NexGen Commercial Intelligence: How Generative and Agentic AI are powering Field Force Effectiveness

The life sciences industry is experiencing a fundamental shift in how sales, marketing, and field operations function. The rapid evolution of customer expectations, digital transformation, and an explosion of data require commercial teams to move beyond traditional engagement models and embrace AI-powered execution. However, many organizations still struggle with siloed intelligence, preventing seamless collaboration across brand planning, sales execution, and HCP engagement.

Generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI are changing the game by transforming how pharma commercial teams work. While GenAI in pharma enhances insights and decision-making, agentic AI is an autonomous assistant that orchestrates workflows, automates processes, and dynamically optimizes sales and marketing strategies.

The true power of AI lies not in isolated applications but in its ability to seamlessly integrate sales, marketing, customer, and field operations into a single, intelligence-driven ecosystem. This blog explores how Axtria’s AI Intelligence Framework (AIF) is leading this transformation by empowering home office teams, field managers, and reps with augmented analytics and conversational AI capabilities. We will delve into the core components of the Axtria AIF and see how it drives value across four key themes.

1. Integrated Planning and Operations (Budget and workload focus)
2. Customer Engagement (HCP and targeting focus)
3. Field Optimization (Home office and territory focus)
4. Self-Service Automation (Sales rep and incentives focus)

We will highlight key features across the four themes and show how Axtria’s integrated AI sales enablement platform ensures customer engagement, data-driven field intelligence, and enhanced rep performance and payouts.

Breaking Down Silos in Pharma Commercial Execution

Despite advancements in AI, many pharma organizations still struggle to translate commercial strategies into nimble execution that meets the needs of new brands, specialty markets, and evolving patient expectations. Companies aim to empower their field force with a unified experience, but reps are often overwhelmed by multiple systems, conflicting recommendations, and a lack of trust in AI-driven insights. While there is a clear desire to leverage GenAI for field execution, next best action (NBA) pilots and AI implementations face multiple challenges to the desired outcomes.

1. Fragmented Planning and Operations: Brand planning, budgeting, and promotional execution remain disconnected across sales, marketing, and customer engagement teams. Budget allocations are often based on historical trends rather than real-time market dynamics, leading to inefficiencies. Additionally, decision-making remains reactive and manual because it lacks the AI-driven scenario planning and predictive adjustments that optimize commercial strategies.
   
   
2. Disjointed Customer Engagement and HCP Targeting: Pharma companies aspire to personalize HCP interactions but struggle to achieve real-time, AI-powered omnichannel coordination. Marketing, sales, and digital interactions operate in silos, leaving reps to rely on outdated CRM data rather than AI-driven next best experiences (NBE) and insights.
   
   
3. Inefficient Territory Planning and Field Execution: Many organizations fail to provide a unified field experience, leaving reps to navigate multiple systems that produce conflicting recommendations they don’t trust. Territory realignments and quota setting remain manual and time-consuming, preventing organizations from quickly adapting field strategies for evolving market needs.
   
   
4. Lack of Self-Service AI for Reps: Reps spend excessive amounts of time pulling reports and planning engagements manually, reducing the time available for meaningful HCP interactions. CRM tools lack conversational AI assistants, forcing reps to sift through complex data instead of receiving real-time AI-driven insights. Organizations also struggle to design incentive compensation (IC) plans that align with evolving rep roles and performance expectations if they haven’t adopted AI-driven incentive optimization.

The Rise of GenAI and Agentic AI in Pharma

AI is poised to revolutionize commercial operations-but true transformation requires moving from isolated AI applications to an integrated, AI-powered decision-making framework that leverages GenAI and agentic AI.

• Generative AI enables the creation of insights, predictions, and recommendations by analyzing massive amounts of data. It can generate natural language responses, create visualizations, and enhance NBAs, making it indispensable for decision-making.
• Agentic AI surpasses GenAI by enabling intelligent, autonomous AI agents to collaborate, learn, and adapt. These agents can handle complex tasks, such as analyzing sales trends, optimizing marketing campaigns, or providing real-time field insights, freeing up human resources for more strategic activities.

GenAI and agentic AI allow reps to focus on building relationships and driving outcomes while AI handles the time-consuming data analysis and insight generation. In the next section, we will look at how an integrated intelligence framework helps decipher the complexities of AI and deploy generative AI agents for true field force effectiveness in pharma.

Axtria’s AI Intelligence Framework: Powering the Future of Pharma

Axtria’s AIF is a next-generation platform that seamlessly integrates GenAI and agentic AI into life sciences commercial operations, enabling life science firms to build business use cases without worrying about the underlying technical infrastructure. It acts as a unified AI orchestration layer, allowing sales, marketing, and field teams to leverage AI-driven automation, predictive analytics, and contextual intelligence. With built-in multi-agent collaboration, semantic enrichment, and real-time AI response optimization, AIF ensures data-driven decisions across commercial planning, execution, and field operations.

Axtria’s AI Intelligence Framework Core Capabilities

Source: Axtria Inc.

1. Prompt Management Framework: Enabling Context-Aware AI Responses
   A framework for prompt management ensures that user queries are interpreted accurately and contextually, providing precise and relevant AI-generated responses. Leveraging advanced prompting techniques allows for natural language interactions, making it easy for users to ask complex questions and receive instant, data-driven insights. For example, sales managers can refine incentive compensation queries, while marketing teams can optimize recommendations using AI-powered conversational insights.
   
   
2. Multi-Agent Framework: Automating Complex AI Workflows
   A multi-agent framework enables multiple specialized AI agents to collaborate, each focusing on specific tasks such as data retrieval, analysis, visualization, and predictive modeling. This multi-agent approach ensures that AIF’s AI-driven insights are accurate, efficient, and tailored to user needs. For example, one AI agent may fetch historical HCP engagement data while another analyzes prescribing patterns to suggest high-impact customer interactions.
   
   
3. Semantic Layer Framework: Standardizing AI Interpretability
   The semantic layer framework allows AIF to bridge technical data structures with business applications, ensuring that AI outputs are contextually relevant and standardized. It includes business glossaries, KPI definitions, and industry-specific terminologies that enable users to interact with AI naturally and intuitively. The business rule engine allows firms to customize AI interpretations, such as defining how sales performance is measured or ensuring consistent HCP segmentation across global teams.
   
   
4. Extendable Data Sources: Seamlessly Integrating AI Across Data Types
   The extendable data sources component allows AIF to integrate with diverse structured and unstructured data sources, ensuring that AI-driven insights encompass sales performance, customer interactions, market trends, and more. For instance, AIF aggregates commercial datasets from CRM systems, marketing platforms, and external data feeds, enriching AI responses with real-time industry context.
   
   
5. Search, Natural Language Processing, and Data Visualization: Delivering Conversational AI-driven Insights
   Axtria’s AIF combines conversational search, natural language processing, and interactive data visualization to make AI-powered insights accessible and actionable. Users can query AI using natural language, receive instant, context-aware responses, and generate intuitive visualizations such as charts, maps, and reports. For example, a sales rep can ask, “Which HCPs should I prioritize this week?” and receive a ranked list with predictive engagement scores.
   
   
6. Response Evaluation and Tracking: Ensuring AI Accuracy
   The features built into AIF’s AI response validation, scoring, and monitoring ensure that AI-generated insights are reliable, explainable, and continuously improving. It evaluates AI outputs against business KPIs, historical accuracy, and evolving market conditions, refining AI behavior over time. For instance, AIF tracks next best engagement adoption rates, adjusting AI recommendations to ensure that sales teams trust and act on AI-generated insights.
   
   
7. Standard Reporting: Customizable AI-powered Commercial Insights
   The pre-built, customizable reports generated by AIF are tailored to the needs of sales, marketing, and leadership teams. Whether a field rep needs real-time engagement insights or an executive is analyzing commercial trends, AIF delivers the right information at the right time. Additionally, AIF integrates AI-powered summaries, business rule decryption, and automated metadata tagging, ensuring that every report provides actionable, easy-to-interpret insights.
   
   For enhanced user experience, Axtria’s AI Intelligence Framework leverages a tight integration across all Axtria applications (Axtria SalesIQ^TM, Axtria MarketingIQ^TM, Axtria CustomerIQ^TM, and Axtria SalesIQ^TM Field Intelligence) to:
   
   
   • Enhance commercial and data analytics operations by embedding intelligent conversational agents that automate insights generation, pre-call planning, and data exploration.
   • Execute AI-driven narratives and summaries that decode business rules, contextualize analytics processes, and surface actionable insights across end-user dashboards.
   • Leverage DANI, our conversational assistant, to advise on pre-call planning insights and post-call debriefs, act as a field query resolution chatbot, and share incentive insight nudges for customer engagement
     

Pillars of Commercial Transformation

Axtria’s AI Intelligence framework drives pharma field force transformation across four key pillars:

1. Integrated planning and operations: Siloed decision-making and manual processes have long hindered traditional commercial planning. AI-powered intelligence seamlessly connects brand strategy, field allocations, and promotional execution, ensuring that every investment aligns with real-time market dynamics.
   
   Agentic AI is an orchestration layer that manages workflows, aligning sales execution with brand objectives and budget constraints by automating budget tracking, call planning, and campaign monitoring. This reduces manual effort and improves decision-making speed. Conversely, GenAI enhances strategic planning by generating real-time business insights that help field teams understand market shifts, competitor dynamics, and target customer behavior.
   
   
   • Key features of AI-powered planning and operations:
     
     
     • The Axtria SalesIQ^TM NexGen IC Operations Cockpit enhances planning efficiency by introducing self-service incentive plan administration, allowing sales managers to adjust workloads and promotions dynamically.
     • GenAI continuously monitors customer engagement patterns and adapts marketing spend accordingly, ensuring promotional efforts remain effective.
     • With conversational AI-powered insights embedded in Axtria CustomerIQ^TM, brand managers can seamlessly analyze omnichannel performance, refine strategies, and optimize NBA recommendations with a simple query.
       
       
2. Customer Engagement: Effectively engaging HCPs requires precise coordination between marketing, field teams, and digital channels. Agentic AI enables omnichannel execution by synchronizing customer touchpoints, ensuring that rep interactions, digital campaigns, and account-based marketing efforts are aligned. At the same time, GenAI bolsters the delivery of hyper-personalized customer insights, helping reps tailor messaging, refine targeting, and dynamically adjust engagement strategies based on real-time HCP behavior. AI-driven NBEs ensure that every interaction is relevant, timely, and high-impact.
   
   
   • Key features of AI-powered omnichannel personalization:
     
     
     • Our Unified Field Experience module introduces GenAI-powered assistants, helps field reps refine HCP targeting strategies, and optimizes omnichannel engagements.
     • The GenAI-driven chatbot in Axtria CustomerIQ™ provides real-time insights and automated suggestion generation, significantly enhancing NBA adoption and team decision-making.
     • AI-powered suggestion explainability for reps and home office teams improves transparency in NBE recommendations, leading to higher adoption and engagement rates.
       
       
3. Field Optimization: Optimizing sales force efficiency requires real-time adjustments to territory assignments, rep targeting, and engagement strategies. Agentic AI streamlines sales operations, automating routine tasks such as territory realignment, workload balancing, and call plan optimization. Meanwhile, GenAI provides field intelligence by analyzing rep performance trends to guide managers with rep coaching opportunities.
   
   
   • Key features of AI-powered field execution:
     
     
     • Axtria SalesIQ^TM NexGen aligns AI-powered clustering models and alignment impact assessments to ensure optimal territory planning.
     • GenAI-driven insights help managers analyze field execution effectiveness, identify high-performing reps, and refine targeting strategies.
     • AI-led focus area analytics enable home office teams to optimize rep engagement by identifying customer concentration hotspots, ensuring field teams prioritize the right territories.
       
       
4. Self-Service Automation: Sales reps spend significant amounts of time navigating dashboards, pulling reports, and manually planning engagements—time that could be better spent engaging customers. GenAI-powered conversational AI assistants provide reps with real-time insights, automated workflows, and instant intelligence, helping them maximize their impact.
   
   Meanwhile, agentic AI automates routine sales processes, such as pre-call planning, incentive tracking, and performance insights, allowing reps to focus on high-value HCP engagements instead of administrative work.
   
   
   • Key features of AI-powered sales assistants:
     
     
     • Axtria’s DANI assistant offers pre-call planning and enhanced customer targeting capabilities, enabling reps to quickly identify their best customers and refine engagement strategies.
     • GenAI-powered incentive management enhances quota refinement and compensation tracking, ensuring real-time adjustments based on sales performance.
     • In Axtria CustomerIQ^TM, the ‘Ask AI Now’ feature provides conversational Q&A insights, enabling reps to quickly optimize NBA profiling, simulations, and monitoring.

The Future of Life Sciences is AI-Driven, Connected, and Intelligent

Intelligent automation, predictive decision-making, and AI-powered field execution will define the next era of pharmaceutical commercial excellence. Organizations that embrace generative AI and agentic AI will streamline operations, unlock new revenue opportunities, enhance HCP engagement, and maximize commercial impact.

With the Axtria AI Intelligence Framework, life sciences companies can seamlessly integrate AI-driven intelligence across sales, marketing, customer, and field operations, enabling them to move beyond traditional execution models and embrace a fully connected, AI-powered future.

The time for transformation is now. Axtria, with its integrated AI-powered intelligent commercial platform, is well poised to support your field teams in this journey.

Written By:

Puneet Singh Bhatia

With over 21 years of experience, Puneet Singh Bhatia has been at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into modern marketing. He is an established product marketing leader known for his expertise in driving AI-powered digital solutions and thought leadership in the life sciences sector. Puneet has authored three Amazon bestselling textbooks in the field of digital marketing, social media and mobile marketing in the past 10 years. Recognized with prestigious awards such as the100 Most Innovative Marketing Tech Leaders (2018), Marketing Mavericks (2021), and Top Martech Leaders (2024), Puneet has showcased his expertise across multiple marketing and omnichannel implementations.

An alumnus of IIM Bangalore, Puneet has spearheaded cross-product marketing strategies to position Axtria as a leader in the commercial space. His thought leadership across content includes thought leadership articles, strategic GTM insights, and product evangelism, which have strengthened Axtria’s strategic positioning among competition. Puneet has been presenting at prestigious pharma industry forums (PMSA for four years in a row) and his insights are widely published in leading platforms like Times of India Voices, Economic Times, and NASSCOM.