Industry

AI use cases in pharma and life sciences

Pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies: research, regulatory submissions, medical information and commercial operations.

Use cases: 10
Deployments: 33
Organizations: 26
Outcome disclosed: 48%

10 Pharma and life sciences use cases

26 organizations in 10 countries run these use cases in public. 48% of those 33 deployments disclose a measurable outcome.

Cross industryPharma and life sciences

AI agent for travel and expense report audit

A travel and expense audit agent is an AI agent that checks every travel and expense report line against policy, for auditors. It checks receipts and prior submissions instead of a small manual sample, flags duplicates, altered receipts and policy violations with the evidence attached, and auto approves the clean majority so auditors spend their time on the reports that are genuinely risky.

Deployments

8 public, best grade C

Median automation rate, vendor reported

72%

3 deployments

HealthcarePharma and life sciences

AI clinical trial patient matching and prescreening

AI that compares a patient's health record against the eligibility criteria of open clinical trials to help research staff and treating clinicians find candidates. It reads structured data and clinical notes, then gives staff a ranked list of likely eligible patients with the evidence for each criterion, so that people confirm eligibility and invite the patient.

Deployments

6 public, best grade B

Reported accuracy

100%

Cleveland Clinic, organization claim

Cross industryBanking

AI copilot for marketing content with compliance pre review

AI marketing content and compliance copilot drafts campaign copy and checks it against advertising rules before a human approves it for publication. It writes campaign copy, product explainers and social posts on brand and in the customer's language from approved product facts, then runs a first pass compliance check against advertising rules and required disclosures, flagging unsupported claims and missing warnings before a human in marketing compliance approves publication.

Deployments

5 public, best grade B

Reported productivity gain

34%

Ally Financial, organization claim

Pharma and life sciences

AI drafting of clinical study reports and regulatory documents

Generative AI that drafts clinical study reports and other regulated documents for medical writers to verify, edit and approve. It writes documents such as protocols, patient materials and submission modules from the trial's statistical tables, listings and figures and from approved template text, before anything is submitted to a regulator.

Deployments

7 public, best grade B

Reported error reduction

80%

AstraZeneca, organization claim

Pharma and life sciences

AI for clinical trial site selection and feasibility

AI that scores and ranks candidate investigator sites and countries for a planned clinical trial, so clinical operations teams choose sites more likely to meet enrollment targets on time. It ranks them by predicted enrollment speed, access to the eligible patient population and historical performance, and teams use the shortlist to activate sites instead of relying on which ones a study team happens to know.

Deployments

6 public, best grade B

Reported cycle time reduction

53%

ICON plc, organization claim

Pharma and life sciencesGovernment and public sector

AI for pharmacovigilance adverse event case intake

AI for pharmacovigilance adverse event case intake is AI that takes in adverse event reports about medicines, vaccines and devices for drug safety teams. It receives reports from calls, emails, forms, literature and partner files, decides whether each is a valid case, flags seriousness, extracts and codes the case data into the safety database format, and routes it to drug safety professionals, who review medical content and regulatory reporting.

Deployments

7 public, best grade B

Reported accuracy

up to 90%

Boehringer Ingelheim, vendor claim

Pharma and life sciences

AI native platform for drug target discovery and molecule design

An AI drug discovery platform is an AI native research platform that prioritizes disease targets from biological data and generates and optimizes candidate drug molecules computationally. It also predicts the molecules' properties before a chemist synthesizes and tests them, so a pharmaceutical or biotech company reaches a validated preclinical candidate with far fewer molecules made and tested than a conventional medicinal chemistry program.

Deployments

9 public, best grade B

Reported cycle time reduction

about 60%

Insilico Medicine, organization claim

Cross industryBanking

AI regulatory horizon scanning and obligation mapping

Regulatory horizon scanning is AI that continuously reads publications from the regulators and standard setters an organization answers to and classifies each item by relevance and urgency. It breaks new rules into individual obligations and maps them to the internal policies and controls that meet them, so compliance owners see what changed and where the gaps are.

Deployments

5 public, best grade B

Autonomy

Assist

Pharma and life sciences

AI review of batch records and process data for quality deviations in pharma manufacturing

AI batch record and deviation review reads and correlates batch records, sensor data and quality certificates from a pharmaceutical manufacturing line to flag quality deviations. It compares each new batch against a profile of the best performing past batches and flags the process parameters and deviations that explain a change in yield or quality, so manufacturing science and quality teams can act on a cause instead of reading records line by line after the fact.

Deployments

4 public, best grade B

Reported cost reduction

Recordati, vendor claim

Cross industryBanking

Governed text to SQL analytics assistant

A governed text to SQL analytics assistant turns a business user's plain language question into a query against governed data. It runs the query under that user's own data permissions and returns the table or chart together with the SQL and the tables used, so routine ad hoc questions no longer queue for the data team.

Deployments

6 public, best grade B

Autonomy

Assist

Free PDF playbook

AI use cases in pharma and life sciences: the playbook

10 use cases with deployments, value, playbooks and governance, in one document for your team.

What the evidence says

Computed from the 33 public deployments behind these use cases at pharma and life sciences organizations. Numbers update with every checked record.

Benchmarks with at least 3 pooled values

Benchmarks across Pharma and life sciences use cases
KPI	Median	Reported range	Data points	Claimed by
Cycle time reduction	60%	53% to 60%	3	3 organization

Business functions

AI patterns used

Deployments by stage

Announced
1
Pilot
11
Production
19
Scaled
2

Public deployments by region

North America
15
Europe
14
Asia Pacific
3
Global
1

Organizations with a public deployment

AbbVie
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)
Amgen
AstraZeneca
Bayer
Boehringer Ingelheim
Bristol Myers Squibb
Curia
Eli Lilly
Eli Lilly and Company
Grifols
H. Lundbeck A/S
ICON plc
IQVIA
Insilico Medicine
Johnson & Johnson
Merck & Co.
Novartis
Novo Nordisk
PSI CRO
Pfizer
Recordati
Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Revolution Medicines
Sanofi
Takeda

The same use cases in other industries

29 public deployments at 29 organizations outside pharma and life sciences run these use cases too. They are not counted in the numbers above; each use case page shows them.

Other industries

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KPI benchmarks

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Methodology

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