Artificial Intelligence has already proved itself as an effective tool to support the research carried out by pharmaceutical companies. However, as companies begin to invest heavily in the technology, they would be wise to explore the impact it could have commercially.

In January, Paul Shawah, senior vice president of Veeva Commercial Cloud, backed Artificial Intelligence to make a big impact on the life sciences industry in 2019, noting “we will move towards an AI-driven workforce as artificial intelligence becomes a standard capability across enterprise commercial applications”.

He went on to say: “AI will not only continue to improve sales force effectiveness with suggestions on their next best actions… it will [also] automate claims-reference linking in content management for marketing operations.”

According to Accenture, AI could help workers to use their time more efficiently, increasing labour productivity by up to 40% – just the sort of boost that sales reps need.

The impact of AI on pharmaceutical sales can start before the sales rep meets a customer. Machine learning can separate customers into highly specific segments, allowing sales teams to personalise their activity to greater degree. For example, in addition to therapy area, doctors can be segmented based on factors including interest in new drugs, location and availability.

In addition, AI can recommend materials based on a sales rep’s previous meetings with a customer and makes them easy to access. For example, if a doctor has expressed an interest in drugs for diabetes and cardiovascular disease before, the sales rep can be told to come equipped with information about relevant drugs. This ensures that personalised, impactful messages are shared, and less time is wasted while the sales rep searches for materials during the meeting.

Going one step further, Novartis is using AI to tell its sales reps what to say during meetings. Novartis’ pharma chief executive, Paul Hudson, told FiercePharma that the company’s ‘virtual assistant’ will make sure his sales team are “talking about the things that the healthcare professional is absolutely interested in.” Elsewhere, Pfizer Australia teamed up with AI provider, Complexica, back in 2017 to simulate sales and marketing strategies and resolve tricky ‘what-if’ scenarios.

During meetings, AI could transform the way inventories are taken at pharmacies. Currently, sales reps do this manually; however, this is associated with human error and reduces the time they have to engage their customer. Instead, images of the pharmacy’s shelves could be taken and analysed using AI to provide useful data about a company’s own drugs, as well as those of their competitors.

After a meeting, the sales rep logs their actions in a customer relationship management system. This, along with customer prescribing and browsing information, is a huge amount of data that, at the moment, sales reps cannot use. However, if data is continuously fed into an AI system, it could help pharmaceutical companies to target the right customers, personalise messaging, and determine the most appropriate type and frequency of interaction.

We’ve seen that AI has the potential to increase the efficiency of sales reps throughout the sales process. Tasks, for example, sourcing relevant materials for the customer, may sound simple, however, many reps are struggling to do this. By putting AI in control of some of the responsibilities that currently lie with sales reps, they will go into meetings better prepared and equipped with targeted resources, giving them the power and confidence to close more deals and boost sales.

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