The pharmaceutical industry has long been squeezed by tight regulation, cost controls on medicines, and the necessarily extensive drug discovery and research process. There is some hope, however, as we are on the cusp of a change across the sector. In February 2020, a team at MIT discovered a new antibiotic in record time using a machine learning algorithm. Robert Weissgraeber at AX Semantics questions whether AI technology will usher in a quantum leap in pharmaceuticals and solve some of pharma’s long-standing structural problems.