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Andrew Embry

Andrew Embry

Sr. Director Insights Innovation Capabilities at Eli Lilly; spoken word poet and storyteller

Aug 11, 2026

StephanieHOST
13:18
Are you able to kind of talk to us about that and describe it?
13:21
So excited to do so.
13:23
Totally agree with you that synthetic can mean a lot of different things.
13:26
And I wish I had a magical dictionary that gives us all on the same page, but we don't have that.
13:31
Maybe some other day, right? So for our purposes, when Lily's talking about synthetic data, we are talking about personas that we have built.
13:39
And if we just oversimplify this, we have an AI tool where we have taught the AI how to act like target HCPs, target healthcare providers, and target patients.
13:50
And we've done that because we have thousands of hours of historical market research that we have transcribed and then use that as a training for those models.
15:23
And I think you sort of answered this about what is the specific use case around data? Because I feel like right now we're in a place of where there's a lot of curiosity and how much of your data, how much of your research do you trust to this specific tool? Do you trust it to do trends work? Do you trust it to do innovation work? Or is it just to do early stage concept testing or early stage things, or maybe just an extra verification? What do you think that when it comes to research questions or use cases that synthetic respondents are the best suited to explore?
11:33
Yeah
11:33
... took me two to three years to get over the initial doubt of doing things at work.
11:39
So when I first started working in the training organization, I had a colleague, and he knew that I performed poetry, and he, he was, like, super big into culture and all this stuff, and he's like, "One day I'm gonna have you perform something for people." And I was like, "Whatever, Bill." Like, "Whatever," like, "Not happening," just kept pushing it over.
11:57
And, like, every few months he'd be like, "No, no, I'm serious.
11:59
Like, there's something in you.
12:01
Like, I want people..." And I was, like, nervous and anxious, and then one day he finally came to me and he's like- Hey man, like, now's the time, right? And so for those two years, I'd been like really nervous and anxious, and I was like, "Never gonna say yes to this," but, like, Bill really cared about me, and I knew, like, Bill wouldn't put me in a position to fail or anything.
12:21
And I was like, "All right, here's my deal, Bill.
13:47
Great.

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