How Technology Will Disrupt the Way Companies Innovate | Fortune Global Forum 2019

okay we've been talking about innovation at these summits the for years and years I feel like I've just like step back into the future we're on the we're on the beginning of a really it's all these things that we've been talking about are on our doorstep and happening right now so this is going to be an exciting panel so a boss I wanted to start with you at Novartis there's somebody with a passion for public policy public health policy as well as running a major pharmaceutical company you talk about reimagining medicine what does that mean you know as a physician it's been an extraordinary to see the speed of innovation now we see in our sector if you go back a hundred years we used to think of medicines as chemicals and these chemicals of course led to dramatic improvements in life expectancy we moved to large molecules in the 1980s and 90s antibodies now suddenly we're in a world where we can start to think about therapy is where we take cells out of your own body reprogram themselves put them back in and maybe cure your or your child's cancer gene therapies where we can correct elements of the genome that have gone wrong and what makes me really excited is it creates the opportunity to say look we were able to bring life expectancy up from 25 30 years of life a hundred years ago to now 70 80 90 depending on where in the world you live and now we can live in a world where we even take on some of the greatest challenges it's like cancer like genetic diseases hopefully Alzheimer's so I think each one of these eras has led to an opening of more possibilities and right now with cell therapies gene therapies and digital as well and AI I think it's opening up a whole set so let's drill down on this just a bit let's just take a I we're in medicine is that helpful and how is it helpful and where it is it less helpful you know I see a few stages for how AI is gonna transform how we find and get medicines to people first it from an operational standpoint is clearly the doors are wide open how we run our clinical trials how we find patients how we with patience this is here and now and that I see is an immediate impact and how we can speed up finding new medicines then there's the whole world of can we actually understand human biology and there I would I have a bit of humility in the face of how hard it is to find a drug when you think about it every one of us is made up of about 40 trillion cells every one of those cells has a trillion molecules so the complexity is staggering ai is gonna help us but first we have to get great datasets organize that data so it's gonna be a long journey I think we have to go on it but it's not it's not gonna be overnight so David Abney CEO of ups something that is overnight and I know you are not what I meant but that was we are we've been talking about drones for years and you have the first FAA commercial license to use drones tell us about that and how that's going to change our lives I will well we're in the middle of a digital transformation we saw a few years ago what technology was going to allow us to do and how it was going to change our industry we had to make a quick choice do we want to be on the leading edge of that or do we want let others kind of take it over then we try to catch up so obviously the answer was to to really act like an entrepreneurial company and really focus on what we think we do best and we need to have our first drone airline which we call ups flight forward that we were going to have to work very closely at the FAA we are an airline we know their processes their language their procedures their expectations and we knew we would be competing with some companies there weren't airlines that maybe wouldn't understand that process so we thought that would work in to our advantage so we were the first one to to get the certification and now we have to make sure that we're the first one to scale and scale on a Bradford way so that's the notes stepping okay I'm gonna drill down here I'm at my I'm at my house in Washington DC when is that package going to be at my delivered to my doorstep by drone and how is that gonna happen am I gonna get hit in the head or how does that work got to worry about my dog I don't think you do have to worry about that obviously it'll be a step at a time and if the first step we're doing controlled deliveries and these are commercial flights and we've done well over 1500 of them already this isn't about the future and so we're picking up and his samples and it's free in healthcare and it would be samples and blood tests and urine tests and stuff like that and pick it up from one part of a healthcare complex some of these are just enormous and take it to where it's analyzed in the other and so you have landing zones back and forth and you're landing on the ground and then doing this and then but we're also experimenting we're doing tests with actual residential deliveries which is what you're talking about backstage you promised me a year away yes okay okay when I said a year away I wasn't talking about to your house I was saying or she is good what I was saying that's going to take the FAA probably a year or so to finish the regulations on how we would do this in the test residential deliveries that we've already done and it's from one of our customers a CVS drugstore to a retirement village or to an individual house is you'd have the drone that would pick up the shipment and a landing zone at the CVS then hover within about 20 feet I was going to point at the lights but the lights at this place are a lot higher than 20 feet but however 20 feet my tether will come down and has come down and the package is released on the ground and then the tether releases very quickly the tether would just be withdrawn back into the that's still Boyd hitting someone on the head landing on someone's dog this tether it would be a very slow controlled delivery and then the only way it would hit you in heads you'd have to dive under I don't think you would do that so you know one of the things David David and I were talking about backstage is how actually these drones are helping us also reimagine access to medicines both of us work with a company called zipline in Africa which is now really transforming how medicines are delivered in Rwanda and Ghana to people who can't access the medicines and it's happening at scale I was there in Ghana last week and there are our entire regions of the country that get their medicines now entirely through drone delivery through parachutes and we're working with the country to tackle a disease like sickle cell disease using this drone technology but it's extraordinary to see how it's happening so quickly and tackling some of the big healthcare challenges the world faces I'm sorry in the developing world and and where else you know I think it'll spread there their ambition is to move across Africa and in Southeast Asia India as well in rural parts of India but I think it shows that these problems that we've been struggling with for I worked in as a public health physician in these places long ago this the challenges we've been facing for decades can now be overcome really quickly by drone tech and not just the drone technology it's all the data science behind that you know where every medicine is gone you know the inventory across the entire supply chain you know did the medicine actually get to the clinic instead of it was it lost in the distribution chain there's a lot of power to this technology to address some pretty big problems and what it's really focused on is is really time-sensitive urgent deliveries so I'm not one that believes that anytime in the near future that paper towels and napkins are going to be delivered by drones everybody's houses we're gonna have a hundred thousand is my dinner party I'm feeding for each other when you think about a very customized drug that that it's real expensive in some cases but it's time-sensitive and and the patient needs that immediately that's where we see the first uses that's why we concentrated on healthcare and life sciences and then it will continue to spread out what we also see is a combination of the UPS package car and we've already tested this too so again it's not future and we have a docking station at the top of the car and multiple drones will be dispatched from the packaged car as the drivers making their deliveries and maybe doing the more rural routes and coming back so it'll be a combination of our drivers and in technologies so there's a lot of uses for it so you think this is gonna transform public health in developing countries I think it'll trends I think it has the potential to really support getting access to medicines particularly the next wave of innovative medicines which is I think our goal has to be moving away from you know older medicines or medicines just from infectious disease to chronic diseases as well and I think getting this kind of resupply chain will really help I also think it could be very important when we think about expanding these personalized therapies where the shipment really matters and when you think about when we take on cancer and a child with our cell therapy you know we're taking cells from that child we're reprogramming those cells we're sending them back that shipment has to make it it has to make it on time because the child's life hangs in the balance and we know 90% of the time we can hopefully achieve a cure so it shows why you know to companies like ours need to work hand in hand to make sure these technologies like our medicines get to patients who need them so please get your questions ready to join in this fascinating conversation vas and I wanted to ask both of you this but let me start with you the collecting enough data for AI to have an impact on safe cell therapy that requires a lot of personal information you talk about personal therapies we're talking about personal information and that's colliding I imagine with data privacy concerns how do you think about that I think we're entering a whole whole new world now given that the potential for human data and clinical data and laboratory data to help us you know of course treat patients better find new patient populations as we discuss where they'll find new drugs I think companies have to put very transparently how are they going to use the data you know we have 500 clinical trials ongoing at any given point in time we've made a commitment to always keep only anonymized data in our own data lakes that we only use those data sets in ways that we've had informed consent so we take a pretty strict view the challenge of course is as you've seen in recent press coverage that there are companies to take a very broad view of how to use human patient data including de-identified data which of course opens up a whole set of ethical questions when you can actually link the diagnosis to the identity of the patient that changes the whole the whole ballgame I think we probably will eventually have a world where we have global standards put in place around how this data can and can't be used but for now I think it's incumbent on companies to be put out their policies and really build trust because the worst thing that what happened is it happened is we just have a shutdown of how data flows then I think medical innovation would really would really slow down yes AI for us it's the same thing we deliver 20 million packages a day so think about all the data that we collect and we follow the same policy by the way and we certainly don't mind this data and turn it over to others but it allows us to be so much more effective in our planning and in our routing and we have a hundred and twenty five thousand drivers it's how you brought those drivers they can be so important and through this system which is called Orion wherever to make were able to make decisions that are much more than the human mind could ever do on a day-to-day basis so we'll go to route we're one of our outstanding drivers that's been delivering for 25 years the first thing they tell you is you can't improve the way over no computer no system can ever do that and then we'll go in and in average we can take six or seven miles out of the route better service at the same time and woof-woof AI it continues to learn on top of itself so you're making better and better decisions every day I love that example I think for companies the first place to look is within your operations we now deploy AI managing all our clinical trials so we find AI predicts the enrollment of our clinical trials and what actions we need to take better than human beings for finance for sales and cash flow now we use AI to predict all of our in line brand sales and cash flow again better than humans our sales reps how they spend their day to the similar to your drivers we use AI for that these are places where the data is really well understood well curated you can architect it and you can build algorithms that pretty clearly show you if you do this you'll get this result it gets harder when you want to try to find a new medicine for Alzheimer's disease when we don't even understand the basis of Alzheimer's disease yeah that's good point on that neurological diseases neuro brain sorry questions right here just identify yourself and make it brief so we can get lots of questions in thank you hi Judy has from cop relief you're talking about using AI and Google was recently using AI to do recruiting and so they trained up their algorithm and before you know what they were only hiring and interviewing males because that's who they had hired in the past for engineering and STEM jobs so do you see any biases in using AI or have you come across that in the AI that you've undertaken so far I can start and you know their bias in AI in in medicine is a huge topic if you if you have a data set that's predominantly Caucasian and then you try to apply it to other ethnic groups then you find that there's a lot of missed diagnosis or missed opportunities so yeah I think you you you I always think about you know there's kind of there's the big data and then there's the small data and you need to kind of think have both together and think consciously about what you're doing and not just blindly apply apply AI that's the only way around it at this point is I mean in theory if your datasets are big enough in you can get around some of these problems I think in clinical data that tends to be hard because you're working on relatively small small data sets so I think it remains a challenge the one place I've seen it's not a challenge though is in imaging data so where AI seems to just work better is whether it's an image of a skin lesion and x-ray a CT scan an MRI where AI just seems to be better than the human eye consistently at finding insights that's where we see a real power other areas I think your point is a very good one we have to be cautious about bias and the algorithm and David I also ask you to address like as a major employer how do you see AI impacting the workforce and potentially displacing jobs right and oh well I'll start with what you were saying now go right to that and I'll do it quickly so we can get a lot of questions but what you pointed out and this by the way is not a taking a shot at any company that's had these issues because I don't know enough about their particular situations but where it works the best is where you take the data you take AI but you also take data mining scientists people that really understand what we're trying to do and you make sure that your core values as a company are ingrained in everything you do and diversity inclusion is certainly there and so you have to have that as they check all through the process and it's all those things are just very personal to us and when it comes to how AI can affect jobs and people we have 480 thousand employees across the across the world they're very important to us I was a package handler and a driver it at one point in time and so we don't see AI replacing all these jobs we think it's going to be a combination of jobs and a combination of AI that enables our people to be more effective the jobs are going to change and we're gonna have to do an excellent job of training people to be able to handle jobs of the future instead of some of the more repetitive jobs that may exist today so but will your workforce shrink well your number of employees shrinking the key to making sure that doesn't happen is to grow the business at the same time if you were just going to concentrate on technologies and and not using technologies to grow your business obviously there would be the more effective you get the more that that you'd be able to do with less jobs but if you're growing your business at the same time which is our focus we don't believe we will see that effect so that's one of the big challenges what about sustainability obviously people are very concerned about climate change now what how are you using innovation to improve your company's performance there start with you David all right whoa sustainability is very important to us I told you how many charts we have on the road we also have about almost 600 planes in the air so we do emit a lot of carbons and we've had to take responsibility for that and we have the largest former private company there may be some government agencies or something before a private company we have the largest alternative field fleet in in our industry and and there's no silver bullets there's not one technology that works we call it a rolling laboratory and so we have electric we have electric hybrid hydraulic hybrid and then all forms of renewable natural gas and liquefied natural gas and all these different areas and our goal is by 2025 coming quickly right 2025 that we will reduce absolute Greenheck greenhouse gas emissions by 12% and also by and that's with growing the business at the same time so absolute not relative and then the second part of that is that that 40% of the fuel that we burn in our ground fleet would be some kind of alternative fuel and so moving away further and further from diesel and gasoline so or something that we're taking very seriously you know on our side first I have a reflection that as your workforce becomes more and more millennial this becomes so fundamental I think for motivating the workforce that's one striking thing I've observed in the role we've taken the route of trying to create some very hard targets a little very different business model than David's but we've set targets of scope one and two to be completely carbon neutral by 2025 and then scope one two and three fifty percent by 2030 for similar reductions in water in waste we committed to be gender or equal in management as well within five years we signed up for LGBT I work for standards so we what we've tried to do is say in every major area let's give ourselves a hard target and let's track ourselves and whether or not we get there and we plan to actually publicly publish our scorecards as well to create accountability around these areas so as we finish up I want you each to give me one surprise innovation you see coming out in the near future boss one surprise innovation I see coming out in the news you know I think we will get to a point where we can use so called CRISPR technology to edit cells to take on and hopefully cure a whole range of disease whether those are things like sickle-cell disease or other hemoglobin based diseases or other things I see now our ability to do that has improved so much it's just a matter of time so we can really create a sustainable pipeline of cures I think that with technologies that are going to be continuing rolling out but time is not going to be near the value of the variable that it has been through the future you know with Hyperloop technologies with the airlines that I believe are really going to design much quicker planes and with the availability of drones that are not going to only move packages but move people you take that and with a ai and all the combinations of things time it's just not going to be the factor that it that it has been over the years things that used to take weeks that are now becoming days are going to become ours and it's going to continue to shrink and it will just affect basically every aspect of our life so it's it's going to be very exciting so it didn't really look forward to fascinating and transformative thank you both for taking us into the future with you over [Applause]

Channel: Fortune Magazine

Views: 940

Keywords: Journalism Franchise, Fortune, business, wall street, finance, tech, technology, patients, doctors, UPS, Novartis

Id: Jit4cwS0YSU

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2019