Rescuing Pharma CX: From Experience Freefall to Intelligent Engagement with GenAI

At the Indegene Digital Summit 2025, leaders from DT Consulting (an Indegene company) unpacked a sobering reality: healthcare professionals (HCPs) are less satisfied with pharma engagement today than they were a year ago. Drawing on insights from over 6,000 HCPs across 13 markets, the discussion revealed a four-point drop in pharma’s Customer Experience Quotient (CXQ) and its first decline since the pandemic.

The session, led by Hannah Price and Jeff French, explored why customer experience (CX) is slipping despite record investments in data, omnichannel, and digital capabilities and whether Generative AI can reverse the trend.

The headline finding was that pharma’s CX is deteriorating, even as internal capability maturity grows. Many organizations have spent years building digital and data foundations, yet the physician experience is lagging.

This misalignment means that operational sophistication is not translating into better engagement outcomes. For pharma leaders, this underscores a critical lesson that capability investment without experience intent creates organizational drag.

Even as pharma scales its digital infrastructure, HCP expectations continue to rise. Every digital interaction outside healthcare, from personalized streaming to seamless e-commerce, redefines what good looks like for physicians.

AI is accelerating that curve, raising the benchmark for relevance, responsiveness, and real-time interaction. For leadership teams, the implication is clear: AI doesn’t just change what’s possible; it changes what’s expected.

Not all engagement channels are declining equally. Interestingly, web experiences have improved because of pharma’s recent focus on consolidating digital ecosystems, unifying medical and commercial portals, and applying stronger UX practices.

Yet, this progress comes with trade-offs. In-person interactions, rep engagement, and hybrid touchpoints have struggled to evolve at the same pace, creating a fractured CX landscape. The danger is a two-speed model: one where digital excellence outpaces human engagement, diluting the overall omnichannel customer experience.

Pharma organizations must now recalibrate for balance, ensuring that every channel contributes to a coherent, connected experience, not a patchwork of isolated successes.

DT Consulting’s long-running Digital Excellence Maturity Assessment (DEMA) reveals a critical plateau: despite years of transformation investment, both organizational capability and HCP satisfaction remain stagnant.

The paradox is clear. Transformation has become input-heavy but outcome-light. The pharma industry has optimized technology readiness rather than customer relevance, a cycle that exhausts resources without shifting perception.

The imperative for leadership is to redefine digital maturity not by the systems implemented, but by the consistency with which insights are translated into experience outcomes.

Strong CX performance closely correlates with organizations that treat omnichannel customer experience strategy as continuous learning systems rather than campaign frameworks. Where omnichannel is executed as an iterative, insight-driven discipline experience outcomes improve measurably.

Too often, organizations still rely on static plans and customer experience metrics that measure output, not outcome. The shift required is from orchestration to optimization, a dynamic process that closes the loop between insight and action.

After decades of digital silver bullets, from CRM to cloud to 360° data, GenAI now presents a genuine opportunity to close the CX gap. Yet, as history shows, the difference between progress and chaos lies in disciplined adoption.

The pharma industry’s next challenge is not experimentation, but execution. Without a framework for prioritization, governance, and change management, AI risks becoming another proliferation wave by producing pilots without impact. Success will depend on translating AI capability into repeatable, measurable, experience-led outcomes.

GenAI offers the capability pharma teams have been waiting for, which is the ability to act on insights with unprecedented speed and precision. Yet technology alone won’t close the gap between ambition and reality.

Organizations that align AI adoption with their CX vision by embedding it into everyday decision-making rather than treating it as a side project will see the most tangible gains in engagement quality, efficiency, and physician trust. If the industry can re-anchor transformation on experience differentiation, GenAI could indeed become the long-awaited inflection point.

Ultimately, AI transformation is not about automation; it’s about alignment. Rescuing the pharma CX requires more than new tools. It demands a unified model of insight, design, and operational execution, one that makes intelligent engagement the true engine of commercial growth.