Ryan Hill on AI's Transformative Power

—Ryan Hill, Assistant Professor of Strategy

Art: Yifan Wu

Before AI came for your job, it came for the biologists’.

In 2020, Google DeepMind researchers unveiled AlphaFold2, an AI model that tackled a major scientific challenge: Is it possible to determine a protein’s structure from its ingredients alone? The ability to do so without slow and expensive lab experiments carried the potential to revolutionize our understanding of biology and accelerate drug discovery.

At an annual competition of scientists trying to solve this puzzle, AlphaFold2 became the first AI model to perform as well as laboratory experiments. In subsequent years, it predicted structures for more than 200 million different proteins, a 1,500-fold increase over the proteins previously characterized in decades of laboratory work. In 2024, the model’s lead developers received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

AlphaFold2 and related models have been “extremely exciting” for science, says Ryan Hill, an assistant professor of strategy at Kellogg. With collaborator Carolyn Stein of UC Berkeley, Hill set out to measure precisely how AlphaFold has changed the field of biology, from the pace and direction of discovery to the nature of scientific work.

Their study provides a preview of what happens when AI transforms a specialized field overnight—a level of disruption that may become increasingly familiar in the future as the world enters the AI era.

“Economists are grappling with a lot of questions around the role of AI in our lives and in the economy,” Hill says. “This is an interesting microcosm to study those forces because it’s a powerful AI tool that does a specific task that we can observe and measure.”

Read more about Hill’s research, and AI’s capabilities, in “What Happens When AI Transforms a Specialized Field Overnight?” at Kellogg Insight. #KelloggLeader #AI #Innovation #Strategy