(This article originally appeared at Forbes.com)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a hot topic in the area of life sciences lately. With a growing number of groundbreaking AI use cases in other hi-tech industries -- ranging from self-driving cars to speech and image recognition tools to personal assistants (you know Siri, don’t you?) -- players in the biopharmaceutical industry are looking toward AI to speed up drug discovery, cut R&D costs, decrease failure rates in drug trials and eventually create better medicines.