A cursory glance across job descriptions at most major pharmaceutical companies will, if one is being unkind, look essentially identical to the 2010s: the same divisional divide of analytics, field, launch, CRM, and content, to name just a few, with essential requirements listing a relevant degree and a set number of years in the subdivision. Meanwhile, AI threatens to upend the commercial ecosystem as we know it, if we let it. There’s no shortage of investment in commercial AI: budgets exist, and pilots launch. What’s missing is a redefinition of the realm of commercial possibility. R&D teams talk about AI in terms of what’s possible, where Commercial teams mostly talk about it in terms of what’s faster: faster call planning, faster reporting, faster content approval. In the pharmaceutical industry, we’re not pondering what the Commercial function could become, only what it could do quicker. I believe that the pharmaceutical industry could learn several vital lessons from the digital health teams they are so frequently adjacent to, or in partnerships with.
Today
As it stands, commercial teams still remain largely siloed, despite a decades-long effort to the contrary: the SWAT teams who swoop in for launch, the marketing teams who focus on a “360-degree view of the customer” and pore over agency data on tactic performance, the sales teams who battle daily for two to five minutes with target HCPs, the digital teams optimizing Veeva or Salesforce and wrangling unwieldy data, and the market access teams negotiating, lobbying, and analyzing. Each function is a separate thread in the complex ball of yarn that is a Commercial team in 2026. Each trying to grapple with the pace of change driven by AI for specific, single threaded needs. For example, a rep getting handed a new “AI-driven next best action” tool but it’s bolted onto the same static quarterly system that existed before, and doesn’t address any fundamental underlying model improvements.
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Opportunities for Pharma
The real question: if we designed a pharma commercial function from scratch today, would it look anything like this? My hypothesis is no, and that it would look much closer to the world of digital health.
Digital health and Pharma remain distant cousins in the family tree of life sciences and health. Where digital health can focus on specific interventions and inventions, Pharma, Big Pharma at least, has the unenviable task of spreading its approach across indications, therapeutic areas, and ultimately entire patient and HCP populations. The result is that digital health companies have grown up leaner, with commercial functions built as a specific, consolidated, and usually much smaller function than in pharma.
What pharma commercial could borrow from digital health isn’t complicated or novel, but it isn’t obvious in the day to day of a big pharma juggernaut. I once heard that in the beginning days of the internet, the NY Times typed in the full newspaper – just digitizing the physical copy. This is an exact analogy for how most of big pharma is using agentic AI now: focused on re-creation of existing ways of working and increasing efficiencies.
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The less obvious side to the speed and efficiency coin is the idea of changing the actual operating rhythm of the portfolio: shipping concepts to production in days rather than months or years. A digital health team ships a feature in weeks based on a usage pattern; a pharma commercial team can spend a quarter just getting requirements gathered. Or radical focus: a digital health commercial function is built around a handful of clear outcomes, not a dozen sub-functions each optimizing their own area. Pairing radical focus with pharma’s strength in regulatory & compliance creates the opportunity to expedite patient outcomes in a way before unseen. Finally, digital health companies build with partners from day one because they have to, while pharma often plans in-house first and partner only once internal options are exhausted, organizational fatigue has taken grip, or the “build” is ready to get going.
Making It a reality
What would it look like if Pharma embraced a digital health style way of working? Potentially, it would be by replacing the sprawl of sub-divisional dashboards and systems with one shared data layer, a single source of truth on HCP engagement, patient journeys, tactic performance, and pipeline, with access rights layered on top rather than entirely separate systems per function. Instead of a field force, maybe it’s a cognitive command center AI that operates across functions instead of within one, flagging a stalled account to market access, content, and the field team simultaneously instead of routing sequentially through three approval chains. And rethinking the field model itself: rather than dispersing reps to chase five-minute HCP windows on a static cycle, that same investment could fund fewer, richer touchpoints, twice-yearly events, and deeper partnerships with different, AI native platforms with distribution & reach like OpenEvidence that HCPs are already choosing to use on their own terms.
None of this requires more commercial budget than pharma is already spending. It requires spending it on reimagining commercial as a function instead of speeding up an existing function. Digital health and pharma have plenty to learn from, and with, each other, and AI is the first real forcing function either industry has had to do it. The Pharma commercial teams that treat this as a chance to redesign the model, not just streamline it, will be the ones that change what’s possible for HCPs and patients. The remainder will only benefit from greater day to day efficiency.
Source: champpixs, Getty Images
Suzy Jackson is a Digital Health & Commercial Pharma subject matter expert and former Digital Health Chief Commercial Officer at RVO Health, as well as former Head of the North America Life Sciences Commercial Consulting team at Accenture. Suzy’s independent advisory focuses on Commercial technology, strategy, Go-To-Market efforts, market entry, partnership shaping, and competitive analysis across Pharma and Consumer Health. Outside of her advisory work, Suzy is an avid scuba diver, traveler, and sits on the Boards of two non-profits focused on women’s rights, legal advocacy, and survivorship from trauma and abuse.
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