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Your A.I. on Drugs

Investors are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into the quixotic promise of A.I.-assisted drug discovery, but a handful of tech companies are pursuing a parallel, potentially more impactful endeavor: leveraging artificial intelligence to speed up enormously costly, time-consuming clinical trials.

clinical drug trial breast cancer detection
While A.I.’s role in drug discovery is indeed promising, it’s by no means a silver bullet: The reality is that the drug development pipeline takes, on average, between 10 and 15 years. Photo: Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Ian Krietzberg
September 23, 2025

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It’s still unclear how rapidly A.I. technology will develop, but at least some of the breathless hype of the earliest years has calmed as the tech’s near-term limitations have become more clear. The notion that artificial intelligence would immediately help us cure cancer, for instance, has been refined to the (still exciting) expectation that the technology can help drive major advancements in drug discovery. In 2024, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang declared that we are on the precipice of “computer-aided drug design.” Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella has similarly talked about how the company’s latest A.I. models will advance the effort.