Professor Jackie Hunter is one of the UK’s most pioneering artificial intelligence speakers, known for her visionary leadership in the life sciences and technology sectors.
With a distinguished career that spans senior roles at GlaxoSmithKline, BenevolentAI, and the BBSRC, Jackie has helped transform the way the pharmaceutical industry harnesses AI to accelerate drug discovery and improve global health outcomes.
As a respected voice among technology speakers and innovation speakers, Jackie has consistently broken new ground—blending scientific expertise with digital strategy to redefine what’s possible in healthcare. She is also a powerful advocate for diversity in leadership, recognised as one of the leading women in business speakers for her commitment to inclusion across science, tech, and enterprise.
In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Professor Jackie Hunter shares expert insights on the ethical frontiers of AI, the role of open innovation in scientific progress, and what’s needed to unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence in healthcare and beyond.
Q: As someone leading the conversation on AI in life sciences, how do you see artificial intelligence transforming healthcare systems in both clinical and operational settings?
Jackie Hunter: “Successful artificial intelligence is already shaping the future of healthcare. It’s being employed in radiology, in pathology, in triaging patients, and downstream in terms of being able to do more remote home care and other implications for health services more generally.
“I think the issue to really realise the potential of artificial intelligence in healthcare is to ensure that you have a commitment to adoption across the healthcare landscape in a particular area. You have senior management buy-in, but more importantly, that the users are fully engaged—because artificial intelligence in its implementation is not just technology, it’s also a social science.”
Q: For organisations eager to adopt AI, where should they start—and how can they balance technological ambition with practical implementation across complex systems like pharma and biotech?
Jackie Hunter: “I think for businesses to successfully implement AI technologies, they really need to look at, first of all, what is the problem they’re trying to solve. Are they going to do the same process but much more efficiently—for example, combining chemical synthesis and screening robotically to enhance iteration and throughput—or are you actually radically trying to transform the process or the question that you have? That, in a disruptive way, can be exceptionally valuable but also a lot harder to implement.
“I think for businesses at the moment—in the pharmaceutical industry, for example—implementation is quite fragmented. Some companies, like Amgen, are very committed and are integrating AI across the whole value chain. Other companies are carrying out pilots, essentially putting their toe in the water.
“The analogy that I use is in the 1990s: molecular biology. We understood about cloning genes, understood about DNA—RNA was just becoming really important in healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry—and we had departments of molecular biology. Now, molecular biology is just seamlessly integrated in everything, every approach that people have, whether it’s looking at patient stratification or target identification.
“I think to truly embrace the power of AI, AI needs to be thoroughly embedded in the domain expertise, rather than seen as something separate. Those companies that have really put AI into a box without integrating it into the domain expertise are not likely to be as successful as those that are really trying to instil it across the whole organisation.”
Q: Ethical concerns around AI continue to grow. In your experience, what are the most pressing ethical risks facing AI in healthcare, and how can businesses mitigate them responsibly?
Jackie Hunter: “A lot of people are worried about the ethical challenges of artificial intelligence, and they are right to be so. In the sense that, first of all, the quality of the data is really important—to make sure that, for example, when you’re developing clinical trial algorithms, you’re really looking across a whole range of patient populations, incorporating different ethnicities, socio-economic class, etc., for it to be truly representative.
“This is especially true where people are using synthetic data for enhancing the size of their training sets. The second ethical question is really about bias—not just the data bias, but also the bias in terms of interpretation and downstream application of AI.
“Then, of course, we need to have transparency. How are the AI models coming up with their solutions? In terms of supervised learning, this is quite easy because you know how you’ve trained the algorithm. But for unsupervised learning, where you don’t really know the parameters on which the algorithm is making the decisions, you really need to be able to delve down and explain how the algorithm is coming up with its recommendations.
“And Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (now part of Google DeepMind) says that one of the key things he’s looking to do in his organisation is to develop AI solutions where the AI will come back and tell you how it’s actually come up with its recommendations.”
Q: Many industries adopt new technologies at speed, while healthcare often moves more cautiously. What lessons can be drawn from innovation in other sectors that could help accelerate change in health systems?
Jackie Hunter: “Traditionally, innovation in other sectors has moved more rapidly than in the healthcare sector—both in terms of public healthcare and also private healthcare. Industries like the pharmaceutical industry have tended to hide behind the fact that there are, of necessity, a lot of regulations and rules in place.
“But you see large corporations in, say, the petrochemical industry—like British Petroleum—can move very quickly and adopt change. If we look at the example of electric vehicles, within a few years the industry had pivoted from downplaying the potential impact of electric vehicles to really embracing the fact that they were being driven by many governments to accelerate development in this area.
“In healthcare, I think we have to look at ways in which these industries have been able to incorporate new methodologies and principles more rapidly. It’s also by looking at the way in which they have utilised their employees, educated their employees, and incentivised their employees to take up that new technology—rather than feeling threatened by it.
“This is a particular issue, I think, in healthcare because there are concerns from people that technologies like artificial intelligence will replace people. But actually, I think the way to phrase this is that they will allow people to work more effectively and efficiently, and to focus on those things that are harder to solve—those more difficult cases—and free them up to really engage with patients a lot more.
“So, I think we have to look at how these large healthcare organisations can embrace being agile and innovative, at the same time as still maintaining their ethical and legal responsibilities.”
Q: You’ve long championed open innovation. What does that model look like in practice, and why is it so critical for scientific and commercial breakthroughs today?
Jackie Hunter: “Open innovation is a topic very dear to my heart. In fact, the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst—the science park at the GlaxoSmithKline site—was initially branded as an open innovation campus when I developed the concept for it.
“It was a concept that Henry Chesbrough developed initially, but actually companies like Procter & Gamble, with their “Connect and Develop” thesis, had already embraced this. It’s about really appreciating what is absolutely core to your business to have control over—the internal innovation you need—and where, by going outside of your business, you can drive innovation and value for the business.
“An example would be, if you were looking to set up a new chemical synthesis platform, would you develop it in-house or have you gone outside and seen there’s a solution out there that would be much more efficient to partner with—or even acquire—rather than spending the time trying to develop it yourself?
“Likewise, a lot of companies waste value by having IP internally that they’re not using—which could readily be spun out. The important thing there is developing the right business model. So, it’s really about how to enable innovation to flow most effectively internally, whilst at the same time ensuring that you are always looking outside to bring relevant innovation in—rather than reinventing the wheel.”
