Scaling AI Across the Enterprise

Introduction

Welcome to the Season 2 premiere of The Improzone! As emerging biotech companies race toward commercialization, the pressure to adopt AI is coming from everywhere from the board of directors down to individual contributors. But how do you move from “playing around with a chatbot” to driving real business value? In this episode, we explore the practical realities of deploying Generative AI in a regulated environment.

In this episode, host Jane Urban sits down with Andrew Schwartz, VP, Global Head of IT at KalVista Pharmaceuticals. Andrew shares his firsthand experience leading a cross-functional GenAI pilot program within an emerging biotech organization. They discuss the shift from skepticism to enthusiasm among leadership, the critical importance of “human-in-the-loop” change management, and how IT can partner with functional areas like Legal, Quality Assurance, and Regulatory to solve specific business problems. Andrew provides a roadmap for moving beyond simple prompts to creating “Agentic AI” workflows that free up humans to focus on high-value work.

Key Highlights

• The “Jack of All Trades” IT Role: Why IT leaders in emerging biotechs must act as strategic business partners rather than just technology support, especially when preparing for commercialization.
• From Pent-Up Demand to Structured Pilots: How to channel organizational curiosity into a safe, secure “sandbox” environment where cross-functional teams (including Legal and Compliance) can experiment with real data.
• The Reality of Prompt Engineering: Why simply giving employees a license isn’t enough—success requires training users to provide context and “coach” the AI to get the right output.
• High-Value Use Cases: Specific examples of how GenAI is being used to streamline QA document reviews, summarize regulatory contracts, and create operational efficiencies.
• The Future is “Agentic”: Moving beyond chatbots to AI agents that can execute multi-step workflows, essentially acting as an intelligent assistant that prepares work for human review.

Featured Quote

“If you don’t have a specific problem to solve, technology isn’t going to help you… You’ve got to have that crisp definition of: ‘Here’s what’s wrong, here’s what I’m trying to accomplish, and here is why it is a problem.’ Only then can you find a tool to help you fix it.”

— Andrew Schwartz, VP, Global Head of IT, KalVista Pharmaceuticals