From Pilot to Impact: Focus on People and Processes to Deliver AI Value

Oct 31, 2025 | Dan Rizzo

AI ushered in a period of rapid investment, testing, and experimentation across life sciences. But, as some large biopharmas are discovering, for every 10 pilot programs, only one delivers real business value.

In a survey of senior commercial biopharma leaders, 89% said they were unable to scale more than half of their AI initiatives. And a recent report on AI adoption from MIT’s Project NANDA detailed that 60% of organizations evaluated enterprise-grade AI solutions, but only 5% of AI solutions made it beyond the pilot phase to production.

In this early-stage environment where the vast majority of AI projects will fail, how do biopharmas find the winners? Selecting the right technology is only part of the answer. It will also hinge on companies’ ability to prioritize — and eliminate — use cases based on tangible value and demonstrated business outcomes.

Life sciences is unlike any other industry: the highly regulated product development and commercialization life cycle takes 10-15 years on average and costs billions of dollars for each new therapy. Promising AI use cases span this life cycle, from speeding up the TMF process to bringing efficiency to case processing to enhancing compliant healthcare professional (HCP) insights captured by field teams.

Targeted AI use cases pointed at core operations and business processes will always deliver the most value. Veeva AI enables this by bringing agentic AI to the Veeva Vault Platform and deep, industry-specific agents to all Veeva applications. Data, content, and now agents work within core Veeva applications to optimize industry business processes, deliver increased productivity, and bring better medicines to patients faster.

With this foundation set, biopharmas can focus energy and resources on selecting the right use cases.

Identifying high-value AI use cases

Despite the excitement surrounding AI as a paradigm-shifting technology, most of the value from AI will come from people. As MIT’s analysis found, “Most [AI projects] fail due to brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.” A return on investment (ROI) in AI requires new skill sets, behavior and process change, and resource reallocation. And for truly transformative AI initiatives, there will be layers of strategic value beyond simple productivity gains.

The Veeva Quick Check Agent and AI Chat is a good example of how this works. This agent allows commercial teams to quickly evaluate promotional content for spelling, grammar, and compliance concerns, as well as elements like box warnings and important safety information. This significantly reduces the time medical, legal, regulatory, and marketing professionals spend hands-on in this core business process. Highly skilled workers are freed up for higher-value work and a historical bottleneck is removed, accelerating the delivery of content to educate HCPs and patients in need of treatment information.

Organizations can identify and validate high-value AI use cases using a simple “Test, Learn, Scale” framework:

1. Quantify the tangible business value and change impact for each use case. Prioritize your investments and projects this way.
2. Reshape business processes and drive adoption with a defined subset of workers.
3. Redistribute time gained to higher-value tasks across the operating model.
4. Measure ROI and remove process or adoption barriers.
5. Scale globally.

Throughout this process, organizations will need to periodically evaluate ROI by measuring anticipated value attainment versus expected value gain. Teams must be free to continuously optimize by removing process and adoption barriers as the technology improves. Change with AI requires optimizing with the human in the loop, and building trust with that workforce requires careful attention.

Leveraging Veeva Business Consulting’s deep expertise

Veeva’s approach to software, data, and consulting, working together as one, creates a connected model to optimize business outcomes. From its start, Veeva Business Consulting has provided Veeva customers with deep industry knowledge combined with Veeva software and data expertise, and is uniquely positioned to deliver measurable value within our customers’ operations.

Now, with AI agents embedded in Veeva applications, Business Consulting is helping organizations reimagine the way they work — not just improving discrete tasks and processes, but also reallocating highly skilled staff to higher value work.

Veeva Business Consulting is best positioned to guide the industry along this journey and to enable investments of time, resources, and effort on AI projects that deliver measurable business value. Its focus is helping the industry and its people work in a more efficient and connected way.

To learn more, visit veeva.com/eu/businessconsulting or reach out to us at veevabusinessconsulting@veeva.com.