You know that feeling when you're drowning in research papers, desperately trying to connect dots across thousands of studies? What if I told you AI is already doing that heavy lifting – and doing it better than we imagined possible? Nofil Khan, Director and Head of AI at Avicenna, has watched this transformation unfold from the front lines, guiding Fortune 500 companies and governments through their AI metamorphosis.
Here's what's actually happened: while we've been debating AI's potential, it's quietly been producing real results. "AI is progressing faster than people realize," Khan observes, "with it already helping in discovering new findings and algorithms." AlphaFold didn't just promise to solve protein structures – it delivered 200 million of them. Tools like Semantic Scholar and research assistants are already combing through thousands of papers, not in some distant future, but right now.
The concrete shift Khan has witnessed? Research workflows that used to take graduate students months are happening in days. Not because AI is replacing human insight, but because it's handling the grunt work – the endless literature searches, the pattern recognition across vast datasets, the initial hypothesis generation that researchers can then evaluate and refine.
What makes this particularly compelling is the open source angle. The same research acceleration that's been available to well-funded labs is becoming accessible to smaller teams and individual researchers. Khan has seen this democratization firsthand through his consulting work – institutions that couldn't afford massive research teams are now competing on insights, not just resources.
The real question isn't whether this will transform research – it already has. It's what happens next as these tools become more sophisticated and more widely available. Khan brings the perspective of someone who's guided organizations through this transition, with both the successes and the inevitable stumbles that come with any technological shift.
Join us for an eye-opening exploration of AI-powered research at Bangkok Scientifique's next gathering – because the future of scientific discovery isn't coming someday. It's here, and it's moving faster than you think.
