Indegene and the GenAI Global Council have published new insights into the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) across the life sciences sector, identifying key lessons from the past two years and setting out a roadmap for the industry’s future.

According to Indegene, early pilots of GenAI focused largely on automating basic tasks such as document search and summarization. However, the company said that the technology has quickly evolved into a potential ‘catalyst for strategic outcomes,’ driving faster speed to market, improved compliance, more personalized customer engagement, deeper insights, enhanced patient-centricity, and reduced costs across drug discovery, clinical development, regulatory, safety, medical affairs, and commercialization.

While pilots have shown success across a range of functions, Indegene noted that life sciences companies remain cautious due to ongoing regulatory uncertainty. Although draft guidelines have begun to emerge from authorities such as the FDA and EMA, Indegene said concerns about regulatory reactions are likely to slow GenAI adoption in the near term.

“The excitement around GenAI’s potential is real, but companies must navigate regulatory ambiguities carefully to scale its adoption effectively,” the company stated.

Indegene warned that the fragmented deployment of GenAI across individual initiatives could prevent organizations from realizing the technology’s full value. Instead, the company advocated for a ‘holistic, integrated value-chain approach,’ emphasizing the need for Center-of-Excellence-driven strategies, multimodal solutions, and alignment of GenAI investments with existing data and technology infrastructures. Seamless integration, Indegene said, will be critical to ensure AI-powered tools can operate across functional boundaries.

Looking ahead, the company identified several major trends it expects to shape GenAI’s evolution in life sciences. These include the emergence of autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, and interacting with systems independently to solve complex problems; the development of Generative User Interfaces (UIs) that create customized, intuitive digital interactions for users; and the rise of multimodal, avatar-driven conversational systems designed to deepen customer engagement across all channels.

Indegene also highlighted the growing importance of hyper-personalization, noting that GenAI will soon enable life sciences companies to create individualized stakeholder experiences by generating dynamic personas and tailoring communications to specific preferences. In addition, the company said synthetic data would play a ‘critical role’ in advancing research in rare diseases and novel therapeutic areas where access to real-world data is limited.

To move beyond early experiments and toward enterprise-scale adoption, Indegene outlined several immediate priorities. These include engineering tailored GenAI solutions with deep domain contextualization, ensuring seamless integration with enterprise systems, and establishing hybrid operating models that combine centralized Centers of Excellence with decentralized AI capabilities across business units.

The company also emphasized the need for effective ROI measurement frameworks to prioritize high-impact GenAI initiatives and maximize value. Multimodal AI approaches that integrate text, images, and video were cited as critical to driving compliant and personalized content generation at scale.

In a highly regulated sector, Indegene stressed that security and compliance must remain paramount, calling for strong AI governance and the adoption of evolving regulatory frameworks. The company also pointed to workforce upskilling and change management as essential components for fostering an ‘AI-fluent’ culture capable of sustaining innovation.

‘Life sciences organizations that focus on trends like AI agents and Generative UI, while building robust, GenAI-ready foundations, will be best positioned to maintain competitive advantage and lead future innovation,’ the company concluded.