The Missing Patient

Published 29 July 2026

Author(s): Gabriel de Paula

Where’s the humanity?

‘Patients aren’t data, they’re people’: it’s the stuff of a thousand cliched LinkedIn posts. There is power in segmented personas, maps and data points, but we know that patients are subtler than numbers on a screen.

We’ve inherited the tools to resolve this, allowing us to use that power at the same time as humanising our interactions. But rather than doing so, we’re using AI to abstract patients further, at the very point where it’s hardest to see.

AI scoring every HCP nightly on prescribing propensity and churn risk, or capping personas at six because more than that isn’t ‘actionable’ is moving us further away from our customers. This is a recipe for the isolation of our brands.

Other industries are waking up to this while we’re still napping. Many in retail saw customer service departments as low-hanging, AI-replaceable fruit. Now, they’re quietly rehiring the same teams. The most recent high-profile example of this comes from fintech: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, has admitted that his company focused “too much on efficiency and cost. The result was lower quality”.