Every major technology wave has reshaped how businesses compete, from dot-com to social to mobile. James Sun has built companies across each of these inflection points, and he believes AI represents something fundamentally different: not just a new channel or platform, but a new way for organizations to think and decide.

AI can analyze data and generate recommendations at extraordinary scale. But making a decision that accounts for incomplete information, organizational culture, and strategic trade-offs remains a distinctly human act. Until now.

Drawing on two decades of entrepreneurship and a year of intensive research with AI scientists at MIT, alongside over 100 AI implementations at private equity-backed enterprises, James will explore the frontier of decision intelligence: AI systems that learn to reason through the messy, context-dependent choices that drive real business results. He will introduce a structural enterprise framework for decision-making through strategic, cultural, and political lenses, and make the case that generic AI tools can provide a consensus, but cannot make the specific decision your organization needs. The future belongs to organizations that build decision engines reflecting their own unique logic.

For analytics and data science leaders in life sciences, this keynote will reframe your role: you are not just the custodians of data infrastructure. You are the architects of how your organization thinks, decides, and acts.

Key Takeaways:

• Why AI demands a fundamentally different playbook than prior technology waves, centered on decision-making, not automation
• What the latest research at MIT reveals about teaching machines to reason with incomplete information
• A structural enterprise framework for understanding how decisions actually get made inside organizations, and how to build AI around that reality
• Lessons from 100+ AI implementations: where companies get stuck and how analytics leaders can bridge AI capability with organizational transformation
• Why every organization needs its own decision intelligence layer, and what that means for pharma, biotech, and medical device companies

James Sun is a founder, operator, and investor building AI-impact companies that take AI from theory into real, operational products across industries including media, private equity, enterprise software, and beauty. He has invested in over 50 companies spanning AI, consumer, and technology.

As the cofounder of Devblock, James has led teams that have delivered over 100 AI implementations for private equity-backed companies helping legacy enterprises modernize their data infrastructure, embed AI into operational workflows, and transform how leadership makes decisions.

Currently pursuing an Executive MBA at MIT Sloan, James has spent the past year working closely with a vetted community of AI and data science PhD researchers to apply advanced research inside traditional industries. Through these collaborations with AI PhDs at MIT, he is studying how artificial intelligence can move beyond probabilistic prediction toward genuine reasoning and judgment. His work draws on reinforcement learning, incomplete-data modeling, and a structural enterprise frameworks examining strategic, cultural, and political dimensions to build decision-making systems tailored to the unique rules and constraints of individual organizations.

James brings a rare perspective that bridges deep technical research with the realities of enterprise transformation, offering audiences both a vision of where AI is headed and practical insight from the front lines of implementation.

Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a multi-modal data and AI SaaS solutions company providing research solutions and patient-centric solutions for life sciences innovators, research sites and the world’s leading healthcare providers. ConcertAI is focused on accelerating and improving the precision of retrospective and prospective clinical studies using provider EMRs, LISs, and PACSs systems as the source for all study data. ConcertAI provides SaaS and AI clinical technologies to more than1900 healthcare providers (half of the top 250) around the world, partners with more than 200 clinical research sites, advances the CancerLinQ initiative with a long-term cooperation agreement with ASCO, and works with a range of medical societies and regulatory authorities. Today more than 50% of the leading biopharma internationally utilize the company’s products and SaaS technologies.

Prior to ConcertAI, Jeff was Managing Director, Accenture Strategy/Patient Health; Global Chief Operating Officer and SVP Strategy at Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research, Inc.; and partner at McKinsey & Company. He is also a founding board member and senior advisor to several early-stage companies and currently Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio). He is the co-author of the widely cited book, Healthcare Disrupted. Jeff has a Ph.D. and M.B.A. from The University of Chicago.