The Diagnostic Room: Pilot Purgatory, Why Pharma AI Stalls After the First Wins

Pharma doesn’t have an AI experimentation problem. It has an AI execution, scaling, and ROI justification problem.

In this solo episode, Dr. Andree Bates names one of the most expensive failure patterns in the industry: pilot purgatory.

A key theme is misdiagnosis. When AI stalls, organisations often blame platforms, data science capability, training, vendor selection, or “resistance to change”. Dr Andree argues these explanations are usually incomplete because they ignore the structural constraints that determine whether AI gets trusted, governed, adopted, and tied to real decisions at scale.