Merck and Mastercard Find Success with Agentic AI, But Warn of 'Plumbing' Challenges

["Merck and Mastercard are among the companies making significant strides with agentic AI, but their executives are quick to point out that the key to their success lies in building a solid foundation of digital infrastructure, or 'plumbing.' Merck's VP of Digital Platforms, Sean Finnerty, notes that the pharmaceutical manufacturer's AI-powered efforts to accelerate drug discovery and marketing material creation are yielding impressive results, but would not be possible without the company's investment in underlying technology.", "Merck is using AI agents to cut drug discovery cycles by a third and ship compliant marketing materials up to 80% faster. The company's AI is generating marketing drafts that are '99% right' when it comes to compliance, shrinking review cycles from months to days and accelerating delivery by 70% to 80%. In medical research, one AI-assisted discovery cycle was reduced by 33%.

Finnerty attributes the success to Merck's focus on building digital platforms and services, including 2,500 AWS accounts, numerous Microsoft Azure subscriptions, and new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) integrations.", "Finnerty's team is building scaffolding to deliver meaningful context in various situations, which is critical for agentic AI to work effectively. The company works with three hyperscalers and has forty-seven edge locations and hundreds of databases, storing 'many, many petabytes' of structured and unstructured data. Merck's goal is to make it easy and frictionless for people to use AI, while ensuring security and integration with various platforms.", "Meanwhile, at Mastercard, Chief Data Officer Andrew Reiskind and his team are experimenting with agentic AI in highly orchestrated transaction and dispute workflows.

Reiskind notes that chargeback or fraud disputes are complex processes that involve multiple steps and unstructured data elements. AI agents have the potential to speed up and solve these problems, but Reiskind cautions that it's essential to assess the risks and perform cost-benefit analysis to determine what risks are acceptable.", 'Both Finnerty and Reiskind stress that building and implementing agentic AI is not a simple process. They warn that companies must be prepared to address challenges, such as hallucinations and incorrect context, and invest in guardrails to minimize errors.

Despite these challenges, Merck and Mastercard are seeing promising results and are optimistic about the potential of agentic AI to drive significant benefits in their respective industries.']