Haleon - How AI is advancing innovation in oral care

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, and seems to be pervading everything. Our dental and periodontal professions must surely be looking at how it will affect oral health.

In this series of interviews, the European Federation of Periodontology is exploring what our partners are doing, or perhaps NOT doing with AI.

In this interview, we talk to Shafik Saba, the global lead for innovation and capability development at Haleon.

Shafik works for Haleon and not an AI company, although his infectious enthusiasm for AI might suggest he works for the latter! For Shafik, it is AI’s incredible ability to crunch data and come up with creative solutions that makes it so exciting for innovation.  “Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini from Google do this really well”, he enthuses, “and increasingly the amount of content you can put into a prompt is growing every day, with platforms like Gemini now able to digest one million tokens, roughly equivalent to the entire Harry Potter series.”

That’s all great, but why does it matter? Well, it allows you to ask AI to sift through large amounts of data based on your specific task or question, and generate creative suggestions to help develop new products that improve people’s lives.

How does AI work for Haleon?

“Our work starts with patients, this can be sorting through millions of data points like consumer reviews, or real world evidence on how products improve quality of life,” explains Shafik Saba, “all the time using AI to find patterns and connections that we’d struggle to do manually.”

“So the classic sorts of issues we might come across include people with bleeding gums, who avoid it until it’s too late and their tooth starts wobbling, where AI can help us understand why they steer clear. AI can then suggest new ways to help them take action, such as using behavioural science.”

Whilst AI can help discover new connections that help patients oral hygiene, can it help in the manufacturing process?  Of course it can! “Some of our more advanced toothpastes are complex to manufacture, and this complexity can result in longer manufacturing times, which makes them more expensive. As manufacturers, we want to make that process more efficient so we can keep the price down while everything else in the world is going up,” explains Saba. “By using sensors to measure in real time how the machines are mixing our toothpastes together, AI can both monitor this data and suggest ways to improve operational efficiency, resulting in higher yield, less waste and faster production.”

AI can also help promote better oral health in poorer countries too by using simple pictures taken on mobile phones and feeding this into a trained data set using Machine Learning.  

“A few years back, I launched a digital service for Sensodyne, where you simply took a picture of your mouth and answered three questions, using AI-powered analysis it could assess the risk of whether your teeth were sensitive and advise on what you can do about it.”  

So what advice does Shafik Saba have for dentists and how they can embrace AI?

Learn how to use it, it is here, embrace it!  That is his battle cry.“Using AI platforms like ChatGPT is different to using Google, when I’m training people at Haleon I generally say follow these four steps. 

(1) Give it a persona, something like “you are a friendly dentist”;

(2) Give it a task like “suggest 10 ways to get my patients to brush for the full 2 minutes”;

(3) Feed it some information, this could be something relevant like a new clinical research paper on how to change behaviour, feed it with anything that might inspire new thinking;

(4) Tell it how you want the answers to be presented, this could be simply “give me the answers in the form of 10 short bullet points”. 

So there you go, now you’ve learnt how to prompt with AI!

Is Shafik Saba at all worried about AI? Not really, as you might expect!  However, he agrees it must be used responsibly. Responsibility in AI is a growing discussion in the industry. From treating people’s data with utmost security and privacy as you’d expect, to eliminating negative bias, to putting human safety checks in place to ensure we are ultimately always the arbitrators of what’s the right thing to do.  Similarly, dentists will always have to have the last say on how to help their patients, as even the best AI doesn’t have the life experience or intuition of a dental professional.  However, as a tool to simplify data heavy mundane tasks, or inspire new ways to solve dental problems, AI is increasingly invaluable every day!