A Live Conversation with Top 10 Pharma AI LeadershipBuild vs. Buy: Lessons From a Top 10 Pharma on Their AI Journey

Most Life Sciences teams can stand up a working AI demo in weeks. The hard part is proving it holds up under a clinician’s judgment and next quarter’s question, as one biopharma team learned firsthand.

Point a model at a data warehouse. Wire up a few agents. Within weeks, something is answering real questions in front of real executives. That part is easy. Proving the answer holds up next quarter, under a clinician’s review and a compliance officer’s sign-off, is not.

One biopharma team spent nearly a year building its own solution in-house, then decided what to keep building and where outside help earned its place. Ritu Saxena, PhD, Director of AI Agents at Merck, will share what her team navigated and what they’d do differently. John Wollman, General Manager, Marmot at Komodo Health, adds what he’s learned across the industry about what makes a demo enterprise-ready.

Join us on September 24, 11:30 am ET / 8:30 am PT to:

  • See exactly where a demo stops being enough, and a high-stakes decision needs more.
  • Hear one biopharma team’s real build vs. buy call, made after building in-house for nearly a year.
  • Learn what “trustworthy AI” actually requires: grounded, explainable, reproducible, verified, and governed.
  • Get unscripted answers from both sides of the table: the builder and the buyer.

Register for the Webinar on September 24

Speakers

Ritu Saxena, PhD, Merck

Ritu Saxena, PhD

Director of AI Agents, Merck

Lanie Schenkelberg

Vice President, Product Marketing, Komodo Health

John Wollman

General Manager, Marmot Go To Market, Komodo Health

Webinar FAQ

Confident and correct are not the same thing. An AI system can sound certain and still be wrong. In healthcare, that gap costs more than credibility. It costs a treatment decision, a mispriced risk, a compliance officer’s signature. Trustworthy AI closes that gap. Marmot is built on five pillars:

  • Grounded, tracing every answer back to a verifiable source of truth
  • Explainable, showing the work behind every step
  • Reproducible, so the same question returns the same answer, every time
  • Verified, checked systematically before a result ever reaches a user
  • Governed, with privacy, access, and compliance built in, not bolted on

Confident is easy. Trustworthy is earned.

  • A small team can stand up a working AI demo in weeks. That part’s easy now. The gap shows up after: proving the answer is correct, that it holds up under scrutiny, that a compliance officer can defend it. Building that trust in-house typically takes over a year, and the work never really finishes, since it has to be re-proven every time the underlying models change. Buying means starting from a platform where that trust work is already done.
  • This one’s for Commercial, Clinical Development, Medical Affairs, and HEOR/RWE leaders, analysts, and power users at biopharma and pharma companies asking what comes next.
  • A framework for evaluating whether your team should build, buy, or do both. Also, a firsthand account of what that decision actually looked like inside a top-10 pharma company.

Yes, this webinar will be shared for on-demand viewing to all webinar attendees via email. It will also be available in our on-demand content library after the broadcast.