Healthcare and life sciences are entering a new phase of digital transformation, powered by the rise of agentic artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional AI tools that focus on prediction or classification, agentic AI combines decision-making and tool use, giving researchers an assistant that can automate labor-intensive tasks, parse vast data sets and accelerate discovery.

Ryan Ries, chief AI and data scientist at Mission Cloud Services, a CDW Company and Amazon Web Services Premier Tier Partner, says the technology is emerging as a tool to help pharmaceutical companies speed up research on drug development and design.

“Researchers are using search agents to sift through data and surface similar information,” says Ries, who has a doctorate in biophysical chemistry. “They’re looking at things like pathways and drug targets or how a compound interacts with cells.”

Those researchers are then directing the agent to find additional papers so they can focus on deeper analysis.

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