24.03 Liontrust Global Innovation Report - The Rise of AI 04.24 - Flipbook - Page 20
VALUE CREATION
We are all aware that we are living in a cost-of-living crisis due
to high inflation and interest rates. The same is true for the cost of
doing business. Innovation’s ability to make things cheaper and
make more and better from less will prove to be a godsend over
the coming years and AI will play a central role in this.
As an example, take healthcare, a sector that accounts for
around 20% of the US economy and is notoriously dogged by
inefficiencies and high costs. Indeed, no other sector holds more
potential to change both lives and the economy in the 21st century.
Yet over 90% of research and development (R&D) for drugs fails.
Companies such as Moderna, focused on mRNA-based drug
discovery, and Salt Lake City-based, Nvidia-backed Recursion,
focused on machine learning driven drug discovery, are using AI
to raise the productivity of R&D, lower the cost and speed up the
process of drug discovery.
20 - The rise of AI: Technology and Innovation Report
Long after discovery and approval, drug prices are inefficiently
expensive across the system. Moreover, health outcomes vary
greatly in quality between best and average practice. As the
largest health insurer and manager of health care in the US, United
Health is using AI to lower drug and treatment prices and raise
the quality of outcomes. Robotic surgery, through companies like
Intuitive Surgical with 12 million procedures now under its belt, is
improving surgical outcomes today, but there is also the potential to
drive down the cost and improve the quality of surgery via AI and
vast datasets of physical robotic surgical experience.
Healthcare is but one example. From retail, through companies such
as Shopify, which is developing AI to help small businesses master
e-commerce, through to automotive companies such as Tesla, leading
the charge on autonomous driving and AI-driven robotics, to finance
through companies such as Upstart, which is raising the efficiency of
lending, AI has the potential to or already is driving customer value.
