Boosting Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing With Artificial Intelligence

Pratap Khedkar, Saby Mitra


Innovations in artificial intelligence and advanced analytics are creating performance and efficiency opportunities across industries and markets. Within pharmaceutical sales and marketing, a domain that also has a significant reliance on human functions such as expertise and reasoning, the impact of AI can be substantial.

Companies that use AI to orchestrate a cohesive customer experience will drive stronger differentiation, better customer access and higher sales impact. This article provides specific opportunities for machine and human integration in pharmaceutical sales and marketing and insight into how to truly realize the value of AI enablement.

About the Experts

Pratap Khedkar is a managing principal in ZS’s Philadelphia office, and leads the firm’s global pharmaceuticals and data science practices. He has advised many biopharmaceutical and healthcare companies on a wide range of business issues including commercial strategy, customer-centric marketing, market access, sales compensation and advanced analytics. A recognized healthcare industry expert, Pratap regularly contributes his insights to publications including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Business Insider, Fortune, Medical Marketing & Media, NPR, Pharmaceutical Executive and others. Currently, his thought leadership work focuses on topics including healthcare policy; life sciences companies’ new commercial and organizational models; and the evolving relationships between patients, providers and payers, and the life sciences organizations that serve them.

Saby Mitra is a principal in ZS’s Evanston, Ill., office and leads ZS’s global customer-centric marketing technology practice. He has more than 18 years of experience in advising and helping clients shape their commercial organizations through customer-centric marketing and CRM solutions in the U.S. and Europe. Saby’s expertise includes designing and implementing transformation programs in several customer-centric topics in the pharmaceutical industry and other verticals, including global multichannel customer engagement programs using big data, analytics and marketing automation platforms; commercial orchestration programs leveraging machine-learning-based next best actions; and field and marketing integration programs.