Launch Command Centers Predict Pharma Launch Risk with Agentic AI

Authored by: Jo Ann Saitta

Pharmaceutical companies face immense pressure and risk when bringing new drugs and therapies to market. Every launch demands coordination, informed decision-making, and a readiness to solve problems as they emerge – all against a backdrop of extreme competition and finite resources.

That’s why, for some time now, companies have been assessing and integrating AI solutions best suited to meet these challenges. As we’ve explored in past pieces like AI as the Input, Not the Answer and Why AI Needs Humans, AI delivers the most value when paired with human judgment. Agentic AI is yet another leap forward, acting on the user’s behalf (in line with human-set criteria) to monitor signals, identify deviations, trigger tasks, and recommend actions. It has a tremendous capability to predict launch risk

However, to capitalize on these capabilities while avoiding AI overwhelm, there is a need to create a central launch command center, which is precisely what we’re doing at Putnam for our clients. We’re taking it a step further by combining our internal AI solutions like Navigator AI™ our strategic intelligence platform, with its built-in conversational AI and agentic AI to form powerful command centers – a place to bring together everything to make more informed decisions. Using generative AI to provide real-time insights and predictive recommendations, supporting readiness planning, competitive analysis, and trend monitoring.

In this blog, we explore the extraordinary capabilities of creating these Launch command centers and how they can be built to predict risk (supply chain issues, messaging compliance issues, or competitive activation) and recommend corrective actions.

Launch Command Center

Given the complexity and opportunities that agentic AI presents, the next natural step is to provide a central hub where a user can consolidate all moving parts for a product launch. These launch command centers become a master deck that can look at the entire journey, synthesize vast amounts of data, automate tasks, and provide real-time insights that support informed decision-making like never before.

Launch command centers can typically bring a host of opportunities by leveraging agentic AI:

• A Launch Analogue Learning Agent compares real-time launch performance with historical analogues, recalibrates forecasts weekly, and alerts brand leads when divergence crosses thresholds.
• A Marketing Mix Optimization Agent analyzes multi-channel engagement data and proposes weekly reallocations, then learns from post-change results to refine recommendations.
• A Field Resource Allocation Agent integrates CRM, sales, and responsiveness data to recommend weekly call plans and digital outreach priorities; managers review and approve changes.
• An HCP Engagement Agent monitors preferences, cadence, and digital behavior to draft next-best engagement plans that sync directly with CRM workflows.

A command center is a tremendously powerful tool for users, as it can monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), automatically flag deviations from the forecast, trigger necessary tasks, and notify the appropriate team member, ensuring the launch stays on course.

And upon detecting underperformance (e.g., delayed access uptake), it autonomously analyzes signals, such as sales data, payer activity, and HCP sentiment, to propose remediation actions directly to the launch leader or team. It also predicts upcoming launch risks (e.g., supply chain issues, messaging compliance problems, or competitive activation) and recommends corrective scenarios. A command center speeds up issue identification and reduces the response time from days to hours, reducing manual coordination.  Its ability to multitask and bring everyone together on a single script is not only exciting but also a game-changer competitively.

Launch Plans

It all starts with a plan. Our proprietary product LaunchNav, leverages data from 800+ Inizio launch engagements and AI to develop bespoke plans for client launch teams.  Our product maps activity-level tasks with defined start/end dates and benchmarks to ensure cross-functional harmony. Additionally, this tool provides benchmarking capabilities and assessments for client’s own developed launch plans. It enables clients to validate their assumptions and identify gaps from an external proprietary data source and experts.

Launch Navigation

A launch command center primarily unifies AI solutions, and internally, we use Navigator AI™ to provide a deep layer of cross-functional launch-process oversight and specialized performance metrics.

Navigator AI™ acts as a dedicated navigational layer, ensuring all stakeholders align on activity-level tasks, milestones, and launch readiness. It can complement the predictive AI of the central command center by providing granular tracking capabilities, utilizing its own proprietary benchmarks and methodologies to flag critical path deviations. This integration allows the command center to leverage a wider array of data sources and expert models, delivering comprehensive, actionable insights directly to the launch leader and their team.

Launch Tracking

Once a drug or therapy is launched, tracking tools are essential for course-correction decision-making to deal with deviations from plan and ensure success. That’s why launch trackers are tremendously helpful, as they allow continuous monitoring, providing real-time cross-functional insights necessary for effective launch management.

A launch tracker can leverage an autonomous reporting agent to generate and distribute executive summaries periodically, as well as PowerPoint reports with trend commentary, reducing the burden of manual reporting. They can also leverage a benchmark comparison agent that evaluates each country’s launch performance against prior internal, country, or global benchmarks, automatically flagging anomalies and alerting country-level launch leaders to areas needing attention.

Add to this a continuous learning agent that feeds post-launch learnings and insights back into the launch knowledge base for model fine-tuning and future planning, and you have a potent tool. Powerful launch trackers can increase visibility for leadership and sustain a continuous learning cycle where nothing is missed.

Conversational AI

An essential part of a command center is conversational AI, which moves the organization from static reports to interactive decision-making. It can:

• Be a conversational brainstorming agent that goes beyond simply answering queries. It can perform tasks and generate summaries, such as “Generate a summary of unmet launch milestones for Brand X.”
• Act as a knowledge curator agent, to continuously update the central launch knowledge base by extracting validated insights from various sources, including launch reports, CRM updates, and global/regional/country launch team discussions.
• Have advanced architecture built on a dual-module chatbot architecture, querying both a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)-based knowledge base (for internal, confidential data) and the internet (for general information). It includes multiple controls to reduce hallucinations and a chat history database for contextual awareness.

Conversational AI shifts information retrieval from static to interactive decision support, reducing time and enabling focus on the insights required for decision-making.

By developing a launch command center with an execution-focused launch tracker and an interactive chatbot, pharma leaders can deploy sophisticated AI that ensures launch excellence and competitive advantage with confidence and complete human oversight.

Ready to create a launch command center? Contact us here.