Building a RAG AI Assistant for Pharmaceutical Operations

Join Tampa Bay Biotech for a practical and engaging introduction to RAG AI application to pharmaceutical operations. Pharmaceutical companies handle enormous volumes of paperwork: invoices, lab certificates, shipping records, and compliance forms from dozens of vendors. Reviewing these documents manually takes hours, introduces errors, and doesn't scale. What if AI could read, understand, and answer questions about them instead?
This session walks through the implementation of an AI-powered document assistant built to do exactly that. We'll show how we designed a system that ingests pharmaceutical documents — even scanned, handwritten, or image-based PDFs — extracts their contents, and lets users ask plain-English questions and get accurate, sourced answers in seconds.
The result is a working AI chatbot that reads vendor documents, surfaces the most relevant information, and responds with citations and confidence scores — no manual searching required.

What we'll cover:

• Extracting text from both digital and scanned PDFs
• Organizing and indexing documents so AI can search them intelligently
• Building a system that answers questions using only what's actually in your documents
• Scoring and evaluating how well the system performs
• Wrapping it all into a simple chat interface anyone can use
• Real lessons learned building AI tools in a pharmaceutical setting

Who should attend:

• Data scientists and AI/ML engineers
• Healthcare and biotech professionals
• Supply chain and operations analysts
• Developers curious about practical AI applications
• Students and researchers exploring applied AI
• Anyone who's wondered how AI can go beyond a basic chatbot

Agenda:

• 5:30 – 6:00 pm: Networking and refreshments
• 6:00 – 6:10 pm: Welcome!
• 6:10 – 7:30 pm: Presentation and open discussion
• 7:30 – 8:00 pm: Networking

Location: Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, 2101 East Palm Avenue, Tampa, FL 33605

Parking: Free parking is available in the lot directly north of the ECC building. Please do not park immediately adjacent to the facility.

RSVP: Seating is limited — please RSVP early. If you're bringing a guest, have them RSVP separately so we can plan accordingly.

Speakers:

Ernest Bonat, Ph.D. — Senior GenAI Engineer specializing in Machine Learning systems and AI assistants for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Healthcare.

Paul London, M.S. — Molecular Technologist and Data Scientist combining laboratory science and biotechnology with applied AI to build practical, data-driven tools for Healthcare and Life Sciences, with a focus on AI-powered document systems for biotech and pharmaceutical operations.