By Ned · June 2026
Sanofi now describes itself, in its own boilerplate, as “an R&D driven, AI-powered biopharma company.” In 2023 it went further, declaring it wanted to be the first pharma company “powered by AI at scale” and launching an app, plai, to prove it.1,2 The ambition is real and the technology is genuinely useful. But the language tells on itself. “AI-powered” describes how the engine runs. It says nothing about where the car is going.
That distinction used to be the whole point of pharma. “R&D-driven” was never really a claim about research; it was a claim about outcomes — new medicines, longer lives, diseases pushed back. Research was the visible means to a benefit patients could feel. AI does not carry that promise on its own. A patient is not helped by a model. They are helped by a medicine that arrives sooner, works better, or reaches them at all. When a company leads with the tool instead of the result, it has quietly swapped its purpose for its plumbing.
No patient has ever been cured by a company being AI-powered. They are cured by what the AI helped make possible.
The market is splitting in two
Read across the industry and you can see two ways of talking about the same technology. One group makes AI the identity. Sanofi went “all in.” And the agencies serving pharma have caught the same habit — arguably worse, because identity is what they sell. Real Chemistry, which posted double-digit revenue growth it credited to AI and analytics, says its mission is to “bring AI and ideas together” and puts named tools like Compliance Compass in the shop window.5,6 Publicis Health leans on having trained a model on hundreds of FDA letters in days.7 Impressive plumbing, all of it — but a client does not hire a medcomms partner to admire its model. They hire it to move a brand, change a behaviour, or get a message past a regulator. When an agency’s pitch leads with the technology it owns rather than the outcome it delivers, it is making the client’s mistake on the client’s behalf.
The other group keeps the outcome in the subject of the sentence. Novartis frames AI as a “seven- to ten-year long game” embedded across the value chain — the benefit, not the buzzword, is the drug discovery at the end of it.3 AstraZeneca talks about AI in clinical trials, but the claim it makes is about reducing time-to-market.4 Pfizer points to computational design potentially yielding breakthrough molecules.3 In every case the technology is the means; the medicine is the message. That is the more honest grammar, and the more persuasive one.
Why “we use AI” is a weak differentiator
There is also a simple commercial problem with making AI your banner: everybody now has one. Seven of the largest drugmakers sit in the top tier of this year’s AI-maturity rankings.3 When every competitor, and every agency pitching them, claims to be AI-powered, the claim differentiates no one. It becomes table stakes dressed up as a strategy. A differentiator has to be something a rival cannot equally assert — a specific result, a faster trial, a molecule that would not otherwise exist. “We use the same general-purpose technology as everyone else” is not a position. It is a parity statement.
The deeper issue is that AI itself has already commoditised. The same handful of foundation models sit underneath nearly every “AI-powered” tool in the sector; the same APIs are a credit-card sign-up away for any rival or any agency. What was a marvel three years ago is now infrastructure — closer to electricity or broadband than to a proprietary edge. And we do not admire companies for being electricity-powered. We admire what they make with the power. Branding yourself around a capability the whole world can rent is not a flex; it is a tell that you have not yet found the thing only you can do. The wonder has moved on, and audiences sense it: announcing that you use AI now lands somewhere between obvious and slightly dated.
None of this is an argument against the work. AI genuinely shortens timelines, sharpens trial design, and catches compliance risk earlier. The argument is about where it sits in the story. Treat AI as the protagonist and you make a promise you cannot keep, to an audience — patients, prescribers, regulators — who care about none of it for its own sake. Treat it as the enabler, and the sentence finishes properly: AI is how we get medicines to people faster and more safely. That is a claim worth making, because it is a claim about them, not about us.
For the marketing and medcomms agencies serving this industry, the lesson is sharper still. Our job is to help clients sound like they know the difference. The agencies that win the next decade will not be the ones that shout loudest about their models. They will be the ones that can articulate, in plain human terms, what those models let a company finally do for the people it exists to serve.
References
Sanofi, “Sanofi ‘all in’ on artificial intelligence and data science to speed breakthroughs for patients,” press release, 13 June 2023. sanofi.com
MM+M, “Sanofi wants to become first pharma company ‘powered by AI at scale’.” mmm-online.com
IMD, “Future Readiness Indicator — Pharmaceuticals 2025” and related AI-maturity analysis (Novartis, Pfizer, sector rankings). imd.org
AI News, “How AstraZeneca dominates AI clinical trials in 2025.” artificialintelligence-news.com
Fierce Pharma, “Real Chemistry debuts AI tool to stay on top of FDA’s torrent of marketing letters.” fiercepharma.com
MM+M Agency 100 (2026), Real Chemistry — Medical Communications profile. mmm-online.com
Fierce Pharma, “How pharma marketers are using AI” (Publicis Health FDA-letter model). fiercepharma.com