AI for Commercial

AI-Driven Omnichannel Orchestration in Pharma

ANG Associates
Life Sciences & AI Consulting

Jan 2026 5 min read

The Channel Fragmentation Problem

Healthcare providers today are reachable through more channels than at any point in pharma's history: field visits, rep-triggered email, remote detailing, medical portals, webinars, and peer-to-peer digital content. In practice, more channels have not meant better engagement. A Deloitte Switzerland analysis published in March 2025 found that only 28 percent of HCPs believe pharma companies' engagement strategies actually meet their needs, even though 82 percent of life sciences executives report being satisfied with their own strategies. The same analysis found that 34 percent of HCPs say sales reps do not tailor messages effectively to their needs. Veeva's Pulse Field Trends Report for the first quarter of 2025, drawn from more than 600 million HCP interactions across over 80 percent of commercial biopharma field teams worldwide, adds a sharper detail: field teams use approved content in fewer than half of HCP meetings, and nearly 80 percent of approved materials go rarely or never used at all. The result is a familiar pattern for commercial leaders: heavy investment in content and channels, but no coherent system deciding which HCP should hear what, through which channel, and when.

How AI Orchestration Works

Omnichannel orchestration platforms address this by treating engagement as a sequencing problem rather than a channel-by-channel scheduling exercise. Next-best-action (NBA) engines, such as IQVIA's Next Best Action offering, combine rules-based logic with machine learning across more than 200 extensible algorithms to perform dynamic micro-segmentation of HCPs and recommend the customer, channel, message, and cadence combination most likely to matter at that moment. Vendors including Veeva, IQVIA, and Aktana (now part of PharmaForceIQ following its 2025 acquisition) build these recommendations from behavioral signals across both personal channels, such as rep visits and calls, and digital channels, including email opens, webinar attendance, and portal activity. More advanced implementations layer in reinforcement learning, where the model does not just score a fixed set of predefined actions but continuously updates its policy based on how an HCP actually responds, treating each interaction as a data point that refines the next recommendation. In practice, this looks like:

Suppressing a rep visit trigger when a physician has already engaged deeply with a webinar or medical portal in the same week
Prioritizing a follow-up call for HCPs whose digital engagement signals unmet informational needs
Sequencing content so a scientific email precedes, rather than duplicates, a field conversation
Adjusting cadence in near real time as new interaction data arrives, rather than relying on quarterly territory plans

Deloitte's analysis describes this as the goal of moving from a fixed content calendar to models that "suggest the Next Best Actions, ensuring continuous refinement of engagement strategies" as HCP preferences and channel usage patterns emerge from the data itself.

What the Data Shows

The evidence for well-executed orchestration is measurable, though it depends heavily on execution quality rather than platform choice alone. Veeva's 1Q25 Pulse report found that content-driven engagement, when properly targeted, more than doubles treatment adoption rates, reduces the time between HCP meetings by up to 25 percent, and increases the likelihood of a follow-up conversation by up to 20 percent. Veeva's European Pulse data from 2024 offers a concrete channel comparison: Boehringer Ingelheim achieved a 60 percent click-through rate through on-demand digital channels, compared with 9 percent for standard rep-sent email, and found that 43 percent of HCPs actively respond to chat messages from field representatives, a channel many commercial teams still underuse. Accenture's 2025 research reinforces why the field channel remains central to any orchestration strategy: up to 70 percent of impactable pharma sales are still driven by field engagement, 5 to 10 times more than direct-to-consumer channels, and 76 percent of HCPs believe field team interactions positively influence clinical decisions. Yet the same research found that only one in four field teams feel fully supported by their current CRM, while 81 percent of pharma field teams believe AI could meaningfully elevate their engagement strategy. That gap, high potential value from the field channel paired with low confidence in the tools supporting it, is precisely where orchestration platforms are meant to add value.

"Physicians have limited time and don't need repetitive information. The transfer must be efficient, with scientifically trusted information through the right channel." (Dr. Vital Hevia, urologist, quoted in Veeva Pulse Field Trends data for Europe)

Turning Strategy into Working Systems

The gap between an orchestration strategy on a slide and a working system inside a Veeva CRM or comparable platform is usually where commercial AI initiatives stall. ANG Associates works with pharma and life sciences commercial teams from the Basel area and across Europe to close that gap: shaping the AI and data strategy behind next-best-action models, validating them against GxP and pharmacovigilance requirements where promotional content and adverse event signals intersect, and delivering the underlying CRM and integration work through SAFe and Agile methods so that orchestration logic ships in increments a commercial organization can actually adopt, rather than as a single high-risk platform cutover.

Sources

omnichannel orchestrationHCP engagementnext best actionpharma commercial AIlife sciences CRM

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