“Every new medicine” is now designed on computers, the CEO of Bayer told Semafor World Economy on Wednesday, describing a fundamental shift due to AI.

“We used to have these banks of chemicals — thousands, tens of thousands of chemical entities — and we would screen them against targets,” Bill Anderson said, but now “we’re basically doing this with computational chemistry, computational biology.”

The same is true, he said, in crop protection. He said Bayer will launch “the first fundamentally new herbicide in about 40 years” next year, designed in silico: “It’s like the difference between shooting in the dark and having a precision-guided weapon.”