AI Isn't a Journey. Success is a Series of Road Trips.
If you run a pharma brand or a commercial P&L and bought AI seats last year, this is about the money you are not getting back.
Aaron Uydess
Independent Principal & Founder
Key takeaways
Only one in ten life sciences employees with approved generative AI access uses it weekly. Most AI seats sit idle.
The gain comes from changing how the work is done, not adding tools: an AI-assisted brand plan can drop from about 12 weeks to 7, with four of them spent on strategy.
Replace multi-year AI journeys with short ROAD Trips: Route, Owner, Arrive, Debrief.
One in three employees at life sciences companies has company-approved access to generative AI. One in ten of those uses it weekly. That is from a ZS and Harris Poll survey of 127 life sciences technology executives. Do the math on your own team. If 30 people got a license, three are using it. The other 27 seats are the most expensive screensavers in the building.
It is not a pharma problem. McKinsey surveyed 1,719 companies this year: 89% use AI in at least one function, and 6% see meaningful bottom-line impact. The gap is not what the technology can do. It is what we ask of it.
Here is the part nobody says out loud. Most bought the seats because not buying them looked worse than buying them. Then they handed out the logins and went back to work. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton School professor, calls this space the "overhang," the distance between what these systems can do and what we actually ask of them.
The work has to change, not just the tools
Give AI to a team that keeps working the old way and you get the old result, slightly faster. The gain comes from changing the order of the work AND the way you work. Take the annual brand plan.
Step | The way it works now | The way it can work |
|---|---|---|
Situation analysis | Brief the agency, wait six weeks, receive 60 slides | Point AI at your own data, draft in two days |
Insight development | One workshop, a handful of hypotheses, no time to test them | Twenty hypotheses tested against the data before the workshop |
Strategy debate | Whatever time is left, usually a week | Four weeks, because the analysis is already done |
Message development | Three concepts, four weeks, pick one | Fifteen concepts in a day, narrowed by the people who know the brand |
Total | About 12 weeks, one of them on actual strategy | About 7 weeks, four of them on actual strategy |
A data scientist said it well: the shape of a project is both "the human does the work" and "the agent does the work." It is a division of labor, and knowing which parts belong to whom is the core skill. The same is true of a brand plan. AI takes the gathering, the summarizing, the first drafts and the pattern-finding across data nobody has time to read. Your team keeps the questions, the judgment, the choices and the accountability. Nothing ships unattended. Someone still validates the data, catches what the model got wrong and rejects the twelve concepts that miss. Call it a third of the saved hours going back into review, which is where you want them.
The payoff comes in three parts. Faster: the cycle drops from twelve weeks to seven. More efficient: production work inside it falls from eleven weeks to three. More confident: a strategy argued for four weeks against twenty tested hypotheses is a stronger plan than one argued for a week over three, and everyone in the room knows it. BCG puts the balance plainly: roughly 70% of AI value comes from people and process, 20% from data and technology and 10% from the algorithms.
What to do about it: the ROAD Trip
Most organizations answer this with an AI journey. A multi-year program, a steering committee and a destination somewhere on the horizon. The horizon moves every quarter, so the destination is further away in December than it was in January, and your team never feels like it is getting anywhere.
Short road trips work better. Each one has a destination you can name, a route you can plan and an arrival you can point to. At Kairos Meridian we run them the same way every time. We call it the ROAD Trip.
R is for Route. Name the destination before you name a tool. Pick one workflow, such as brand planning, field insight or content variants, and write down ten real questions the brand needs answered. Run them. Score the results, including the failures. Two hours a week for six weeks beats a year of enterprise pilots.
O is for Owner. The trip needs a driver who knows the brand, not a pilot lead who knows the tool. Name the one person with the deepest knowledge, give them protected time and permission to look foolish for six weeks. Access is not adoption. A driver is.
A is for Arrive. Decide what good looks like before you start, or you will not know when you get there. What makes a segment insight actionable rather than interesting? What makes a message variant on-strategy rather than merely on-claim? Write it down, name who decides and use it to reject work. Generating output is now cheap. Judging it is the job.
D is for Debrief. The fastest learning in any organization is lateral. What one brand team figures out on a Tuesday is worth more to the team next door than any eMail, webinar or training module, because it comes with a real problem and a person who can answer the follow-up question. Formal training teaches the tool. Peers teach the work. Hold the debrief, share the dead ends as openly as the wins, and start the next trip where this one ended.
The trip is shorter than it looks
Measure the miles behind you, not the distance to a horizon that keeps moving due to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Every trip you finish makes the next one shorter. The road is also more crowded than it looks. Only 6% of companies are AI high performers. Only 5% are what BCG calls future-built. The teams that look miles ahead of you are mostly louder about it.
You already own the car. The question is who you put behind the wheel.
If you want help planning the first road trip, we will spend an hour with you mapping the route. No deck, no pilot proposal, no license to buy. You leave with a destination, a driver and ten questions to run. eMail info@kairosmeridian.us.
CONTACT US TODAY
The first conversation is twenty-five minutes — a diagnostic, not a pitch. Pick a time with Aaron below, or send us a note about what you’re working on.
About Kairos Meridian
Kairos Meridian provides pharma strategy, marketing, and analytics in service of impact… with a dose of innovation. We serve as the senior, independent partner for pharma brands, for vendors that sell into them, and for the private equity firms making decisions about pharma-related assets.
Kairos Meridian, where strategy meets the moment, provides big agency thinking with boutique agility. We serve as strategist, operator and the additional arms & legs our clients need to hit and exceed goals.
ZS / Harris Poll, 2025 AI trends: Life sciences leaders on data, digital and AI (n=127): https://www.zs.com/insights/2025-survey-data-digital-ai
McKinsey, The State of AI (2026 survey, n=1,719): https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
Veeva, Agentic Commercial Trends Report (Q1 2026): https://www.veeva.com/resources/agentic-commercial-trends-report/
Ethan Mollick, The Overhang, One Useful Thing (September 2026): https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-overhang
BCG, Scaling AI in the Biopharmaceutical Industry (January 2026): https://www.bcg.com/publications/2026/scaling-ai-in-the-biopharmaceutical-industry
BCG, The Widening AI Value Gap (September 2025, n=1,250): https://www.bcg.com/press/30september2025-ai-leaders-outpace-laggards-revenue-growth-cost-savings
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We do the senior commercial work pharma brands need while the decisions are still open: building the strategy, sharpening the program and running it with the analytics to prove it. The work is our product.
What are your areas of expertise?
Commercial strategy in pharma & life sciences, with the deepest work in omnichannel, direct-to-patient, innovation, data and analytics.
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Small and mid-cap pharma brands in their first five years, the vendors selling into them, and the private equity firms holding related assets.
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We don’t sell technology or media, and we don’t do the technical build: no media buying, campaign production or platform implementation, and no junior consultants doing the thinking. We take strategy through execution and bring the analytics to measure it, which keeps our work independent.
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No. Fractional arrangements sell a percentage of someone’s time. We take interim leadership roles with a specific mandate, a defined goal, and an end date.
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