Biopharma is entering 2026 with accelerating change across AI, precision medicine, evidence expectations and care delivery. Advantage will not come from having the most initiatives. It will come from converting external change into performance through faster decisions, stronger evidence, better experiences, and trust that scales.
This perspective is based on research conducted by our Director, James Beeby, which draws on a scan of external trends, innovations, and market entry concepts shaping the biopharma industry.
What is changing fast
1) AI is compressing decision cycles, not just automating tasks:
Generative AI and agentic AI are accelerating planning, content development, operational execution, and analysis. The strategic implication is practical. If your decision cycle does not shrink, your responsiveness will not improve, even if your technology stack does. The opportunity is not simply adopting tools. It is redesigning how decisions are made, governed, and executed so pace improves without increasing risk.
2) Precision medicine is raising the bar for evidence:
More targeted therapies and more sophisticated patient stratification are changing the proof required by regulators, payers and clinicians. Winning organisations will build an evidence capability that connects clinical outcomes, real world signals, and access narratives in a continuous way. Evidence creation becomes a strategic advantage when it is structured, repeatable, and aligned to the decisions it needs to support.
3) Digital twins and synthetic data can accelerate experimentation, if governance is built in:
Digital twins and synthetic data are enabling faster modelling, scenario testing, and AI training when real world datasets are constrained. The unlock is trust. Traceability, privacy by design, and explainability need to be embedded from the outset. Without that foundation, speed becomes fragile and adoption stalls.
The underestimated shift: care delivery is being rebuilt around the patient
The medical field itself is evolving quickly, and that is changing expectations for how biopharma supports both clinicians and patients.
Ambient AI documentation is reducing administrative load and reshaping expectations of what good support looks like. AI decision support is becoming more embedded in clinical workflows, lifting expectations for relevance, speed, and clarity. Remote patient monitoring and telehealth are maturing into more continuous models of care, not occasional touchpoints. AR and VR are also progressing from novelty to functional training and capability building at scale.
The implication is clear. If care is becoming more continuous, digital, and workflow led, then engagement needs to become more useful, contextual, and integrated into the moments that matter. Presence alone will not be enough.
The strategic implications for the next 12 to 24 months
If you are shaping a biopharma strategy right now, there are a few moves that separate activity from advantage.
First, move from pilots to conversion. Build the pathways and governance that turn innovation into outcomes in a repeatable way. Second, treat trust as infrastructure. Auditability, transparency, and human oversight are not compliance add ons, they are what enable sustainable scale. Third, redesign experiences around workflow and context, not channels. Experience is increasingly shaped inside tools and moments, not through marketing cadence. Finally, build evidence and access capability early. As value based expectations rise, evidence generation and access strategy become tightly linked to data, experience design, and service delivery.
Ready to pressure test your 2026 priorities?
If you are assessing where to place bets across AI, evidence, operating model, omnichannel experience, or care ecosystem partnerships, talk to one of our experts. We will share what we are seeing across the market and help you prioritise what matters most.
