75% of drug launches miss targets by $200 million. The culprit? A planning function that hasn't evolved to match the complexity and pace of modern pharma
As a pharma executive, you've navigated countless technology transformations. You've seen how digital tools reshape capabilities, elevate teams, and create competitive advantages.
Today, AI offers something different: not just another tool but a fundamental multiplier of your organization's planning capability, and with it, the opportunity to create the kind of sustainable competitive advantage that defines industry leaders.
Contrary to popular belief, it isn't about replacing people—it's about unleashing their strategic potential.
When AI handles the mechanical aspects of planning, your teams can finally focus on what truly drives pharmaceutical success: anticipating market dynamics, orchestrating complex portfolios, and turning scientific breakthroughs into patient impact.
The early adopters are already capturing extraordinary value. They're not just saving millions, they're fundamentally reimagining what planning organizations can achieve.
When leading pharmaceutical companies empower their planning teams with AI, the results transcend traditional ROI metrics. Yes, the numbers are compelling—54% productivity gains in year one, growing to 73% by year two, translating to $8.7 million annual savings per 100 planners.
However, focusing solely on efficiency misses the profound strategic transformation. Those recovered 8,600 hours monthly across your planning organization aren't just savings—they're your new competitive arsenal.
Imagine your planning teams freed from mechanical tasks, now able to model complex market scenarios across all therapeutic areas, anticipate regulatory shifts before they impact timelines, orchestrate resources dynamically across your entire portfolio, and provide your leadership team with predictive insights that shape strategy rather than just track execution.
This, right here, is the difference between planning as an overhead and planning as a strategic advantage. Your planners evolve from project schedulers to strategic architects who shape how your organization navigates an increasingly complex landscape.
While the transformation potential is extraordinary, we must acknowledge a difficult reality. The planning function in life sciences has been fundamentally broken for years, and this dysfunction has quietly undermined countless launches, delayed programs, and squandered opportunities.
More than 75% of new drug launches have failed to meet expectations. Many miss their target launch dates by over 19 months. On average, each underdelivers by $200 million in forecasted revenue.
These aren't just execution misses; they are symptoms of deeper, systemic issues that plague how our industry approaches planning.
Life sciences planning today typically follows a static, "plan-once-and-forget" approach. Organizations invest significant resources in annual planning cycles that produce detailed documents, which are quickly rendered obsolete by the industry's rapidly changing landscape.
While markets shift daily and scientific breakthroughs emerge unpredictably, plans remain frozen in time, creating a dangerous disconnect between strategy and reality.
Companies often settle for high-level plans that lack granular detail and thorough resource analysis. This superficial approach stems from a pragmatic but misguided belief: since the future is uncertain, detailed planning is a wasted effort.
Without sufficient depth, organizations lack a proper understanding of the actual costs, time requirements, and resource needs for successful execution. Teams scramble to plug gaps with last-minute solutions that inevitably cost more and deliver less than properly planned approaches would have achieved.
Perhaps most damaging is the industry's reliance on standardized templates and boilerplate approaches. Many organizations invest months and millions in consulting firms to develop "playbooks" or "blueprints" that are assumed to work universally across all evolving circumstances.
This one-size-fits-all mentality leaves companies perpetually surprised by predictable variations and unable to adapt when reality diverges from their single-scenario plans.
Comprehensive scenario planning no longer requires armies of planners and months of effort. AI breaks this trade-off. What once required thousands of hours now happens in minutes.
Depth and variety no longer come at the expense of speed. Comprehensive and agile scenario planning is not only possible now, but it can be routine.
The consequences of broken planning are painfully illustrated by Biogen's launch of Aduhelm, a groundbreaking Alzheimer's treatment that became one of the industry's most spectacular failures.
The planning failed to address stakeholder education and market preparation adequately. Doctors remained skeptical of the data, payers balked at coverage, and patient uptake was minimal. First-year sales reached just $4.6 million versus blockbuster expectations—a devastating outcome.
This wasn't a product or data failure. It was a planning failure—a failure to foresee the complexity of launch execution beyond regulatory milestones.
The root cause wasn't the science or the execution; it was the manual planning architecture that couldn't model complex stakeholder dynamics in real time. Imagine if Biogen's planning teams had been able to generate and compare dozens of market scenarios rapidly, identifying potential physician resistance and payer pushback months before launch.
Life sciences leaders haven't ignored these problems. The challenge has always been capacity. Detailed, multi-scenario planning requires time, coordination, and resources that simply haven't been available.
Cross-functional planning often involves manually reconciling assumptions from dozens of stakeholders. Aligning inputs across R&D, regulatory, and commercial teams can take weeks, sometimes even months. When timelines are tight, and every input may shift, the ROI of investing that effort feels uncertain.
This is where Operational AI changes everything. AI-powered planning platforms can model stakeholder responses, test pricing strategies across multiple scenarios, and identify hidden risks before they materialize. The technology that could have transformed Aduhelm's trajectory is available today for your pipeline.
Here's what three decades in the life sciences industry have taught me: the best planning comes from experienced professionals who understand the subtle interdependencies that make or break pharmaceutical programs.
AI doesn't replace this wisdom; it amplifies it exponentially.
When your senior planners can generate comprehensive scenarios in minutes rather than weeks, they can apply their judgment to what truly matters. They become strategic advisors who help therapeutic area heads navigate complexity, enable clinical teams to anticipate and prevent bottlenecks, and give executive leadership the foresight to make bold moves with confidence.
This multiplication effect transforms planning from a support function into a strategic differentiator. Your competitors are still updating quarterly plans while your teams are already executing their third strategic pivot based on real-time market intelligence.
In life sciences, success rarely comes from perfect plans. It comes from rapid adaptation. Markets are volatile. Clinical results are surprising. Competitors pivot overnight. The best-performing organizations don't avoid uncertainty; they outpace it.
The leading pharma companies of tomorrow know this; they realize that sustainable advantage will not come from any single drug or technology—it will come from organizational capabilities that compound over time. AI-powered planning creates precisely this type of advantage.
Organizations with advanced planning capabilities can sense market shifts weeks before competitors.
Which means they can mobilize resources across portfolios with unprecedented agility, launch products with pre-tested responses to multiple market scenarios, and maintain strategic alignment across functional teams despite constant change.
This agility gap widens with each decision cycle. While competitors debate annual or quarterly plan updates, AI-enabled organizations continuously refine strategies based on emerging data. The result is a virtuous cycle where better planning enables better decisions, which in turn generates better outcomes and attracts more talented individuals and resources.
For executives ready to elevate their planning organizations, success follows a proven pattern. Start by reimagining planning not as administrative overhead but as a strategic capability.
Invest in your people and show them how AI amplifies rather than replaces their expertise. Deploy platforms that integrate seamlessly while delivering transformative capabilities.
Most importantly, measure success through strategic outcomes, including faster time-to-market, higher launch success rates, improved resource utilization, and enhanced organizational agility. These metrics matter far more than simple cost savings.
This is why Unipr built Ana, an AI planning partner explicitly designed for the complexity of life sciences. Ana embodies our belief that technology should elevate human capability, not replace it.
With Ana, your planning teams can generate rich, multi-scenario plans in minutes, maintain living strategies that adapt to market realities, surface hidden dependencies before they become crises, and focus their expertise on strategic judgment rather than mechanical tasks.
The impact is immediate and compounds over time. Organizations using Ana report not just efficiency gains but fundamental improvements in how they navigate uncertainty and capture opportunities.
For companies managing large portfolios and complex timelines, Ana is a force multiplier.
Ana creates bandwidth, surfaces blind spots, and makes scenario-based, adaptive planning the new standard without adding cost or headcount.
Today's pharmaceutical leaders stand at a defining moment. Organizations that adopt AI-powered planning will shape the industry's future. Those who hesitate may find themselves increasingly unable to keep pace with the changing world.
It isn't about technology adoption, it's about organizational evolution. It's about giving your teams the tools to do what they do best: turn scientific innovation into patient impact with unprecedented speed and precision.
The future of pharmaceutical excellence requires planning capabilities that match the pace of scientific discovery. Your teams have the expertise. AI provides the amplification. Together, they create the strategic advantage that will define tomorrow's industry leaders.
The future belongs to those who empower their people to achieve what was previously impossible.
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