New Beghou data and conversations across Fierce Pharma Week point to a broader challenge: making sure commercial strategies, systems, and ways of working actually hold up as AI accelerates.
Across very different topics at Fierce Pharma Week, the same practical question kept cropping up: Does what we build actually make it easier for people to do their jobs and support patients and HCPs?
AI was seemingly everywhere during the multi-day event, but it wasn’t always at the center of the most valuable conversations. In fact, several speakers mentioned “AI fatigue.”
The sessions that seemed to resonate most often focused on broader challenges: reducing friction for patients and HCPs, supporting behavior change, and helping different parts of the commercial organization work together.
One way to think about those challenges is through three fundamentals that Beghou Partner Clare Gora discussed during her Fierce Pharma Week presentation: coherence, composability, and cohesion (the 3 Cs).
Together, these 3 Cs look at whether teams are working from the same understanding, whether companies can build on what already works, and whether the resulting systems and processes actually work in practice as commercial execs increasingly look to accelerate AI.
Following are some of our takeaways from the week, grouped by the 3 Cs alongside Beghou’s preliminary Commercialization That Works research findings shared by Gora in her presentation, The Next Act in Commercialization: From Market Signal to Coordinated Commercial Response.
Coherence: Are teams solving the same problem?
Coherence starts with a shared understanding of what the organization is trying to accomplish and why.
That does not mean every function needs the same view, priorities, or responsibilities. It means those different perspectives should connect back to the same understanding of the market and the same strategic intent.
A session featuring CSL Behring’s Market Access and Biostatistics groups offered one example. The teams had different mandates, measures of success, and ways of working, yet converged around a shared goal of "winning" in a crowded rare disease market.
At the “Hindsight Is 20/20” session, Jeff Bakker, Insmed Senior Director of HCP & Payer Marketing, made a related point about launch preparation. “Investing early” means more than committing dollars, he said. It also requires the time and focus to understand market behavior, HCP needs, office routines, and the practical barriers that determine whether a strategy can work in the real world.
That context matters because teams can all believe they are executing the same strategy while working from different assumptions. Our latest Commercialization That Works research reflects some of that difficulty: 64% of commercialization leaders said turning market signals into clear decisions has not become much easier over the past two years.1
Composability: Can the next step build on the last?
A second theme from Gora’s presentation was building toward success incrementally rather than waiting for a full-scale transformation to deliver value. Composability involves a sequenced approach whereby each solution leaves the organization with reusable business rules, workflows, or data assets that can support the next decision.
For AI, the sequencing of use cases is key to this process. During a session on agentic AI, Alex Halliday of AirOps argued that “actionability” should be a central criterion for selecting use cases. Sanjiv Koshal of Gilead described narrowing the focus to three commercial use cases rather than pursuing dozens.
That means separating what’s specific to one use case from what can be repurposed across others. For example, in the “Hindsight Is 20/20” session referenced above, those pre-launch investments should yield data definitions, governance decisions, and workflows that can support future brand or indication work.
Ultimately, composability helps organizations avoid two costly extremes: one-off solutions that cannot travel and large-scale, foundation projects that take years to produce value.
Cohesion: Does it actually work for the people involved?
If coherence and composability are the blueprint and building blocks, cohesion is where those ideas meet day-to-day reality.
Acadia’s chief commercial officer urged during a recap of his company's rare disease launch that “families should not be the ones who have to hold healthcare together.” The systems and organizations around them have to do that work instead, providing a better patient and family experience. Otherwise, it's a sign of internal fragmentation appearing externally as additional work for HCPs, caregivers, and patients.
HCPs voiced a similar concern from their perspective. They talked about wanting context, continuity, and support within the broader care ecosystem. One provider captured the frustration with poorly integrated technology: “We don’t want another login. Make it frictionless.” Another was even more fundamental: “What’s more important is for the patient to have a care roadmap.”
The future of the field force discussion raised the same issue in a different way. Speakers described reps increasingly serving as coordinators across the care team versus "around dirt," i.e., traditional geographic territories. Their value is shifting from simply delivering information toward helping customers interpret and use it in the context of individual patient needs.
This will become particularly important as physicians increasingly use AI for their own independent research and answer engines. Reps will need to shift toward providing context and patient-centric detail (stories, anecdotes) that AI can't replicate.
Those examples get at what cohesion looks like in practice. The technology may work. The strategy may make sense. But can people actually use what has been built? Do the handoffs work? Does the right information reach the right person at the right time? Or do people still have to stitch the experience together themselves?
Beghou’s research shows there’s still work to do. Only 7% of commercialization leaders strongly agreed that their teams can translate decisions into execution across commercial workflows without heavy manual rework.1
Many respondents agreed with this statement at some level, but strong agreement drops sharply. That suggests an industry that understands the problem in principle but has not yet built consistent confidence in its ability to solve it.
And a separate Beghou Field Force Pulse Survey found that only 29% of field professionals report a high level of trust in data and insights provided by headquarters.2
AI raises the stakes for all three
Taken together, the sessions suggested that pharma’s relationship with AI is becoming more practical. The industry is asking harder questions about value, adoption, and fit.
But the larger opportunity goes beyond simply adding AI to the commercial model that already exists. Without the 3 Cs framework, which requires not only aligning on the blueprint and building blocks but also ensuring they come together in a better reality for patients and HCPs, AI will fall short of its promise, said Gora.
"AI is only going to sit on top of the foundation," she said, "so if we don’t have that in place, the ROI everyone expects won’t follow."
1. Beghou's flagship Commercialization That Works survey conducted with 180 life sciences execs across commercial operations, market access/payer marketing, HCP/patient marketing, and data & analytics/commercial IT: August-September 2026.
2. Beghou's Commercialization That Works: Field Force Pulse survey conducted with 100 life sciences field professionals: May-June 2026.
View the slides from Clare Gora's Fierce presentation and additional takeaways from our Commercialization That Works research. Full data from the Commercialization That Works survey is scheduled for release in November. Alex Margulies and Savit Tewari , both Associate Partners at Beghou, contributed to this report based on their conversations and experiences at Fierce Pharma Week.