Watch the Novel Cohorts podcast with special guests Jeff Morgan and Nishant Aggarwal from Deloitte
Unlike our typical podcast, this episode features a live demo of Deloitte’s Gen AI solution RWE Agent. The walkthrough showed how agentic AI is transforming the RWE lifecycle, helping researchers move beyond rigid, historical self-service systems toward more intuitive, transparent, and efficient workflows. The session offered a glimpse into what’s possible from natural language cohort building and data model–agnostic workflows to AI-generated suggestions that draw on knowledge bases like ClinicalTrials.gov to interpret trial protocols and recommend inclusion or exclusion criteria based on defined cohorts and outcomes.
Some key learnings were:
- Natural Language Cohort Building: Conversational interfaces allow users to define cohorts in natural language, lowering the learning curve compared to historical self-service tools
- Intelligent Suggestions: AI can propose relevant inclusion/exclusion criteria, prior datasets, and study references based on similar historical analyses drawn from knowledge bases like ClinicalTrials.gov
- Data Format Agnostic: Agentic AI tools can work directly with source data, removing the need for rigid data model transformations required by earlier self-service systems
- Speed and Efficiency Gains: Data onboarding, query generation, and cohort creation processes that historically took weeks or months can now be completed in hours or days
- Visual and Statistical Summaries: AI tools can automatically generate descriptive statistics and visualizations of cohort characteristics, supporting validation and deeper insight exploration
- Transparency of Outputs: Features like viewing generated SQL code or inclusion/exclusion criteria enable researchers to verify and understand AI-driven results
- Human-in-the-Loop Design: AI-generated outputs can be validated through human review at key checkpoints to ensure accuracy and trust, especially for inclusion/exclusion criteria and cohort definitions
- Flexible Deployment: Can be deployed within client environments, giving control and ability to extend the solution, unlike rigid third-party SaaS tools
- Guardrails and Compliance: Role-based permissions and built-in guardrails help prevent misuse or unauthorized analyses, ensuring safety and regulatory compliance