By Timothy S. Donahue

Top Takeaways:

• AI focus: Haypp says nicotine industry needs compliance-built AI systems
• Youth concerns: Company warns agentic AI is not ready for regulated nicotine categories
• Policy engagement: Executives participated across science, legal and regulatory ATNF panels

Artificial ‌intelligence ‌is ‌moving quickly. Haypp Group’s view is that the nicotine industry cannot afford to chase that speed in a way that turns careless.

That point came through in Haypp’s remarks at this year’s American Tobacco and Nicotine Forum (ATNF) in Ashburn, Virginia. Company leaders kept circling back to the same set of pressures as new tech starts to rearrange how the sector works, governance around AI, regulatory changes, and preventing youth access.

Gavin O’Dowd, Haypp Group’s CEO, spoke on the opening-day panel, “Innovation in Science: Harnessing AI & Creating New Approaches to Advance Product Research & Applications.” He described AI less as a way to dodge oversight and more as a way to strengthen compliance and produce better evidence.

“AI should not be a shortcut around regulation or responsibility,” O’Dowd said. “Used well, it can help our industry move faster on the right problems: understanding adult smokers and adult nicotine consumers, improving age-verification and compliance, and generating better evidence for regulators.

“The opportunity is not simply to personalize messages; it is to build systems that help more adults make informed choices while strengthening protections against youth access.”

He pointed to the volume of money pouring into AI across the wider tech world and said that, for regulated businesses, that only raises the stakes, safeguards need to be in place before these systems become routine and hard to unwind. O’Dowd also said nicotine companies should not expect off-the-shelf, commercial AI products to work well in settings where compliance is non-negotiable.

“The category cannot simply import generic AI and hope it understands our obligations,” O’Dowd said. “We need tools built around the data we actually have, the regulatory standards we must meet, and the responsibility we have, restricting access to adult consumers 21 and over.

“In a category with high compliance stakes, governance has to be part of the architecture.”

He added that Haypp’s machine-learning tools can now generate probability scores that estimate how likely a product is to succeed before it launches. Even so, he stressed that the company treats AI as support for decisions, not as a substitute for people, whether in marketing, compliance, or consumer communication.

From there, the panel moved to agentic AI, systems that can act on their own across multiple steps. O’Dowd argued that this is where the risks become sharper in nicotine categories, particularly given concerns about youth access.

“The most fundamental challenge we’re facing as an industry is to keep these products out of the hands of underage users,” he said. “Agentic AI isn’t ready for regulated categories, and as an industry, we can’t let it get ahead of itself. When underage consumption is on the line, the moral stakes are too high to move fast and figure it out later.”

O’Dowd pushed for regulators and industry to sit down together, so that safeguards tied to compliance and age verification are not left behind as AI adoption accelerates. Haypp’s presence at ATNF was not limited to AI.

Laura Leigh Oyler, vice president of regulatory affairs, joined the April 21 panel “State & Local Policy Impacts on Harm Reduction.” Issa Abuaita, head of legal for the U.S., moderated “Building Lasting Regulatory Reforms: Solutions for a Better PMTA Pathway.”

Across sessions, Haypp repeated themes that have become harder to ignore in the nicotine policy debate, responsible retail practices, science-led regulation, preventing youth access, and updating regulatory pathways for reduced-risk products.

For the sector overall, the conversation pointed to a basic shift already under way, AI is becoming part of both operations and regulation. Haypp’s argument was that it should advance with clear compliance expectations, not race ahead of them.