As pharmas double down on digital and AI, talent is a key consideration, consultant says

“Dig­i­tal,” “dig­i­tal-first” and “dig­i­ti­za­tion” have been buzz­words in phar­ma mar­ket­ing and com­mer­cial strat­e­gy for more than a decade. But the typ­i­cal way that hap­pened was by dig­i­tiz­ing ex­ist­ing ecosys­tems.

Now, with the re­al-world adop­tion of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, “the en­tire busi­ness con­struct is get­ting reimag­ined,” said ZS man­ag­ing part­ner Mah­mood Ma­jeed.

That means shift­ing or cre­at­ing new busi­ness mod­els, but al­so chang­ing up the tal­ent pool. Phar­mas need to think about new kinds of tal­ent fun­da­men­tals such as ex­per­tise in dig­i­tal da­ta and AI, and more gen­er­al­ly the abil­i­ty to work dif­fer­ent­ly, said Ma­jeed, who leads the man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy’s dig­i­tal and tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness.

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