About this episode

Dr Andree Bates and Parth Khanna discuss the evolution of AI in life sciences from passive copilots to proactive role-based agents.

For many life sciences teams, the first wave of AI has looked like copilots: smart search, quick answers, and help on demand. Useful, but passive. In this episode, Dr Andree Bates is joined by Parth Khanna , CEO and co-founder of ACTO , to explore what comes next: moving beyond copilots into role-based AI agents that proactively close knowledge gaps, improve field readiness, and operate safely inside regulated environments. Parth shares his path into life sciences and tech, including founding an early NLP company in 2012 and then building ACTO after speaking with over 100 life science companies about field force effectiveness. Today, ACTO supports tens of thousands of professionals and hundreds of brand launches, and Parth argues the industry is now entering the “agentic era” where the real differentiator is not just model access, but how organisations build context, control, and change management around AI. A key theme is why generic AI tools often fail inside enterprises. Parth outlines four requirements for agent success: context (role and job-specific personalisation), connection (stitching data sources and agent-to-agent workflows), control (testing, monitoring…

People in this episode

Host: Dr Andree Bates

Guest: Parth Khanna

Topics covered

• AI in life sciences
• role-based AI agents
• field force effectiveness
• knowledge gaps
• agent success requirements

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: ACTO

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