Zeiss leveraged its data situated on Veeva Systems’ PromoMats, an application focused on managing the lifecycle of promotional materials across the life sciences industry, to build a proof-of-concept Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)-based platform in partnership with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to simplify content creation and personalisation.
Speaking at the 2024 Veeva MedTech Summit, which took place on 5-7 November in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Dr Jochen Tham, head of digital customer experience at Zeiss Medical Technology, spoke about the key things the company learned during the development of the app.
“At the outset, we thought AI would fix our content generation. But while it will fix certain steps where AI is especially well-suited, it will not fix your end-to-end content journey,” said Tham.
“Certain topics can be sped-up enormously by applying AI to them. And this has been the learning cycle; it's not an end-to-end solution, and the way AI will do things is different from the way that you have learned in the past. You have some prompting capabilities. It's easy to generate variations, so you'll have different approaches than you had in the past when doing things manually. That's the change of AI, but overall, it will not solve your end-to-end process.”
Tham notes that an increase in data tends to lead to more content generation, with companies wishing to apply that data to their promotional efforts around customer communication.
“Having all this data changes the communication massively, since you then have to adapt to the different roles of your customers, to the different languages, as well as to behavioural data that you get with your marketing automation.
“And this really multiplies efforts towards content generation.”
Tham goes on to say that the basis of the problem, and one in which GenAI can help, is that companies have a lot of data and see an opportunity in leveraging and using it in their content generation efforts, but at the same time, they have complex internal processes and may not be clear about how to use the data they have to meet this opportunity.
“You have the business opportunities, but you still have to maintain a certain budget in order to fill a perfect customer experience, which means no one wants to open an email that is addressed to all doctors in the world. You have to make sure that such communications are calibrated per areas like country and speciality of what a promotional communication is trying to address.”
Having met with local marketeers to understand what their needs and pain points were around content creation, Tham discussed why Veeva Vault acted as the cornerstone for which its AI application could be built on.
“We knew that all the approved documents and approved texts were stored in the Vault. We also knew that all imagery will still be stored in Veeva as kind of the baseline.
“So, this gave us the regulatory approved ingredients that could be used as prompts into our AI model, and this is where the AI needs to sit on something, and that was the Veeva system for us in this project.”
The overall aim of Zeiss’s tool is that it can be handed over to local marketeers in different countries, so they don't have to go into innumerable different tools, enabling them to create tactical campaigns to sell to their audience and to their local needs while still maintaining a proper regulatory foundation.
Tham concluded: “Our AI application is aimed at enabling the marketing into different countries without having to raise the skillset to become a marketing automation specialist, because that doesn't make sense, and we hope that this will be the foundation that we can do global personalisation around in the future.”
Speaking with Medical Device Network at the event sidelines, Tham said the future need will be to communicate, market and engage with customers on the right time they are using material.
Tham explained: “In the past, marketing may have been a case of sending out something for general knowledge, and now we want to have real-time communication, too, that's meaningful for the doctor during his processes, and gets more into the work space of the doctor. I think that will be the future need we are pushing to as that's an area where you really need to get the data together.”
