What AI Trends Did You See at the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference?

Pharmaceutical Executive: What AI trends did you see at the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference?
Angela Schwab: Good and bad. You see a lot of players coming into the market saying that they can do this or that, but they’re just a ChatGPT wrapper. It’s really hard for companies that are trying to select vendors.

They’re asking which ones have substance and which ones don’t. Which one meets all of the security protocols, as opposed to ones that just say that they do.

Selecting a vendor can be very complicated because there’s a lot of noise. It doesn’t matter what sector you look at; there’s a million people trying to raise funds and saying they can do these things.

What’s going to happen in the next year is that that stuff is going to get filtered out real fast. The companies that we’re seeing a lot of interest in are the platform plays. We’re seeing a lot of interest in platforms over one-point solutions.

How do you tackle this entire process? How do you streamline clinical trials from end-to-end? How do you work with other people to ensure digital data flow.

PE: What was your experience debuting Trialynx at JP Morgan Healthcare 2026?
Schwab: It’s fantastic. This was the culmination of our springboard accelerator. We went through that program, it was six months of an intense accelerator focused on health and technology.

We were able to pitch to a packed house. There was a waitlist, it was exciting to see so many people out there supporting women in clinical research and health technology.

The other really cool thing that happened at JP Morgan was an event where they brought out all of the women that were CEOs or in C-suite positions. Everybody dressed in pink, it was incredible to see all of the women there, along with the men supporting them. I was more impressed by that.

As 2026 kicks off, one of the biggest things I saw at JP Morgan was an intense excitement around partnerships. I think, in the next year, this industry is going to have smaller players that have all jumped up because of AI. You’re going to see the maturity of some and the falling off of others.

The M&A space is going to be pretty hot leading into 2027.