Rick Bates, WG’96, founder and CEO of RxSense, is no stranger to solving complex business problems. His healthcare technology company manages massive volumes of pharmacy benefit data, spanning over 10,000 drugs and hundreds of thousands of pricing variables. Despite having a top-tier internal analytics team, Bates found himself facing two persistent roadblocks: the challenge of building efficient prescription benefit plans, and the struggle to automate long-range pricing projections.

That’s where the Wharton AI & Analytics Accelerator came in.

An experiential learning program under the Wharton AI & Analytics Initiative (WAIAI), the AI & Analytics Accelerator connects industry partners with interdisciplinary student teams to tackle real business problems using AI and advanced analytics. But beyond the educational mission, the Accelerator serves as a strategic resource for companies seeking external insight, innovation, and problem-solving power.

“We were stuck,” Bates recalls. “We didn’t have the bandwidth to look at the problems differently. The Accelerator helped us break that cycle.”

A Real-World AI Partnership with Strategic ROI

RxSense proposed two advanced analytics challenges for its student teams: reverse engineering pharmacy benefit plans, and forecasting drug pricing through 2027 using AI models.

For the students, these problems presented a novel challenge that extends beyond the more manicured outcomes they’re asked to deliver in the classroom. These projects required analyzing complex datasets, developing customized algorithms, and surfacing entirely new approaches to entrenched business problems. Bates and his executive team approached the project with deliberate openness, offering only partial datasets to avoid “leading the witness” and inviting radically different methods of inquiry.

“The students didn’t come with any healthcare bias,” Bates said. “They brought pure analytics and creativity. They modeled the data in ways our team hadn’t even considered.”

Weekly check-ins with RxSense’s data and analytics teams helped provide students with any guidance they needed, and assured their efforts were on the right track. The check-ins also helped to develop a shared understanding and familiarity with not only the problems at hand, but with the individuals working to solve them.

At the end of the eight-week project, company representatives came to campus at the Wharton School for their teams’ final presentations and other programming as part of the day-long AI & Analytics Accelerator Summit. When his student teams stood up to present, Bates observed not a formal, nervous pitch, but a fluent, collaborative discussion between his staff and the student teams.

Immediate Business Impact, Long-Term Strategy

Before the Accelerator, RxSense was consuming high levels of time and technical labor to manually build pricing projections and benefit plans. After the Accelerator, they walked away with:

• Two concrete frameworks for tackling core business problems
• New modeling techniques introduced by student teams
• Clear next steps for refining and automating their systems
• A renewed vision for incorporating AI into their pricing infrastructure

“We now have a totally different approach,” said Bates. “We know what’s missing, we know what to do next, and we’re going to get to full automation by Q1 of next year.”

The benefits weren’t just technical. The Accelerator also surfaced new hiring considerations. Bates noted the program illuminated the kind of talent RxSense would need more of in the future – technically fluent, AI-savvy professionals who think differently and work cross-functionally.

“The first thing [joining the Accelerator] did is it made me realize I should have been doing this sooner,” said Bates.

Why Companies are Investing in WAIAI Partnerships

For Bates, the value proposition of the Accelerator isn’t hypothetical – it’s operational. The Accelerator has become a reliable, low-risk way for companies to prototype advanced analytics solutions while engaging with new talent and perspectives.

Bate’s team plans to continue both projects in the fall and explore additional collaborations with WAIAI. RxSense is one of many organizations that have found meaningful outcomes through this analytics-for-industry engagement model, where real-world data meets Wharton’s academic firepower.