With the recent introduction of IQVIA Orchestrated Analytics with AI Assistant, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in how life-sciences professionals will interact with data and tools — greatly enhancing their efficiency while also tapping into new, previously unseen strategies and behaviors.

The foundation of this exciting new product is our tried and trusted IQVIA Orchestrated Analytics solution, a unified data foundation and analytics platform designed to help launch new brands, maintain competitiveness for established brands, and foster personalized engagements that are tailored to complex healthcare provider (HCP) behaviors.

The other element of this solution is our new, cutting-edge IQVIA AI Assistant. AI Assistant is a conversational AI interface built with IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI™, designed to accelerate brand excellence by providing analysis and guidance you can use to discover, prioritize and act on the most impactful activities. And when we say our AI is “conversational,” we mean exactly that: IQVIA AI Assistant uses generative AI to enable you to ask questions in natural language.

AI Assistant is much more than ChatGPT

While IQVIA AI Assistant is a large language model (LLM)-based solution, it is vastly different from familiar off-the-shelf LLMs like ChatGPT or Copilot. For starters, IQVIA Orchestrated Analytics with AI Assistant is custom-built to access data,draw conclusions, and perform actions from IQVIA’s rich data, analytics and software products — so you can trust that responses will be relevant, accurate and up-to-date. Integrations with Orchestrated Analytics apps means that those questions can generate actions too, and dramatically optimize your workflows. Additionally, IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI gives its answers the precision, speed and trust you require, while maintaining compliance and privacy at all times.

By keeping out untrusted and irrelevant data and focusing on compliance and privacy, Orchestrated Analytics with AI Assistant capitalizes on the promise of generative AI without the “hallucinations” and distorted output that may crop up in commonly used LLMs. IQVIA’s version of generative AI is focused and accurate — which makes it possible to address complex business questions, drive greater sales performance, and simplify daily tasks with actionable insights and recommendations.

Artificial intelligence with practical applications

During any discussion of AI, users often ask, “What can it do for me?” IQVIA AI Assistant has access to the same Orchestrated Analytics data and tools you already use every day, so one (limited) way to look at it is that AI Assistant can do much of what you already do, but far more thoroughly and with remarkable speed and accuracy. The use cases for AI Assistant are as varied as are the types of commercial functions in the life sciences industry.

You already ask questions of your data every day, figuratively speaking. The difference with AI Assistant is that you can now literally ask questions of your data. Questions like:

• How are our brands performing? 
• Which areas of my territories are not reaching their full potential? 
• Who are all of the customers listed in this region? 
• In this region, are we doing enough activities to support a particular treatment? 
• For the treatment, how is activity trending across each market? 
• How am I doing compared to my competitors? 
• How does my performance compare to my goals? 
• Can you organize all this information in PowerPoint for me?

Let’s dig a little deeper into some common use cases for a few different job functions.

Role: Sales Representative

Sample question: “Plan my activities for next week’s visit to London.”

A good sales rep regularly digs through a fair amount of information to figure out which doctors to contact and how best to approach each of them as individuals. This requires everything from access to up-to-date details about physicians and their institutions, to strategizing one’s calendar and mapping out the most efficient route for a day’s visits. Sales reps have to understand the brand- and territory-related risks across all of their doctors, which requires they synthesize a diverse range of information — from commercial interactions (what has each client purchased and used) to medical touchpoints like publications, events and interests.

IQVIA AI Assistant gives sales reps a one-stop means of doing all this, bringing together all relevant information and data and help execute these complex tasks much more quickly and easily. A sales rep need only ask AI Assistant to “Plan my activities for next week’s visit to London,” and it will schedule the most efficient route to meet with approved recommendations. Once the high-value clients are accounted for, AI Assistant can then scan for gaps in the calendar and suggest lower segment HCPs to fill out the schedule. As those gaps are filled, the schedule and route will automatically update as well. The sales rep can then use AI Assistant to generate insights and recommendations for each contact on the day’s schedule. This includes precise insights into the doctor’s preferred channels of engagement, suggested topics or events for engagement, and recent publishing efforts. All this can all be accomplished “on the go” and the results quickly imported into the representative’s PowerPoint collateral as well. With automated export of data to everyday tools, employing your company’s templates and styles, AI Assistant dramatically improves efficiency and frees up the user’s time for more meaningful tasks.

Role: Commercial Operations Leader

Sample question: “Is my team missing opportunities with HCPs?”

On the corporate side, an operations leader is less focused on the doctors and more dedicated to planning and execution so that their sales reps can perform efficiently. To do this well, they need detailed information on the incentives and the performance targets across their teams, and they need to be masters at marketing — creating efficient market strategies, coming up with the optimal mix of promotional elements for their target audience, and overseeing digital marketing campaigns. All this requires extensive use of up-to-date market reports and analysis from many different sources.  

IQVIA Orchestrated Analytics with AI Assistant provides operations leaders with a single interface to do all this and more. For example, a query of “Is my team missing opportunities with HCPs?” would lead AI Assistant to identify any key, lower-segment HCPs that are missing from the current plan — based on any new data available, including third-party data. It could then suggest the best HCPs to use as gap-fillers in the team’s call plan when top HCPs are not available. AI Assistant presents all this guidance with easy-to understand, transparent descriptions and recommendations, backed by clear and concise tables for easy identification of potential opportunities and fast comprehension of the underlying data. With another simple query, the operations leader can then instruct AI Assistant to integrate the appropriate low-segment HCPs into the team call plans, ensuring that everyone is instantly updated with the potential gap-fillers.

Role: Business Analyst

Sample question: “How are we performing compared to competitors?”

A company’s business analyst needs to make sense of data that is often quite technical and that typically comes from a dozen or more data sets, all in support of a wide range of users performing a wide range of functions across the company. IQVIA AI Assistant accelerates that process by making it remarkably easy — and refreshingly non-technical — to analyze all types of data using simple language queries like, “How are we performing compared to competitors?” AI Assistant can quickly extract pertinent details from all available data sets and quickly synthesize an informative and accurate report, practically eliminating the need for an analyst to continually dig through a bunch of data dictionaries to make sense of how all the data sets fit with one another. From this one simple query, the results could include everything from a brief summary of trends — illustrated with clear and concise graphs of relevant sales and market data — to a risk analysis, recommendations for implementation, and even new insights with consolidated metrics for contextual intelligence.

Role: Country-level Leader

Sample question: “How is our portfolio performing in Germany?”

A firm’s country-level leader is another example of where IQVIA enables conversational intelligence that addresses complex queries. Without AI Assistant, discerning how sales of a product, category or portfolio are performing in any given market is likely to entail a lot of investigation and analysis across multiple data sources. With AI Assistant, it’s simply a matter of asking a straightforward question, like “How is our portfolio performing in Germany?” and quickly receiving the most up-to-date market-share statistics as well as additional metrics — growth rates, historical changes, etc. — for even greater context. Additionally, AI Assistant can bolster this information with in-depth analysis across competitors, including automatic ranking by sales, key insight summarization by brand and drug class, and a broader portfolio analysis across markets. And when it comes time for the country-level leader to report their findings, AI Assistant can present the findings in a graphical representation (say, a map of Europe with sales values called out) and generate a contextual summary of positioning across markets.

Role: Executive

Sample question: “How can I fine-tune our strategy for the best chance of success?”

At the executive level, there is a real need for a single source of truth amongst multiple hierarchies of data, from which the executive can generate cogent analysis and insights at many levels. Executive leadership needs access to a trusted viewpoint that can enable exploration of the business at the global, regional and territory levels, across entire portfolios and categories or individual products. An executive must be able to synthesize vast amounts of data to identify where a gap might exist, to find problems before they become too large, and to define a cohesive overall strategy for their brands.

When given a natural language query like, “How can I fine-tune our strategy for the best chance of success?” IQVIA AI Assistant excels at capturing a holistic view of complex data and provides an executive the ability to seamlessly navigate across different levels within their organization, pull together wide-ranging strategic insights, discover best practices, and develop new strategies and approaches.

If you could talk to your data, what would you ask?

IQVIA Orchestrated Analytics with AI Assistant opens new possibilities for life sciences companies and everyone within them that works with data. AI Assistant delivers integrated insights that go well beyond pre-built KPIs and are valuable across the full range of job titles and responsibilities. This innovative solution offers a single source of truth for reporting, insights and recommendations, and it stands apart for its customizability and performance, as well as for supporting secure and compliant deployments tailored specifically for life sciences.

As we continue to implement generative AI to empower next-generation reporting and alerts, the only question is, what will you ask of your data?