Trend Trend 7: pharmaceutical R&D shifts from manual experimentation to AI-guided discovery

Summary

The seventh trend in CB Insights' outlook is pharma's path toward self-driving laboratories. Drug research is moving from manual bench experiments toward discovery workflows that are guided by AI and increasingly automated. A US buildout worth more than 400 billion dollars gives companies a chance to design new labs around AI from the start. Large drugmakers are partnering with chip makers on discovery supercomputers and already deploy agents for tasks such as medical writing. Research platforms now analyse data and scientific literature to help scientists choose better experiments, while humans remain in charge of decisions. Fully autonomous labs attract investment but remain early and outside mainstream practice.