Healthcare Businesswomen's Association

HBA Central New Jersey - Driving AI Adoption in Pharma: From Inspiration to Action

Article written by Jennifer Postelnek

 

This past June, the HBA Central New Jersey chapter hosted an engaging in-person event in Princeton, sponsored by Indegene, titled “Leveraging AI to Accelerate Your Career” where industry leaders shared powerful insights on why embracing AI is essential for success in today’s evolving workplace.

Following the event, we heard your feedback loud and clear: you wanted practical tools to turn knowledge into action. In response, we launched the first in a series of hands-on workshops, “Unlocking the Power of Practical AI: From Data to Decisions.” Led by Gunjan Aggarwal, Head of Data Analytics at Averitas Pharma. This interactive session demonstrated how pharma and healthcare professionals can move beyond AI theory and create real impact in their workflows.

The session was truly interactive, with many attendees testing practical tools in real-time, asking questions, and sharing their own experiences and expertise.

Key insights learned:

  • “AI is no longer a tool. It’s becoming a collaborator.”
  • Generative AI expands human capability by creating content, insights, and new solutions. “The barrier is no longer technology, it’s IMAGINATION.”
  • Effective prompt engineering is essential for leveraging AI, with distinct approaches for compliance (strict) and creativity (loose).
  • Tailor communication with different leadership personas using DISC profiles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) to improve executive influence and business case approvals.
  • Agentic AI autonomously monitors data, diagnoses issues, escalates to relevant partners, updates executives, and tracks resolution—eliminating manual, reactive workflows.
    • Using agentic AI workflows tools like make.com, turn AI into a collaborator that reads documents, structures data, sends alerts, and triggers actions.
    • “Agentic AI becomes your autonomous “data guardian,” detecting issues, resolving them, and communicating with IT, vendors, and executives, before you ever open your inbox.”
  • Custom GPTs made simple. We walked through how to build your own private GPT for data strategy and procurement—no coding required—to evaluate contracts, flag risks, extract key terms, and automate renewal alerts.
  • Early adopters of AI will outpace the industry.
  • Prompt engineering is now a critical leadership skill.

Thank you to all members who participated in this session. And a huge thank you to Gunjan for providing practical tools, inspiring and empowering attendees to applying AI to their everyday work.

“We’ve been using the customGPTs since [the workshop] … and it has already been genuinely helpful. The session made it feel approachable and immediately actionable, and it sparked a lot of momentum … Most importantly, it helped me not feel stuck in the availability of the existing tools!...Thank you again. It was a great use of time and one of the most practical AI sessions I’ve attended.” – Lalitha Priya Chandraskekhar, Founder and CEO, PFG MedComm, LLCc

Special thanks to the HBA volunteers who made this event possible:  Gunjan Aggarwal, Poorna Ashok, Gina Cuniere, Rhonda Walker, Elizabeth Dolgos, and Jennifer Postelnek.

 

💡Is there a specific AI topic you want to learn more about? Let us know in the comments.

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