All these years, Artificial Intelligence or AI was regarded as the future of Pharmacovigilance. Unexpectedly, COVID-19 has accelerated this to such an extent that one can safely say that the future is already ‘present’. The regulatory agencies have already started collaborating with the IT companies for augmenting AI for the large scale COVID-19 vaccine exposure, which may be regarded as the largest global post-authorization safety study. With millions and billions of people getting vaccinated, the data is undoubtedly going to be enormous, to be regarded as big data. This is not expected to stop here, with scope to study the long-term effects, on this cohort.

The pharma industry primarily considers AI for triage and case processing activities and signal management. There is tremendous potential for extending the scope beyond these activities. The Information Technology (IT) industry and the service providers have realized the scope of AI. They have started investing in AI research, either on a standalone basis or in collaboration with the pharma companies. Unfortunately, this is restricted to the dominant players, while the generic companies still await the low-cost, tried, and tested formula, with an obvious time-lag.

When research agencies are estimating the Pharmacovigilance industry to grow to 12-14 billion $ by 2027, one should not get surprised if these turn out to be under-estimates. This can partly be attributed to the global AI market, which is estimated to grow to 500+ billion $, in the same duration.

The best part is that the industry is gearing up to utilize cognitive computing to the utmost benefit of Public Health, and this is going to be a revolution of its own kind. Pharmacovigilance automation and AI should be considered tools that add value (and not necessarily replace) while lowering cost without compromising quality.