AI as your co developer: A new way to build tools in Pharma

Across Life Sciences, a quiet but profound shift is underway. AI is no longer just supporting our work, it’s beginning to co‑create with us. In highly regulated environments like Pharma, where precision, documentation and compliance drive every decision, this opens the door to a completely new way of building solutions.

During our latest technical coffee corners, Strandie Raphaël Facchini shared insights that sparked an energising discussion within our community.

Here’s what this new partnership with AI really looks like...

How AI compresses hours of work into minutes

In the past, building even a small internal tool meant securing budget, involving development teams, drafting requirements, and waiting through months of back‑and‑forth.

Today, that barrier has dramatically reduced.

AI automations allow you to describe what you want, in your own words, and generate the first working version almost instantly. The distance between “we should have a tool for this” and “it’s ready for review” has never been shorter.

AI is helping Pharma professionals build tools themselves while preserving the same quality expectations we’re trained to uphold.

What changes with AI‑assisted development

AI doesn’t remove the structured thinking that Pharma requires but it compresses the time between steps.

a) You define what the tool must do

Exactly as you always have. You outline the purpose, constraints, data flows, and compliance expectations. Your domain expertise sets the boundaries.

b) AI builds the first version, and fast!

Instead of waiting months, AI can create a functional prototype in hours or minutes.
It assembles workflows, draft logic, interfaces, and documentation faster than any traditional pipeline.

c) You validate that it works correctly

Review, test and confirm compliance. Your role remains essential here because you are responsible for the quality.

d) You deploy using the same standards

Quality documentation, traceability, risk assessments, approvals - none of that disappears.
But now you start from something complete instead of from scratch.

The partnership is simple:
Your expertise + AI’s speed = smarter, faster and compliant delivery.

AI is powerful, so how do you train it?

The good news: you don’t need coding skills, you need GxP rigor.

AI doesn’t learn like a machine in a factory, it learns like a colleague and it still needs some human oversight and validation.

If you know how to onboard a new team member, you already understand the basics:

clear instructions and structured context
feedback and corrections
gradual refinement

AI responds to the exact same approach. Your Pharma knowledge is what makes AI’s output reliable.

Impact for QA & QC professionals

For junior QA/QC professionals especially, this shift is a massive opportunity. You gain:

the ability to prototype solutions yourself
faster cycles for testing and learning
less time stuck in manual processes
more time spent validating and improving

The phrase “we don’t have a tool for this” is losing relevance.
If you can describe the tool, you can build the tool, with AI as your co‑developer.

It’s the start of a new chapter for Pharma.

And at Strand, we’re embracing it together. Our technical coffee corner sessions have become one of the places where learning happens in real time: Strandies sharing insights, challenging assumptions and unpacking the trends shaping our industry.

A space built by Strandies, for Strandies where expertise grows and our community keeps moving forward.

Overview