Market Research for Better Healthcare | Michaela Gascon, MBA KJT, President & CEO

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Mike: Michaela, introduce yourself to our listeners

Michaela Gascon: I'm Michaela Gascon, president and CEO of KJT. At KJT, we inform a lot of strategic marketing decisions [00:01:00] for our life sciences clients. The research that we conduct helps them to inform their business strategy, and that involves everything from pre marketing decisions, through commercialization efforts and managing mature market brands.

Mike: When I hear life science, Michaela, I'm always thinking for some reason, like biologicals, like the drug itself is kind of a lie, but that's not necessarily so right. You're talking just anybody kind of in healthcare. Would that be fair

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, it's really weak. KJT encompasses all different parts of healthcare. So we certainly work with clients who are in the pharmaceutical side of things. Some of our clients are actually biotechnology companies. And then we also work with a ton of different medtech companies, bringing forth different and new medical technologies. And then we can't, of course, forget about health insurance providers as well. We do some work for payers across the US healthcare system in particular. 

Mike: When you're promoting the insurances, health insurance and so on, [00:02:00] I know we, as pharmacists, we kind of

them. I mean, you gotta have someone that you hate as an industry.

do you face in

health insurance where

of good that comes out of it, but there's a lot of bad press that comes into that too. So I imagine it's a challenge for you to work for the health insurance companies.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, for the health insurance providers in particular, the work that we do is actually a little bit different than on some of the drugs and the medical technologies themselves. We don't do as much of the promotional aspect as we do helping them to think about different patient populations and segments across the industry that they're looking to create solutions for or to really figure out if they're serving their needs.

From that macro view, of course, if you take any individual patient case or provider that is engaging with the health insurance company, everyone's got some probably great story and a horror story for every one of those.

 But yeah, we help them think [00:03:00] about bundling new product offerings or thinking about those solutions, not as much on the actual direct promotional aspects for them.

Mike: You're not out there creating ads for them and trying to set up this and that you're more, the theory or the direction, kind of a consulting side for them, you might say.

Michaela Gascon: Helping to consult and make sure that they are making informed decisions around a lot of different patient types, or if you have a Medicare, supplement plan, all the different versions of a customer that might be out there. So, they can really make sure that the new plans that they're putting in place. directly meet the needs of those customers.

Mike: And so Mikayla, I imagine that, you know, that's kind of the secret sauce, but then getting information for these people. Are you gleaning that research from somewhere? Are you doing your own market research, your own, Control groups? 

where you're peering in behind the two way glass, that kind of thing. Is it kind of a combo of that? You're getting some, but [00:04:00] then you're also creating some of your own.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah. That's a lot of what we do here at KJT is we're actually doing that independent market research, So our clients will hire us to do that. Neutral view on the market. They'll come to us with a particular business question. They're trying to inform and say, Hey, if we go out and ask our current customers, our prospective customers about this, we know they're probably not going to tell us the truth.

There's probably gonna be some bias in the information that they're feeding to us, for a litany of reasons. so that's when they hire a company like KJT and we go out and do that research on their behalf, but in a blinded fashion, that could encompass a focus group that could encompass a one on one interview that certainly could be an online survey where we're taking customers through a trade off exercise of, hey, would you like this, but at this cost, would you still select that option in the plan?

Or, again, thinking about different segments that they need to make sure that they are aware of as they're putting together new offerings and new bundles. With particular health [00:05:00] plans.

Mike: Who are the worst focus group participants? Let's hear it.

Michaela Gascon: So the worst focus group participants. I think there's a whole spectrum of them. I'm sure that the qualitative moderators on her team have a personal chart, if you will. But I think one of the worst offenders might be the know it all. Whoever comes in, really tries to dominate conversation, has something to say about every single question you're asking, will shut other respondents in the group down. They really can disrupt those dynamics and make the whole exercise feel like a battlefield rather than a collaborative one. Let's learn from each other and see what all these different folks have to say about a particular topic.

Mike: How many are in the focus group? My brother owns a branding company and, and so I'm a little bit familiar,is it kind of like where you got eight people sitting around the room and you're looking at them and that kind of stuff, or is it different than that?

Michaela Gascon: yeah, a lot of focus groups can be that there is some magic that happens when you have, let's say, more than five, but less than [00:06:00] 10 participants sitting around the table all talking about their shared experiences or, what it was like to be diagnosed with a certain condition or their reaction to a particular interaction that they've had with their dentist recently, 

so, there's some good. Correlation that happens around there, but sometimes it's really nice to have a smaller group, which we would call a triad. three participants and the facilitator or the moderator can go for it. In much more depth from everybody, if it's a particularly rare disease or a situation that not a lot of people may have encountered. Getting depth of response can be really important because you don't have as many experiences to pull from 

Mike: Where are you picking up These focus group participants?

Michaela Gascon: So there's a lot of different avenues that we go through to actually recruit participants into these studies. some of them come through, research houses that have research panels 

of them come through different patient advocacy groups. Some of them come through client organizations and client lists. If they have a [00:07:00] target list of folks that they want specifically to speak with, that can be the case. There's really a lot of different ways we find people to participate in research studies .

Mike: So back to the know it all. You're kind of hiring these people. And then you want to go back to The firm that has recommended these people. And it's like, you send Charlie over?

No one got a chance to speak. How did these guys slip through the cracks on Makayla?

Michaela Gascon: That's a great question. We are always looking for a particular background, so you've got to have experience with a certain brain or you've got to be diagnosed with certain conditions. So you've got to generally be of a certain age, in a research where we're typically, Always trying to ensure that we're getting a representative view of the market.

So if it's a condition that, over indexes on, men being diagnosed with it, we're going to try and recruit more men to that focus group. so we're always looking at the sample, of who we allow to participate. And you're absolutely right. We're compensating them for their time. So everyone has a [00:08:00] financial incentive to be there and to share their opinion, but that know it all personality who wants to give you an answer and jump right in can be really hard, and that's really the role of the moderator to make sure that they feel like they are seen and they are heard, but that they're also in their place as well. 

Mike: I can see that like in a jury, deliberation, but when it comes to the marketing stuff, I'm thinking, why would I want to necessarily push my way too hard? Because they're not deciding anything. Right. 

Michaela Gascon: Some cases they are, they don't realize it. I think sometimes, the power that their voices actually have. I think a lot of people participate in research because they're curious about what might be, we're showing a lot of new product concepts in a lot of cases, and they like to know that, Hey, maybe I was part of that future decision on, what

this new company might bring to market as they're looking for new products and new services. So some people certainly have that intrinsic motivation that they gained from as well. And then other people are just kind of, could sit [00:09:00] down and talk to you about anything. So they're just kind of a chatty Cathy type and, sit down over tea and whatever, you know,

 You can imagine the whole spectrum of personalities that we capture through the research process and everyone's different motivations for being there.

Mike: I asked you to complain about them, but you probably want some of everything you want to say, all right, here's, this guy that's, or gal that's ramming stuff down, but why isn't everybody else talking? Is it an embarrassing product? Is it an embarrassing stance they don't want to bring out?

It's like, you can probably tell a lot, even from the interaction, even of the different personalities, I imagine.

Michaela Gascon: Absolutely. And that sometimes is very, I mean, there's a litany of reasons, right, as to why someone won't speak up in that group setting, probably calling all the way back to their, elementary education setting Yeah, it's really important to hear from those people as well because they're target customers just like everybody else, just like the know it all, so you really want to make sure that you do understand what their opinions are, what their perspective is, because otherwise it's a [00:10:00] missed revenue opportunity. Six and 12 months down the road 

Mike: And so I imagine they sign their life away when they're in these things. I think some of it's in general, but you probably, like you talked about products, they probably look at some things that it's like, mum's the word on this stuff.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah. Some of it is very proprietary and you do sign official NDAs and all that kind of stuff. And in other cases, it's more exploratory. a company might be getting into a new category or a new therapeutic area that they haven't worked in before, and they're really doing more exploratory landscape questions around what they don't know, the brands or the company's past experience .

Mike: years ago, at the pharmacy, I think I got free tickets for Tangled, you know, the Disney movie, Michaela, you, you were probably.

10 When that came out, you could have probably tagged along with my kids to it. Anyways, I go there and I'm in the front row and they say, you know, this is a Disney screening, maybe not to see if people are laughing at a certain part, but just to see how the audience is, responding or something.

[00:11:00] So at the time I forgot what I was doing. Maybe I was. I don't know, God forbid back then maybe I was counting calories or something like that and I pull my phone out to put in like I've had, you know, one and a half tubs of butter popcorn or something like that and I get my phone out and I'm down by my thigh trying to keep it under wraps.

I had my phone out for like three seconds and this bodyguard guy came. It dragged me out of the theater.

Michaela Gascon: Oh, wow. If you were, okay, I see. So you were part of a screening 

Mike: They thought I was gonna do something. And so they pulled me out and didn't drag me up, but they said, come with me. They said something like, um, some non choice like we can either, you know, run your phone over with a steamroller or we can put it in this, Envelope and you can get it after the movie and sign your this or that,

 I was naughty. I was really naughty

Alright, so the focus group is kind of fun. Imagine you're doing for companies you're [00:12:00] doing, some surveys and that kind of stuff, 

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, we do. And we try to make the surveys interesting and engaging as well. one of the things, we're always going to have some closed ended questions, tell me which of these you know about and what you think about these ideas. But I think some of the trade off exercises that we get into are the most engaging to think about. So would you, out of this list of five options, which of these is most preferred and least preferred and taking me through? In a couple of different rounds, we can actually do some pretty interesting analysis, looking at the rank ordered and really stacking your preferences after just having you ask it a few short questions, actually. so those are really informative again, clarifying results and where brand teams and marketing teams should really look to focus their attention and efforts. Then we have a much more complicated version of that, where we have to make multiple trade offs at the same time. We call those choice based conjoints often, and those really are [00:13:00] used to inform a lot of new product decisions. Thinking about different features that a new product might include. What's your willingness to pay for that feature? Thinking about bundling it again, go all the way back to that, the printer and cartridge model. Like, okay, if you're going to buy

Are you going to buy the razor and the blades, or what kind of frequency do you want each of to go together? Pretty interesting exercises that go through those lines of questioning. And again, that really helps, especially our med tech clients, when you have a lot of features, not just, a drug

a lot of

play with and tinker with from a product optimization standpoint.

Mike: I'm thinking that With the ease of access to real data, you do some A B testing on, see what gets clicked on Google. Right. And I imagine you could do that kind of with a fake product or something that, you know, you want to do with a bundle. You don't want to give it away, but you want to see if they're clicking on, on this or that.

 Because people don't know what they're going to do until they're [00:14:00] really talking with their dollars, you know, then, you know, really what their answer is.

Michaela Gascon: One of the main things that we have to then translate is as we go through those choice based conjugate exercises, we talk about that as being a constrained environment, like everyone is all knowing, everyone knows about all the products and all the features and does that really happen in the real world?

Well, of course not. There's information asymmetry with everything that we touch, so what we get out of those studies is actually what we call preference share. Again, in an all knowing environment, this is how someone would make those trade offs. And then we get to translate that into market share and helping clients build up revenue forecasts or demand forecasts off of these studies. And again, making a number of assumptions that feed into those demand estimations around what's really going to happen, when this comes to market. How much are you going to promote this? Are you going to have a sales team behind this? Is this going to be direct to the consumer? how do you want to think about your market strategy and how you might adjust what is preference share in the model to something [00:15:00] that's demand share that your sales ops team can actually do something and your production team can actually do something with.

Mike: Preference share and demand share, say that again.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah. So when we're coming out of choice based conjoint studies, what that gives us is what we call preference share. And that's in this constrained environment where. Everyone has access to all of the information that they might need to know before they make a selection. So we think that's a fictional environment. Our job` a research team is to then translate that preference share into something that can actually be taken. The sales ops team or the production team can actually take action on and convert that into market share or estimated market share. If that particular product comes to market. How much demand is there going to be? How much revenue might you forecast off of those sales? 

, 

Mike: The first one you mentioned there, that would be maybe like the focus group where they've got time to sit there with the documents And the leaders explaining what they have and what choice they can make and so on. [00:16:00] And then do you mean in the real world, people may not have that amount of time or it might be on a small screen and they can't see all the options.

Is that what you mean by not having all the choices or there's something I didn't pick up there.

Michaela Gascon: So I think one of the big things that is different between the online surveys that we conduct and how someone actually makes a decision in the real world is that information asymmetry. So again, you think about a particular product that might be purchased by the hospital. If we're talking to an orthopedic surgeon in the survey environment, and they're saying, yeah, a new knee sounds great.

I like these features and I like these potential benefits. In the real world, they're not actually the ones who are going to be ordering those things. It's going to be someone

team and the sourcing team at the hospital.

really important when we're doing the research to understand not just preference of the customer or the end user who might be using the product, but also getting input from procurement, from sourcing, [00:17:00] from whoever in hospital administration is actually going to have a decision based on that because they have different information that they're going to be looking at to make their selection and it's really integrating. We call them multiple decision maker modeling . So again, how much share of influence do each of those folks have and in the healthcare system in the US, it's highly complicated and there's a lot of nuance depending on

who's purchasing, what the product is. Is it happening independently? Is it happening through a health system, an IDN? It gets real complex real fast.

Mike: And there's a lot of stuff that people, well, there's two examples. One would be like, what'd they say years ago. When somebody had a scratch DVD or even going back further, you know, vinyl something, and nobody said at that time, I wish I had a little device in my hand that carried like 10, 000 songs.

 Your mind doesn't even go there. So you don't even know what you want. You think a [00:18:00] DVD is the greatest thing. And it's like, well, not really. It's scratches and all that kind of stuff. Then another one would be like, chat GPT, they had voice response.

It took like two seconds to have this conversation. In real life, people don't wait two seconds. In real life, people don't even let me finish before you answer something. So that's the kind of respect I get, especially at home. so I chatted with GPT. They came out and I was waiting for this.

It's like, they come out with this automatic voice response. I mean, like a 10th of a second, like you're talking to a real person.

And I thought. I don't really want that. I mean, let's say someone's talking to you and you're, you're kind of like, eyes are kind of going back in your head.

not really listening. Wouldn't it be great if you could say, Hey, You're going to talk to me for about a minute and a half. somehow miraculously write it out and I'm going to look at it and I'm going to cover what you said in a minute and a half and about 15 seconds, I'm going to scan it and this and that [00:19:00] you can't do that in real life, but with the chat GPT voice, I've hardly ever used it because I don't want to sit there and have them talking back to me. I want to scan what they've said. I want their 30 second response. I want to read it and I want to jump right away to where I want it. whole time I thought, wouldn't that be cool to have,

 computers talking to you?

And it's like, Not really. I'm not using it, but I didn't know I wasn't going to use it until I didn't use it. And I know you come across that all the time with what people think they're going to want or think they're going to do versus reality. I love giving commands and I like to give a verbal command and have somebody do something. And practically all day, I'm not touching the keyboard.

I'm just voice typing. I love that. I don't want to sit there and listen to them talking back to me. I don't have the patience for that. You just don't know that stuff though. Who would know that people love to talk and give commands, but don't really want to listen [00:20:00] to it coming back.

Michaela Gascon: That's what works for you. So again, you're clearly a visual learner. If you like to read the text that's getting kicked

I suppose that's true, But the other people learn much better from an auditory standpoint. Some people have to, feel it, that kinesthetic learning style, 

so

Mike: That's right.

Michaela Gascon: But there's all types of different ways that people learn out there.

Mike: In the movies, you know, you want someone to stand up and say, here's what we're doing, this, , but unless it's a proven record, you want the focus groups and all that, because you don't really know what people want until you talk to them and that kind of stuff.

Michaela Gascon: And there's a lot of variability out there. the mass marketing that's going to impact purchase intent. You need to know what all walks of life are thinking and what they're going to do with their dollar. how the physician is really going to write that script at the end of the day, because it's not just about the loudest voice in the room. Sure, that's a voice, but a lot of people have purchasing power and influence in these decisions. 

Mike: Tell my brother, with his branding firm, I'm like, Tim, do [00:21:00] people hire you? It seems like these companies, when they hire on like a CMO or something like that, they would have this knowledge and I got it down to saying that Tim can become the scapegoat because then instead of the CMO getting fired, the CMO can say, well, I hired Tim and he didn't really pan out.

Then it's just like, you can blame it on someone else.

 Do the companies that. Come to you, Michaela. I figure they need you. Do you think they ever use you as a scapegoat?

Michaela Gascon: Perhaps occasionally, but I think that is the double edged sword of using an independent agency to help support your business strategy or your marketing strategy. We can go out and get that unbiased view because they don't know it's company X who is behind the questions. You need us because you can't get away from your own brand as the employee or as the CMO of that company.

 if it doesn't go well, or if your management changes, or, if you don't like the recommendation we're ultimately making at the end of the day, or your board takes that [00:22:00] decision negatively, could we get thrown on the bus? Absolutely. when you say they can't do it themselves, is that because their view is skewed or something is preventing them from doing it?

It's mostly the view that is skewed internally or the people who you would be asking those questions, so say I'm a pharmaceutical manufacturer and I'm asking you as a pharmacist about a new product, you're going to maybe tell me what I want to hear. It very much depends on what your personality is and are you just a people pleaser or are you going to play it

And, think about all those different personality types. So even if you know that, it's Pfizer, Lilly, or whatever, it might be the personality to tell them exactly what you think to improve a new product that they want to bring to market. And other people will be more reserved and shy or feel intimidated, not wanting to give that real information.

Well, if they're making decisions based on incomplete or biased information, that doesn't ultimately help anybody. [00:23:00] 

Mike: so Michaela, I know that you love all your clients and they're just perfect people, but imagine that you went to a company that someone rubbed you the wrong way, 

If you got somewhere where somebody rubbed you the wrong way, why would it be? Would it be a no at all in the C suite again? Or what, what could you imagine that it'd be like, ah, that wouldn't be my favorite client.

Michaela Gascon: So I think what we really look for is partnership and co-creation. We feel like we have knowledge across the healthcare spectrum. We work with a mix of different pharmaceutical, biotech, medtech, and health insurance clients. We have a really holistic view of healthcare. What happens and what can happen, in particular, the US healthcare system. So where it really gets very frustrating for our teams is if it doesn't feel like a partnership, Client being in a superior position and then KJT being inferior. That's really frustrating for our teams because you've made a choice. Someone's made a [00:24:00] choice to work with us, to pay us money for our thoughts and our expertise. And then if that doesn't kind of come through, if expectation doesn't meet reality, That can be really, really challenging for the teams to work through, like, do they even care? How much of my time am I supposed to invest into this? If they don't really seem like they want my opinion anyways, What we've seen a lot in this year in particular, we've never seen more clients go through restructure and reorganization. it's been across all different client types for us this year And a lot of cases, there's some other political angle of something that's going on at their corporation that we may not even be privy to,

And they just hold on for dear life.

And we're getting caught up in the mix. And it's like, wait a minute, what's going on here? So a number of ways and reasons that that can happen. But our best work product is done when we can really get to those levels of partnership

And it's funny,

bringing me back to the very first tagline of a company when KJT started almost 18 years ago was when results [00:25:00] matter. Don't call us if you're not invested in the decision.

someone else told you to do this, like call us when the results actually matter 

Mike: Michaela with AI, let's say chat GPT, kind of things are you finding that that is skewed on? Because somebody might say, Hey, I'm not going to have a focus group.

 I'm just going to tell Chad GPT to give me

Michaela Gascon: much.

Mike: and give me a know it all Charlie and give me a pretend person and give me that. What kind of things do you think that would skew that a real human wouldn't? True.

Michaela Gascon: So I think there's pluses and minuses to this equation. We certainly know that a lot of these large language models were trained based on data from Western societies, predominantly English articles. So everything that you're getting as an output from that, you have to lens.

[00:26:00] sure you appreciate that.

 I think the other thing, the bias that we're seeing is that there isn't, the why behind a lot of these. Some, depending on which model you're using and how you're prompting that model , frankly, you get a different response and you have to understand the bias that's coming from the user itself. So a novice person who isn't interacting with these models very often is going to ask a similar question in a very different way.

These models are very literal. Even if you and I are trying to elicit the same kind of response, we're going to get very different responses just based on our styles and our own biases that we are overlapping on what could be a biased model. The emotion behind a lot of it too is certainly missing from these models, which is why, the need to still do some human and understand this from the human point of view. Why is something happening? What's that emotional response that these models are not to that point. We really see it as the intersection of human intelligence [00:27:00] and artificial intelligence. With our brain framework, the balanced and responsible artificial intelligence is how we talk about it. Internally and for our clients, it's pulling the benefit from human intelligence and artificial intelligence and how you can get the synergistic benefit from both. 

Mike: With AI, it's like people are worried about it taking over the world and stuff like that. And the one example I heard, the questions are so important. Cause you could say, how can our company save on paperclips or something like that.

And the answer is like, kill everybody, that'd be a way to do that, but it just doesn't make sense in the long run. 

What is your deliverable to the companies? What is the average company getting from you? 

Are they getting marching orders? What are they getting?

What's a company getting from you

as the answer to why they hired you?

Michaela Gascon: So, it depends on the team that you're engaging with at KJT, but if you're engaging with our commercial market research team, you're often getting a [00:28:00] PowerPoint deliverable and a presentation of those results. also help support the activation of those findings internally. Those could be workshops.

Those could be, you know, executive level presentations. That would be a typical deliverable for us on the commercial side. When we're talking about real world evidence generation, in a lot of cases, those are going to have some sort of PowerPoint report and data summary as well. The end result might be a steering committee meeting, and then you're tagging your medical affairs colleagues who are working on the publication plan and thinking about which Congresses and conferences do we want to present results at?

Which journals are we getting these data published in? Can run the gamut from, a podcast or a sizzle reel, kind of a video result through something kind of standard in the PowerPoint world.

See something formal, like, a manuscript or a poster that's getting presented to Congress. It depends which team you're engaging with here. 

Mike: Do you see the follow up of what they've done with your [00:29:00] information or you look at a company and like two years later, like, well, why the hell did they do that?

We didn't tell them to do that. 

Michaela Gascon: You definitely have the bewilderment or the questioning of like, I wonder how they took that left turn,

like, okay, interesting. Sometimes there's just other reasons at play that from, Whatever, rationale is being made from a production standpoint or, some other team said, Nope, we're still going to push forward. And even though the research didn't support it and I was like, okay, good luck.

Mike: They don't report on anything to you. They don't say what they did or anything like that. Right. It's just, they can take it or leave it.

Michaela Gascon: or leave it. we'll always give you a recommendation of what we think is going to be the right decision. you can take it or leave it. Of course we hope that what we're providing is insightful enough and reasonable enough that they do make decisions based on the insight that we're creating.

Mike: All right. So Michaela, you've been there for about ever. I know you started in the ranks and now you're the head honcho. Do you like being the head honcho of that? Or do [00:30:00] you sometimes wish you were just part of the army?

Michaela Gascon: It's a big job, and there's a lot of pressure and a lot of decision that comes with it, but there's always part of you, whether it's maybe just nostalgia for the good old days or getting your hands into

a project.I do try and keep my hands in some stuff, so I don't lose sight

but there's always something nice to think fondly about the times when you were more entrenched in the day to day and having different experiences.

I think there's always a little bit of the grass that is greener. mentality that we all struggle to disconnect from at some point.

Mike: How many people are you in touch with? How many in your firm or whatever? 

Michaela Gascon: So we have just over 50 employees 

Mike: And how would you categorize them percentage wise? Like so many administrations, so many doing the work, this or that.

Michaela Gascon: The vast majority of those people are doing the actual work. We have information technology, information security management, finance, HR, compliance, sustainability, all those kinds of corporate functions covered. But the vast majority of our staff are interfacing with clients [00:31:00] and doing billable work.

Mike: What does your average week look like? How does that break out for you?

Michaela Gascon: I would say it's never the same. And I think

The thing I've loved about this industry from the beginning is that we go through different business cycles. We go through different client cycles. Nothing about the insights industry is ever static.

So even if, as that's translated through different roles I've had with KJT, it still continues to mean that there's always something a little bit different. of pace, 

Mike: You've got new business acquisition follow up, you've got. Your employees, you've got, with your board or long range planning, you got this kind of stuff.

Are you doing most of the time? 

Michaela Gascon: It's a constant balance of that strategic plan, that multi year plan. How are we doing on this year's operating plan? What's happening in the market outside of us? The last six months, I've actually been spending a fair amount of time on generative AI, looking at [00:32:00] a lot of these, Large language models, how that can and should change our business processes, thinking about what that future is, to future proof the business. So that's been taking up a disproportionate amount of time, compared with the first six months of the year, there's always something, that's new and

and you've got to stay abreast of whatever that changes. So I think being agile and making sure that you can recalibrate your to-do list and what's on that list on a pretty regular basis is important. 

Mike: Future proofing your business. What does that look like? And, since you've been there a long time, 17 and a half years, would you say you're different from 15 years ago?

And what will your company look like in 15 years?

Michaela Gascon: So different from 15 years ago, we certainly have additional service offerings. So if I think back to the early days, we definitely didn't have real world evidence, we didn't have medical publications, and we didn't have an AI solution team [00:33:00] thinking about accelerated research insights. So there has been substantial change from the early days, but some of the core of what we're doing is still the same as it has always been. It's honestly quite hard for me to think about what the business looks like 15 years from now. It's so hard. And so I think the world is going to go through so much change. As we think about AI, it's going to be infused in all walks of life. I think in 15 years,just two years, maybe three years, I think it's going to substantially change. The things that I'm trying to prepare for the company are, the mindset, that growth mindset, openness to change, willingness to change, trialing different things, and running pilot programs. Now we have time to make intentional decisions around how we're going

Mike: going to

and the reasons we're going to change. So Michaela, that was a trick question for you, and you passed, because when you're in a company that is kind of looking out and [00:34:00] seeing what the world wants and things like that, I would have said, well, Mike, we don't know what we're doing six months from now. That's the kind of company we are. You know, we respond to things. 

Really interesting because, growing up, whenever we heard of You always thought it was going to clear out the blue collar jobs. You just had no doubt about that. It was just going to be, you know, the Jetsons and it was going to be, the maintenance things and all that, just blue collar coming up and it's amazing. Cause it really. Came from the top down in a hurry. And I think it caught most people by storm. And I think about how early in the AI, this is like a year or two ago. And they were saying, you know, we're going to slow everything down, you know, because we don't want AI to take over the world.

And I'm thinking, well, you're not going to slow down a country. You're not going to get everybody agreeing to slow AI down. Whoever, Slows down is going to be the loser. And now, as I'm thinking now, it's like, maybe this was done by the white collar people in order to find out how their jobs aren't going [00:35:00] to get lost.

But it sure was a flip from what we heard years ago.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, it's certainly impacting white collar jobs much more than blue collar jobs, and I think that's going to continue, the societal impact is going to be so great, and I don't think that we are ready, We are not skilled. We're not prepared. We're not talking about the impact of these things. It's almost like you, you lost or missed some of that theoretical philosophy class that everybody may be skipped in their undergrad. It's like, frankly, we haven't taken the time to process enough of what is about to happen and what is already happening. Um, because we've been living through, year after year of quote, unquote, unprecedented times for now. Five years in a row. So it's like we were just struggling to keep our heads above water. And now you want me to think about what, okay. 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Like they'll say, you know, the cab companies didn't have time to respond to Uber, you [00:36:00] know, they had like five years and now with AI, you get like. days, maybe to respond to something. And so I think that's probably why they slow things down.

people aren't used to things happening that fast, even in quickly changing industries they've never had to deal with something this quickly before.

Michaela Gascon: I agree, the pace is quite rapid and again, some of it's from a protection standpoint or they want to tweak some things in the models. But I think again, they've been working on these models in a lot of cases for a decade or more. Scientists have been working on this for a long, long time.

And then when chat GPT just got released, now just over two years ago, has been a flood of change that feels very rapid pace, but some of it

more quickly than the actual technological advancements have been made because they've throttled the models and they've given us only a certain lens of what we're looking at. gosh, they went from 3. 5 to 4. 0 to 0. 1 to, if you think about the progression of [00:37:00] how. Quickly, it feels like these models are coming out when there's been years of data and training behind this, but from the consumer perspective, like, oh my gosh, it only took them three months to go from this to that. That's not the reality, but some of it's that how they're releasing information and how they're

see.

behind the curtain 

Mike: So Michaela, ChatGPT might be 10 steps ahead already. 

Michaela Gascon: are. They

Mike: But they're bringing out only like step four now because they don't want to freak people out at step 10, like next week kind of thing.

Michaela Gascon: That's very much what is happening. And that's also why it feels like these changes are happening so quickly because, there's a lot of pressure from these competing frontier models to release the next coolest thing when in reality, a lot of them have been working on it for a long, long time, but there's this marketing and competitive pressure, that's coming to play as well.

Yeah, you're right. You'll see like, went from. Image production to video production, like in [00:38:00] a month. And you're like, I don't know, I don't even know if you could communicate that quickly to people to even do that. exactly. Yeah. They've spent a lot of time doing a lot of different things so chatgpt is going through their ship miss. So 12 days of open AI is what they're calling it. And they didn't just come up with 12 different new features and things in the last month here. They've been working on a lot of these things.

But again, from a. splash standpoint, they've bundled it into Shipmas and they're releasing one every day for this 12 day run. day eight right now, day nine, something like that. So we're almost at the end of it, but it's impressive once you stack up after feature after feature. It's impressive. It's intimidating. It's inspiring. it's a lot of things simultaneously.

Mike: it's kind of like a couple that has their challenges and then, you know, the fight starts and then the person's like, you do this, this, this, this, and this is like, wait a minute, [00:39:00] that didn't all happen yesterday. You've been storing those up for a little bit. 

Boy, I read yesterday, Google brought their new chip out, their willow chip. And they said, It was calculated that the most powerful computers in the world right now would take like 16 septillion years or something like that to figure out. 

Michaela Gascon: Some of the stuff that's happening, I really, like, if I think about, I can't think about it too hard, it's hard to wrap your head around and then you think about, the computing power, but then also the demands of how much energy these models are pulling and

The value of that is from a demand standpoint. 

Mike: You mean energy, like actual energy? Like they use a lot of energy. You mean, yeah, they use a ton of energy. Right.

Michaela Gascon: A ton of energy, and there's a push from a lot of these companies. They're bringing nuclear power plants back online to have additional energy sources, to feed these data centers the demand is going to be so great.

It's only going to get more. As more people use these models which is why they're [00:40:00] also simultaneously trying to build more efficient models that don't require as much from a computational power standpoint. we'll see where that all nets out, And then you think about, again, that the valuations of a lot of these companies. They're throwing around billions and trillions of dollars from an investment standpoint, an expense standpoint, like they're nothing, 

 Artificial generalized intelligence is the goal for a lot of these companies and creation of agentics and having these agents make decisions independently without us is very much the goal.

So that's where things are going to get really interesting and what we still are extracting value from, from a human standpoint, working in concert, very likely, with other ai agents

Mike: That's pretty fascinating. Because right now, I mean, there's still things you think you have to do, but eventually.

With the AI stuff. I mean, you think like, well, kind of a, [00:41:00] not a moral decision has to be made there, but some decision it's like, well, they can make that decision. 

Michaela Gascon: We will see what the future brings and quickly 

Mike: Give me an example of that, Michaela. Like you just said that, instead of LM, it's going to be more general. If you could throw out a scenario of that, what would that be? Yeah,

Michaela Gascon: (Listen to this section - No transcription) language models, or maybe more small language models that are specialized in certain areas, certain, is it law?

Is it healthy? Is it compliance? Like, what is it? And sending out requests to those other models and then coming back, feeding those back into the. Conducting and allowing multiple decisions and actions to be made based on all of those different information [00:42:00] sources. So, one of the models that is most susceptible that people are already taking advantage of today is really around customer service and the customer experience, because it's a finite problem.

There's only so many things that could happen. There's only so many answers that could be, it's a constrained environment . It's a little bit easier. to train these models on. someone types into the chat with a certain complaint about your product or service, and then these agents can go through and make those reasoning choices.

These newer models have reasoning capabilities, say, okay, well, if this, then that, and, what is a possible resolution? What do I offer? How do I talk about resolving this on the customer's behalf? 

Mike: Talking about customer service, I'm kind of like a big deal at my house here now because I actually changed my garage door opener. I got it up there and I, I did something, I screwed up the motherboard somehow. I think it was, My screwdriver and I bent something anyway. I got on the phone with, [00:43:00] this company and I said, Hey, I did this, I did that.

Well, okay.We'll send you the motherboard out and things like that. We're used to this technology right now. Now we're used to that happening. And then a human decides, Oh, okay, we'll send this, make sure you send this back and that kind of stuff.

But that stuff, going to happen, but that stuff is like, they're going to make a good decision, send it out to you, 

to be a robot pick. There'll be zero humans involved, even for material and physical stuff like that, and then on top of that, Michaela, you'll get, Instead of, planners, sitting around talking about it, they'll make their own decision about like, well, in the future, do we do this? Should we just send this? No, I mean, it's going to keep going up and up and up in levels of decision, like right up, past the CEO, basically.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, I think it's going to be very interesting to see what decisions humans still make and what we [00:44:00] allow these agents' decision rights over. for as much change as we've already experienced in the last two years, since the release of Chat GPT. I think we're going to experience even more. I don't know if I want to say exponential change if I look two more years out, but we're living through some interesting and fascinating times right now.

Mike: You can look at it two ways. , you can be fearful or you can say, look,all the way through the 1800s, people were working from sun up to sun down and barely feeding themselves.

And now we've been able to get to whatever work week, you know, standard 40 hour work week. Is this a fearful thing or do humans go down to 10 hours a week? And because AI is so smart, they're going to get better medicine and better feeding and all that.

And so we just kind of do our thing. So there's a couple of different ways to look at it at minimum, of course.

Michaela Gascon: Yeah, I was listening to a podcast just a couple weeks ago, and someone had that same very altruistic, I'll say, [00:45:00] view on AI, how we can all get down to very little actual work and still producing enough wealth, that we can live a comparable, and they were arguing, better life. Because we'll be having the income to make choices and having a heck of a lot of free time on our hands with a very glass half full lens on how things could transpire.

we can, we can live there, uh, for a few minutes 

Mike: there's been inventions since the beginning of time. This is the first time that an invention is an invention. So who knows where it's going to go? So Michaela, 

what would be a way to learn more about you guys and some of your offerings and so on.

Michaela Gascon: So, if someone was interested in learning more about KJT, I think the number 1 recommendation I would have is just to check out our website. We did revise a lot of that content this year to make more clear the services that we're offering to the commercial folks with marketing brands. And also [00:46:00] in medical affairs thinking about that real world evidence, we've got case studies examples, and I'm pretty easy to submit a contact us form If you want to engage in additional conversation, 

Mike: Well,

Michaela, golly, thanks for joining us today. I'm just a closet

marketer 

this is my love, going way back. So I appreciate any time somebody will put up with me with some of these questions. I know you're busy. You have a lot to do, so I appreciate your time. I know our listeners do too. great having you on today.

Michaela Gascon: Thanks, Mike. It was a fun way to spend some time this afternoon, so I appreciate your time and hope you found it interesting. 

You've been listening to the Business of Pharmacy podcast with me, your host, Mike Kelser. Please subscribe for all future episodes.