AI Has Given Medical Affairs Everything Except the Answer

Author(s): Briana Belford

If you talked to me at all in Q1, you probably heard about all the travel, events, and AI-related conversations I was obsessing over. I probably used a lot of hand gestures and gushed over the *transformative moment* we were in, in insights, in medical communications, and in professional corporate life in general. As I’ve settled back in, applied new learnings to ongoing projects, and simply gotten a chance to breathe before a spring travel surge, I’ve finally processed the common threads across Reuters Pharma USA, Pharmabrands Age of AI Europe, and various insights & innovation workshops across Real Chemistry’s Medical Affairs clients. Each had different audiences, formats, and goals, but all circled surprisingly similar questions.

At Age of AI, the conversation was sweeping and expansive: multi-agentic workflows, synthetic environments, AI-generated tools spun up on demand with magic wands (at least that’s how it feels, right?). At Reuters Pharma USA, the discussion was more grounded: physicians’ shrinking attention, segmentation models that don’t quite work. In my daily work with medical insights teams looking to show impact, the stubborn reality that the outcomes we care most about take a year to show up persisted despite having access to more data and technology than ever.

AI has dramatically expanded what Medical Affairs can do—without resolving the harder question of what we should prioritize. Here are my takeaways from a Q1 spent in 8 cities across 3 continents.