Successfully launching new pharma products and indications has become exceptionally challenging. Patient journeys now involve more specialties and evidence requirements have intensified. The overcrowded market means reduced rewards for later entrants, placing pressure on companies for speed to launch. In addition, post-pandemic launch trajectories continue to underperform pre-pandemic baselines, indicating an urgent need for innovation in launch strategy.

Generative AI presents game-changing opportunities to transform launch planning and execution. In this blog post, we look at how advancing tech capabilities can mitigate launch challenges to drive productivity, enhance decision-making, and elevate customer engagement.

The Need for Launch Innovation

Previously, in the primary care era, patient journeys typically involved one or two specialties. Approvals relied predominantly on randomized controlled trials. And customer engagement centered on achieving the highest share of rep voice. The present era of specialty care has upended these dynamics:

• More complex patient journeys now involve three to seven specialties
• Payers and providers demand more integrated evidence to complement clinical trial results
• Customer engagement has become multichannel, extending beyond the sales rep to digital touchpoints

The COVID-19 pandemic also inflicted additional stresses and cost pressures on launch success and further exacerbated the shift with fragile, backlogged healthcare systems that hampered diagnosis and treatment rates and opportunities to engage with physicians.

Lastly, the crowded nature of many therapeutic areas means limited room for new entrants. Market viability rests on the speed of launch planning and execution and reducing the cost per launch.

Generative AI Features Improve Launch Excellence

Generative AI offers pharma companies the ability to improve efficiency, speed, and decision-making. They can use it to pursue multiple launches more effectively by capturing data and learning from each launch. Generative AI accumulates intelligence over time, protecting intellectual property and helping to safeguard knowledge as human intelligence is lost through turnover.

Fundamentally, generative AI impact stems from three key features:

1. Insights and analytics: Analyzing terabytes of structured and unstructured data
2. Content generation: Producing new text, images and code
3. Stakeholder interaction: Better understanding of stakeholders and tailoring interactions and communication

These features enable more robust, real-time insights and accelerate critical workflows. The technology’s innate conversational nature promotes adoption, interaction and accessibility.

These breakthroughs can lead to substantial positive impacts such as:

• Boosting launch productivity via research, content and launch decision assistants
• Enhancing decisions with data-driven recommendations on forecasting, supply chains, process optimization and more
• Providing scenario planning based on uptake curves and key drivers of launch success
• Reinventing engagement with superior healthcare professional (HCP) segmentation and hyper-personalized multi-channel campaigns

Generative AI Powers the Command Center: Launch Cockpit

To realize generative AI potential, solutions must move beyond disjointed pilots to integrated and agile enterprise platforms.

Serving as a central launch command center, IQVIA’s Launch Cockpit is a single source of truth for all launch data, plans and insights. Cross-functional teams gain complete visibility into launch progress and performance. Generative AI modules then help users extract and act on the most valuable signals hidden within Launch Cockpit’s vast data assets.

Launch Cockpit Provides the Key Modules for Launch Activities

Launch Cockpit provides more visibility and access to insights, fostering cross-functional collaboration. It allows teams to respond faster and with more certainty to changing external and internal conditions for better operational agility.

Generative AI Enhances Engagement Across the Customer Journey

Customer engagement with HCPs is still below pre-pandemic levels, making it increasingly important to improve engagement, especially around product launches. Generative AI has broad applicability to transform commercial models by enhancing every aspect of customer engagement across the journey:

• Better understanding stakeholders by analyzing vast data to create personas
• Developing personalized engagement plans
• Generating tailored content and messaging
• Supporting interactions through recommendations and training, including transcripts and best answers for HCP questions
• Analyzing interactions to provide insights for the future
• Monitoring the competitive landscape – activities, pricing, market trends, promotional mix

The evolution of generative AI applications is already moving from next best action algorithms to more advanced solutions like co-pilots to assist with content, insights and calls, as well as co-planners to optimize strategies.

In terms of messaging, generative AI enables use of data. One such application is the creation of digital twins of HCPs to practice interactions. These rich digital personas can capture both objective metrics and subjective emotional traits to allow for targeted messaging. Using digital twins, AI assistants can train sales teams on communication styles, managing difficult questions and providing feedback.

The Future of Launch Excellence Is Generative AI

Launch excellence has never been more critical or more difficult to achieve. Using generative AI immense potential, life science leaders can build the enterprise capabilities necessary to thrive within intensifying launch complexity.

For further information on this topic, view our webinar on-demand: Powering launch excellence with generative AI