Advancements in AI, including Generative AI and Agentic AI, offer a powerful way to drive growth and efficiency and reinvent disruptive business models.

• This blog post also examines how AI is transforming new product pipelines and core business processes and discusses how Accenture and Snowflake’s strong partnership is leading the industry in novel AI use cases.

The life sciences industry stands at a pivotal moment, grappling with unprecedented challenges and monumental opportunities. At Snowflake and Accenture, through our close partnership in the industry, we're seeing four major trends reshaping the life sciences landscape. Economic and geopolitical factors are creating high volatility, disrupting global supply chains, while stagnation in growth and intense profitability pressures are putting revenue at risk due to pricing shifts. Yet, amid these headwinds, advancements in science are driving future growth, with a staggering 78% of new growth expected to come from new scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, the convergence of technologies is leading to the reinvention of business models, where the application of large language models alone could transform 40% of hours across existing processes.

AI: Reimagining life sciences from research to reality

The impact of AI, and especially Generative AI, at this moment in time for the industry is profound. We see two critical areas where it's making a difference: accelerating new product pipelines and reimagining core business processes. Life sciences companies are increasingly prioritizing technology-led transformations, leveraging AI to drive efficiency, increase productivity and modernize at scale.

Overcoming the hurdles to Generative AI adoption

While the promise of Generative AI is immense, we know that adopting it comes with its share of challenges. Our clients often grapple with four key hurdles:

• Balancing "make versus buy" decisions: Deciding whether to build solutions in house or acquire them.

• Scaling up adoption: Moving beyond pilots to widespread implementation.

• Finalizing the ecosystem: Identifying and integrating the right technologies and partners.

• Acquiring talent: Finding and nurturing the specialized skills needed for AI.

Perhaps the most crucial, and often overlooked, aspect is change management. Generative AI demands new ways of working, with the potential to unblock last-mile consumption of data insights, but successful adoption hinges on helping people adapt to and embrace these shifts.

For organizations just embarking on their AI journey, our advice is clear: be bold and try out the technology. Focus on quick wins and "no-regret" moves that deliver immediate value. Engage with multiple partners to broaden your perspective and capabilities, and always maintain an open feedback loop to learn and continuously improve.

The dawn of Agentic AI: A new frontier for productivity

We're also witnessing an exciting evolution in AI, moving from traditional AI to Generative AI and now to Agentic AI. What makes Agentic AI so groundbreaking is its proactive nature. AI agents by design are capable of performing full cycles of sensing, analyzing, deciding and acting autonomously. Our clients are already exploring how to develop them to execute threads of activities in both core business functions and horizontal areas. ​​For instance, they’re driving the next level of performance in core “IT4IT” chains of activities through Agentic AI use cases for autonomous IT operations or IT landscape-validated state proofing.

We believe that Agentic AI capabilities will fundamentally reshape how we work, even more so than Generative AI has already. For regulated industries such as life sciences, this presents a unique advantage. Their inherently structured approach to compliance and documentation gives them a significant head start in building the robust knowledge graphs that AI agents will operate on. In fact, we see immense potential for Agentic AI to drive unprecedented productivity in compliance and regulatory steps, given their highly documented, checklist-based nature.

We're committed to helping life sciences organizations harness the power of data and advanced AI, including Agentic AI, to not only navigate today's complexities but thrive in the future.

The Snowflake and Accenture partnership: A deeper look 

Snowflake and Accenture share a truly special partnership that spans many dimensions across the life sciences industry. We operate as a scale partner across the enterprise, and together we're dedicated to delivering AI and data solutions for our clients, forging deep expertise across a breadth of industry use cases.

Our joint efforts are focused on helping our life sciences clients modernize their enterprise-wide data strategy. This means helping clients ensure their data is fully managed and multi-cloud-platform portable. We also collaboratively leverage our combined solutions, products and experts to drive powerful insights for our clients and set the necessary groundwork for enterprise-wide, production-scale AI engineering and AI-native data collaboration.

We're actively engaged with numerous life sciences clients across multiple continents and at various stages of adoption. Each client’s use case is very specific to them — whether it's in biopharma drug discovery and development, clinical research and operations, manufacturing and supply chain optimization or commercial excellence — and we have concrete proof points from our work with them. Additionally, as partners, Snowflake and Accenture are jointly and periodically validating where to best invest our resources for maximum benefit in the industry, with a commitment to co-creating and co-leading the adoption of industry-leading intelligent technologies.

Unlock the future of life sciences with advanced AI and data strategies. Download the “Snowflake Life Sciences Playbook to AI, Apps and Data Collaboration” ebook or contact us to discuss your specific needs.