AI is transforming pharma market research by moving the function away from one-off, project-based studies and toward continuous, always-on intelligence, a shift that changes what insights teams deliver, not just how fast they deliver it. That's the assessment of John Shortell, a market research and insights leader with 30+ years of experience across the specialty medicines and oncology markets, who mapped out four concrete changes already underway during a conversation on ZoomRx's Decode podcast.
This isn't a vague "AI will help you work faster" prediction. Shortell, who has led global insights teams through the big data wave, the digital transformation push, and the shift from VHS-taped patient interviews to instantly queryable data pointed to four specific structural shifts he expects to reshape the insights function within roughly the next 12 to 15 months. Here's what each one looks like in practice.
"I've always been frustrated that it doesn't feel like we're really fully leveraging all of the knowledge we have... I expect we're going to move from this sort of data gathering and one-off projects to more almost like this knowledge management... almost like a continuous meta-analysis as opposed to a once every year or two exercise."
In practice, this means insights teams stop treating each new research archive as a blank slate. Instead of a brand team commissioning a fresh ATU study and manually cross-referencing it against three years of prior waves, AI-enabled knowledge management makes the entire research history queryable on demand, surfacing patterns across dozens of past studies in the time it used to take to locate the right PowerPoint deck. Teams that have gone this route are also building AI agents by therapeutic area and by competitor, effectively turning years of primary research into a standing, continuously updated resource rather than a filing cabinet.
"We're really going to have the opportunity to sort of step up and be that trusted advisor... you're there when the brand team that you're a part of doesn't make any key decision or attend any key meeting without you in the room."
Freed from the manual work of pulling and formatting data, insights professionals can spend more of their time in the room where strategy gets made — shaping the questions being asked, not just answering the ones handed to them. Shortell connects this directly to a talent-retention concern he's heard voiced elsewhere in the industry: insights has been losing strong talent to other disciplines — a concern he first heard voiced by a speaker at an industry talk years ago, and has echoed himself since: elevating the function's strategic weight is a chance to "make insights sexy again."
"Moving from this project-based research to almost always-on intelligence — and that's not necessarily the artificial intelligence, but that is sort of what we can bring to the table."
The clearest example already in production: AI agents built for early message development, letting brand teams pressure-test messaging directly against a synthesized patient-and-caregiver perspective before a single dollar is spent on formal creative testing. Shortell estimates his team has built somewhere around 50 of these agents across different therapeutic areas and products — not to replace primary market research, but to trim the number of creative rounds an agency needs to run before testing begins. The same logic applies to competitive intelligence: AI-powered conference summarization is already compressing what used to be days of secondary literature review into a near-real-time feed.
"I think we have this opportunity to be like an across-enterprise connector almost, by bringing in data from many disparate parts... whether that's from our medical organizations and our sales organizations and our insights functions and our marketing teams... if we can really bring that all in-house for this collective insight, I think it positions the insights functions and teams very well for the future."
This is the shift with the highest ceiling — and the most organizational friction. Shortell is candid that most companies, including his own, are still building AI agents on a per-function basis today, which is useful for early adoption but creates real duplication: a medical team and an insights team may each build a separate AI agent to analyze the same competitor using their own siloed data. Resolving that duplication into a single, enterprise-wide source of collective intelligence is where he expects the insights function to earn a genuinely new mandate — not just producing research, but connecting an organization's knowledge for it.
Decode: AI for Life Sciences and Healthcare is ZoomRx's podcast series on how AI is reshaping market research and commercial strategy in pharma. ZoomRx is a life sciences consultancy serving 100+ biopharma companies across the globe, helping insights and brand teams turn research and AI-powered analytics into decisions that move the needle.