In the first post in this series, IQVIA’s Christie Conn, VP of Brand & Commercial Strategy Center of Excellence, weighed in on the mounting pressures facing today’s life sciences brand leaders. In this post, Christie discusses her perspective on how strategic partnerships, AI-enabled insights, and new approaches to collaboration are helping brand leaders transform challenges into competitive advantages. In doing so, Christie draws from her experience on both sides of the brand-partner relationship.

Redefining Strategic Partnership

IQVIA: Given the tectonic shifts in the industry, what does a modern strategic partnership look like for today’s brand leaders?

Christie: For starters, a strategic partner needs to be at arm’s reach for every question—from “How are we performing within the market?” to “What action should we take with our field?” to “What campaigns should we release digitally?” There needs to be an actual person sitting at that table with the brand leader.

Equally importantly, the partner needs to answer those questions within a critical time period. It’s not enough anymore to say, “We’ll get back to you” and deliver an answer a month later. It’s got to be within days, and it can’t just be a perspective. It needs to be an analytic, data-fueled response that brand leaders can confidently use to act, respond, optimize, shift strategies, or execute. In other words, these can no longer be transactional relationships. A strategic partner needs to be truly integrated, becoming extensions of the internal team.

AI Evolves from Computation to Insight

IQVIA: Artificial intelligence is transforming how brand leaders interact with data, but not always in the ways many people expect. How do you see AI and trusted data impacting brand operations?

Christie: The power of AI is really about how we translate a human question into a data architectural requirement. For example, think about adoption among HCPs and stakeholders—in other words, how they respond to a new asset launch. The key is specificity and context. AI needs to be tuned not only to the pharmaceutical market but to the specific questions brands are asking in real time. If you’re an oncology asset, the questions you query shouldn’t pull in retail market data from 15 years ago. At the end of the day, AI isn’t just the cool new shiny toy for asking and answering in a human way. It’s about responding with insights that are both precise and comprehensive.

From Data Overload to Unified Intelligence

IQVIA: One of the most significant advantages of modern partnership models is the ability to synthesize multiple data streams into coherent insights. Why is that so important?

Christie: Thinking about IQVIA specifically, our value isn’t just in the interpretation of data in its individual components. It’s how we line that all up to create a true insight. The definition of insight is taking the outcome of what data is saying and thinking about actionable, comprehensive, and strategic viewpoints. Our approach transforms the overwhelming volume of available data from a liability into an asset, giving brand leaders the “so what?” for their brand performance.

Uncovering Hidden Signals

IQVIA: What are some underused metrics that brand leaders should focus on more?

Christie: The beauty of AI-enabled capabilities is connecting all these metrics. Once we can link them at an individual, de-identified patient level—connecting click-throughs to actual humans or households to medical data—we can answer questions like, “Did they go to a doctor afterward?” or “Was there a diagnosis or lab test?” This level of integration allows brands to move beyond surface-level campaign metrics to understand actual patient journey impacts. And that enables much more sophisticated optimization of marketing investments.

Anticipating What’s Ahead

IQVIA: How do those kinds of insights differ from what’s been available in the past?

Christie: Twenty years ago, it was about market sizing and national trends. Then we advanced to precisely paying field reps based on physician-level data. Five years later, it was about patient-level data and longitudinal patient behavior—looking at opportunities through diagnosis and treatment patterns. Now in the world of AI, we’re combining all of those capabilities. The layering of these different data sets helps us as humans to interpret and manage the exponential amount of computation that our brains simply can’t do, but machines can. Ultimately, it enables predictive rather than reactive decision-making, so brand leaders can anticipate market changes instead of simply responding to them.

I remember an incident from when I was on the brand side. We had a very severe market event that caused a supply outage, so we had to identify which physicians had product and where patients could continue to get it. We also had to think about which physicians most needed to receive product as soon as supply was restored. We did a retrospective view to identify our loyalists within the physician ecosystem and to find ways of bridging most patients.

The ability to look at the data at the physician level and at the patient level—behaviorally, attitudinally, and literally where that product was—gave us a point-in-time reference. But with today’s predictive capabilities, we would have been able to model out: Is our hypothesis right as to who our loyalists are, and if we take action to bring this many patients back to the brand, what does that cost us?

Welcoming Strategic Support

IQVIA: Have brand leaders’ perception of external partners kept pace with this evolution? What’s a common misconception brand leaders still have?

Christie: Again, speaking about IQVIA specifically, from my experience on both sides, brand teams often look to us as just the data leader or data vendor—a source for information. If I could go back to my brand leader days, I would use a partner like IQVIA to help guide strategy, not just provide data.

By giving IQVIA a seat at the table, we can help direct not just what the data is but what it’s saying and what it could mean for brand strategy and execution. Brand leaders are already buying the data, and they have the expertise right here if they choose to use it.

Practical Strategies for Implementation

IQVIA: We’ve talked about the challenge of balancing short-term survival and long-term success. How can a strategic partner like IQVIA help with that?

Christie: The key is taking long-term, strategic plans and breaking them down into appropriate KPIs and metrics for quarterly, near-term tactical views. Most brand leaders already follow this process—linking their annual brand planning with long and short-term forecasting. The challenge is in execution, and partnering with IQVIA can help manage that interoperability between brand planning and tactical execution. We serve as an intermediary between the action steps brands want to take and the data infrastructure they’re relying on from multiple partners.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

IQVIA: Do you have any other advice for brand leaders looking to stay informed and make better decisions?

Christie: I encourage all brands leaders to gather information from multiple sources. I start with the science view first—key opinion leader (KOL) articles and publications on diseases or assets. The other really important perspective is what Wall Street analysts are saying about an asset. Financial analysts who evaluate investments in emerging biopharma companies do their own research, and their unbiased view is often valuable. From there, the key is synthesis. Marrying the financial industry’s evaluation with the science often gives you a pretty good estimation of the likelihood of success.

Partnering for Performance

As Christie emphasized throughout our conversation, the brand leaders who thrive in today’s environment are those who move beyond seeing partners as vendors and begin tapping into them as strategic extensions of their own capabilities. They’ll be well positioned to transform data overload into actionable intelligence, short-term pressures into long-term advantages, and market complexity into competitive differentiation. The tools and partnerships to succeed in this environment are ready. The question for each brand leader is whether they are ready to embrace this new model of collaborative, data-driven, and strategically integrated brand management.

If you haven’t already, please read the first part of our interview with Christie, The Modern Brand Leader’s Dilemma: Data, Decisions, and Market Pressures.