Define Ventures, one of the largest venture capital firms focused on early-stage health tech companies, has officially published the results from its latest report, which showcases an accelerated brand of investment from Big Pharma companies in the context of deploying AI to counter rising cost pressure, regulatory shifts, and growing competitive urgency.
Going by the available details, this particular study took into account the opinion of more than 40 executives, including leaders from 16 of the top 20 pharma companies and major players like Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Oracle Life Sciences, Tempus AI, and Datavant, all of them coming together to indicate a decisive shift towards enterprise-scale AI deployment.
To understand the significance of such a development, we must take into account a fact that a company needs anywhere around $2.6 billion, as well as a timeline of around 10 years, to bring a new therapeutic to market, figures that have literally doubled over the past two decades.
In case this wasn’t bad enough, the introduction of Inflation Reduction Act is also causing immense cost-cutting and mounting pricing pressure.
Against that, 70% of pharma leaders now see AI as an immediate priority, rising to 85% among the top 20 companies. In fact, even with tighter overall budgets, 85% of executives are increasing their AI investments, effectively directing their spend towards improving productivity, accelerating drug development, and protecting margins in a more constrained economic environment.
A closer look is going to reveal that the companies are also reshaping the way we they go about building AI capabilities. You see, earlier the approach was more geared towards conceiving these tools internally, but over 40% now expect to split efforts between internal development and external partnerships, whereas on the other hand, 30% are prioritizing external-first strategies.
Having said so, this growing openness to partner hasn’t exactly lead to a positive experience at scale. We get to say so because no more than 35% of respondents described their experience as somewhat positive, while 40% reported neutral outcomes, and 5% had somewhat negative experiences.
Moving on, Define Ventures’ report also discovered that pharma companies are prioritizing AI investments in areas where risk is low and returns are immediate. This they are doing with a clear emphasis on improving operational efficiency, as every executive surveyed said success in AI must include reduced administrative burden and improved workforce productivity.
Further contextualizing that would be a contingent of 94% respondents who identified medical writing as a top AI priority for the next year.
An estimated 80% of leaders also said they are focused on reducing the cost of therapeutic discovery. For better understanding, leading organizations are already finding near-term ROI by streamlining the operational backbone of early R&D. This efficiency-focused attempt includes automating time-intensive tasks like literature reviews, hypothesis generation, bench workflows, and building infrastructure to manage increasingly complex multimodal data.
As a result, pharma organizations are also outpacing peers in operational readiness, something which is only reinforced by data claiming that 80% have formal AI governance committees, compared to 73% of payers and providers.
On top of it, pharma’s funding models also reveal a shift from fragmented, department-led efforts towards more centralized, enterprise-wide strategies. This translates to how only 20% of AI budget is allocated by innovation teams in pharma companies, compared to 60% for payers and providers.
“Pharma’s AI future will be defined in the next 12 to 24 months,” said Lynne Chou O’Keefe, Define Ventures founder and managing partner. “What we’re seeing is a decisive acceleration to enterprise execution — with leaders embedding AI into core workflows to drive speed, efficiency, and real ROI. But internal teams can’t do it alone. This moment is a generational opportunity for startups that are ready to scale, integrate seamlessly, and speak pharma’s language.”
