How AI is Changing What Reps Can do in the Field

Over recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has generally embraced AI. Due the nature of the technology, various companies have implemented it across multiple sectors. Now, the question that everyone is asking is: where is AI having an actual impact?

In March of this year, ACTO co-founder and CEO Parth Khanna wrote a piece for Pharmaceutical Executive discussing an area where he sees AI making a major impact. According to him, digital health solutions allow companies to both gather larger amounts of data and then derive actionable insights from that data.

Khanna recently spoke with Pharmaceutical Executive, where he elaborated on this topic, while also discussing how things have evolved in the months since he initially wrote his original piece.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How is AI changing what reps can do in the field?
Parth Khanna: It's an exciting time to be enabling and supporting life sciences organizations and their frontline teams with AI. Just last week, for example, I was speaking with a chief commercial officer whose company is bringing a very exciting new treatment-resistant hypertension drug to market. The conversation was about how to give frontline teams every possible competitive advantage — and what that actually looks like in practice.

There's a prevailing debate in the ecosystem about the role of the sales rep. Do we even need a rep in a world where HCPs are getting information from tools like OpenEvidence or OpenAI? The answer that keeps resonating is that sales reps add the most value when they help physicians and healthcare professionals apply clinical data and evidence to their own practice. HCPs can get answers faster than ever — but what they're still looking for is a knowledgeable partner who can help them work through the implications of that information in the context of their patients. That's where AI can be immensely helpful, from pre-call planning and answering critical product questions all the way to coaching support and helping reps pull through the development feedback they've received from their managers.

This brings me back to a framework I think about a lot: building both human intelligence and empathetic agents simultaneously. Human intelligence comes through AI-powered adaptive learning — ensuring reps get trained faster and are field-ready sooner — and through AI-based role-play practice, where reps can rehearse in front of an AI avatar before they speak to a real customer. They get more repetitions in, and they can land the message with greater confidence and impact.

Empathetic agents come into play at the point of need — pre-call planning, HCP targeting, surfacing complex product information in real time. Human intelligence working alongside empathetic agents is, in our view, the winning formula for field sales teams today.