AI Champions: why Pharma needs culture as much as technology
In pharma, AI doesn’t lack technology, it lacks culture. AI Champions aren’t a title but a mindset: curious, pragmatic, collaborative, and resilient. They are the spark that turns technology into meaningful and sustainable change.
Pharma is no stranger to paradoxes. One of the most striking today is that while AI technologies are ready and the business need is undeniable, adoption remains slow. As our co-founder Michele Barana recently noted, the missing piece is not code, but culture.
Beyond tools, towards culture
Pharma is a sector where complexity and compliance often make transformation feel slow. Yet the potential of AI is enormous: faster processes, sharper insights, greater personalization in engagement.
The real difference lies not in platforms, but in people who bring them to life. We call them AI Champions. Not because of a formal title, but because of their mindset: curious enough to try new tools, pragmatic enough to focus on real-world applications, collaborative enough to share learnings, and resilient enough to keep experimenting even when things fail.
How AI Champions put learning into practice
So, what do AI Champions actually do? Their approach is simple but powerful: learning by doing and sharing is caring.
They approach AI not as a theoretical exercise, but through hands-on experimentation and cross-team collaboration. Take video creation, for example. When our teams needed to select the right AI tool, technical experts, trainers, consultants, and marketing professionals joined forces to test and validate multiple platforms. Through iterative experimentation and open discussion, we identified the tools that were genuinely useful, balancing practicality with business needs. This hands-on, community-driven approach turns experimentation into actionable results and fosters a culture where AI solutions are co-created, trusted, and scalable.
From internal culture to customer impact
When AI Champions accelerate adoption inside an organization, the ripple effect extends far beyond internal teams. Clients experience faster and more relevant innovation in the products and solutions they rely on.
Because Champions experiment early and share openly, our products evolve in response to real-world challenges. Improvements don’t just appear on a roadmap; they are born from lived experience. This means:
- Features that matter, because they come from real use cases.
- Faster delivery, because ideas are tested and refined before scaling.
- Solutions you can trust, because compliance and practicality are built in from the start.
Champions remind us that innovation is not about launching something new for its own sake: it’s about making products more valuable, usable, and impactful for those who depend on them.
Why small wins matter
Too often, AI initiatives in pharma begin as pilots that never scale. Champions change that dynamic. A marketer who uses AI to generate campaign variations in hours instead of weeks. A sales manager who optimizes call plans with measurable results. A compliance officer who tests AI-assisted reviews to accelerate approval.
These stories may seem small, but they create ripples. Each success inspires others, showing that in pharma, lasting change comes less from grand programs and more from practical wins that build trust.
A strategic shift for pharma
The lesson for the industry is clear: AI adoption is not a technical problem, but a cultural one.
Champions embody the mindset that makes innovation sustainable. They ensure that as technology evolves, the organization evolves with it. They are not just early adopters. They are the spark that turns technology into transformation, and the force that makes innovation in pharma not only possible, but sustainable.