Roche teamed up with Stravito to create Brain42, an AI-driven platform transforming knowledge-sharing and decision-making across the organization.
Roche is one of the world’s biggest and most respected pharmaceutical and biotech companies. It was founded in 1896 by a visionary 28-year-old Swiss entrepreneur named Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche. Amid the European Industrial Revolution, the young businessman strongly believed that producing medicines on an industrial scale would be crucial to the global healthcare industry.
Hoffmann-La Roche’s vision created one of the world’s most innovative healthcare companies. Today, Roche is a leader in pharmaceutical research and development and diagnostics. The company spends an estimated 20% of its revenue on R&D. Roche is a major producer of COVID-19 tests and cancer therapies and focuses on areas such as immunology, neuroscience, and medical devices.
Roche’s immense collective knowledge enables the development and commercialization of life-saving medicines and technologies. The German Roche Pharma affiliate wanted to make the most of this aggregated wisdom, so they looked to Stravito for a solution.
Together, Roche and Stravito have developed a platform where users can find information easily and quickly, helping to cut through the noise and combat the inflation of insights. Christoph Petersen, Capability Lead for Insights and Analytics at Roche Pharma AG, describes what prompted the company to collaborate with Stravito:
“We were looking for a proven and flexible solution, and that brought us to Stravito. Stravito had the exact product we wanted, and they offered the flexibility to adjust it to the aspects that were important to us.”
Harnessing the power of collective knowledge
Roche has made huge contributions to the development of the global healthcare industry. The company’s success is partly due to its commitment to effective communication and ability to share insights about customer needs, market developments, and competitor activity to drive innovation. Roche is focused on providing insights for internal stakeholders and physicians, healthcare organizations, and patients.
This is no simple task. Roche has a complex network of stakeholders and customers and operates in a highly regulated environment. It must engage and share information with internal teams and develop B2B and B2C communication strategies.
Good insights can provide companies with a significant competitive advantage. However, businesses in all sectors often face insights inflation, where facts or information are mistaken for insights. True insights inspire action and guide decision-making, but how they are delivered makes all the difference.
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Christoph and his team at Roche have developed a three-pronged approach to tackling insights inflation. People need to capture, connect, and curate information for the organization. This differs from throwing in lots of source data and hoping that algorithms will distill something people did not know before. Barriers to access must be removed. Insights teams must develop solutions that help people engage with information.
Roche Pharma AG also has specific language needs. Being the German affiliate, naturally, much of Roche’s documentation is in German. While search algorithms and large language models work well in English, many fail to provide quality results in other languages.
Roche needed an intuitive, user-friendly knowledge platform that was easily accessible with a single sign-on and would provide users with accurate results in German.
The solution: The Brain42 insights platform
By partnering with Stravito, Roche has developed a user-friendly knowledge management platform: Brain42. Stravito’s custom solutions provided Roche with a cohesive hub where internal stakeholders could access information. The result is that Roche now has a fully integrated repository of knowledge that is simple to access and secure and provides relevant results.
As Christoph put it:
“It’s so important that we are good curators of information for our internal users. Brain42 is the answer to our questions. We want to ensure that people looking for insights go there and search for something. Then, either they find it or not. If they don’t find the information they want, they know it’s not there. Users don’t have to scroll through pages of irrelevant information.”
Key lessons: Focus on quality, ownership, partnership, and user experience
During the development of Brain42, Roche had various concerns that needed to be addressed. There was an issue of ownership of data. As a large organization, Roche has multiple marketing teams that work with multiple outside agencies. Roche found that this resulted in many disparate data sitting unused with these outside agencies.
Users needed to quickly and easily find the required information without being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of unstructured information. The content had to be effectively created and managed. Search results must be accurate and integrated to accommodate various languages by leveraging AI and LLM technology.
With Stravito, Roche found the perfect partnership. Together, the two companies were able to find a balance that effectively curates information, reduces access barriers, and activates insights.
Christoph describes working with Stravito on developing Brain42:
“If there’s anything I’ve learned on this journey, it’s this: choose your partners wisely. You must have a healthy partnership to succeed with this type of project. You don’t want a partner who always says no and insists on only selling an off-the-shelf solution. At the same time, you don’t want a partner who won’t challenge you when necessary or lacks a strong vision for their solution. It’s a balancing act, and that’s what we’ve found with Stravito.”
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Roche, AI, and the future of insights
Staying on top of technological advancements enables a company to fully prepare to meet future business challenges and provide beneficial insights to all stakeholders.
Christoph sees that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models will majorly shape how we manage information and communicate insights. In partnership with Stravito, Roche is preparing to harness the powerful capabilities of AI and LLMs. This exciting new technology will enable innovators like Roche and Stravito to overcome insights inflation and develop even more accurate and user-friendly insight platforms.
“We know we need to prepare ourselves for AI so that we can leverage the technology and focus on what matters most. And that is to have better insights into our collection.”
Taking inspiration from social media is also an area that Roche is focusing on for the future development of Brain42.
“If we have this interaction data in the platform, such as search queries, comments, shares, then the AI algorithms can learn from that data, making search and chatbots even better.”
Roche and Stravito continue their fruitful partnership and work diligently to improve the Brain42 platform. The result will drive faster, better customer and market understanding—and it might just lead to the next revolutionary medicinal breakthrough.
