What if AI could make prevention, not treatment, the foundation of global healthcare? At World Summit AI 2025 (October 08–09, Amsterdam), Barbara Cresti shares a vision where AI accelerates discovery in life sciences, empowers small businesses, and forces us to confront the hidden costs of the AI era.
What’s your most compelling dream scenario for AI — a breakthrough that would fundamentally improve life on a global scale?
My most compelling dream scenario for AI is an AI-driven leap in life sciences that enables truly preventive medicine for everyone, everywhere — targeting the diseases responsible for most global deaths and long-term illness.
I imagine AI models accelerating the discovery of ultra-low-cost diagnostics and preventive treatments, by decoding the earliest biological markers of cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory illness, and diabetes — often years before symptoms emerge. AI could model complex interactions between genetics, environment, and lifestyle across vast, diverse populations, revealing prevention pathways we cannot yet see.
This would lead to affordable vaccines, precision nutrition interventions, and simple, scalable therapeutics designed for low-resource settings, ensuring that prevention is not a privilege of wealthier nations but a standard of care worldwide.
Such a breakthrough could shift the trajectory of global health — reducing the burden on healthcare systems, extending healthy lifespans, and preventing millions of avoidable deaths each year.
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AI