“Common sense is always required”

Antje Mark’s job as Head of Market Intelligence is all about facts and figures. She gathers information about our markets and customers. In Seamless, she explains how artificial intelligence helps her.

Antje, what type of data do you deal with on a daily basis? 

It’s all kinds of data to get answers to the following questions: How does the national market develop and how do the international markets develop? What type of developments are there with the competition and our customers? How do patients find out about health-related topics? How do physicians inform themselves in a professional context? The answers to these questions help many departments make decisions.

Where does this data come from?

We use various data sources. A lot of the time, information is publicly accessible. But we also buy data – or collect it ourselves. We use surveys, for example, to test how people perceive our brand, or whether planned marketing campaigns work as we’d hoped. 

How does AI help you?

I currently use AI to analyze texts and open-ended answer categories in surveys. When it comes to corporate documents, the texts are always anonymized, of course, in accordance with our internal AI Guidelines. Lengthy studies or guidelines with a lot of text often form the basis for my work. I get Chat GPT to filter out key points and to create a summary for me. I can get a quick overview like that. 

How did you learn the use of AI?

The classic way: learning by doing – as you do with new things. I experimented a lot, made mistakes, learned from them, developed my own routine step-by-step, and just became more confident in the use of AI. To test the use of AI, I looked for a question that was related to my practical work. I then compared various AI tools by asking about pain reduction following an ankle ligament sprain. My objective was to check whether the AI tools mentioned medical products, which sources were quoted, and whether we’re visible in the results as a manufacturer. In my opinion, there’s still a lot of work to be done so that we get mentioned in this type of question – that’s really exciting.

Do you have suggestions for colleagues?

Prompting is the key. To get the right information, you need a precise prompt. I usually limit the length of the answer. Or I ask for the 10 most important results to be displayed. When I ask about medical or quite complex issues, I initially request for answers to be given in language that’s easy to understand. With study summaries, I check figures and context in the original source at random because AI can make mistakes and it sometimes doesn’t get connections or subtle contexts. I would never rely on it blindly – common sense is always required.