Hi!

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been digging into what our inaugural AI in Biopharma Communications Survey tells us about how AI is changing our profession.

We’ve seen that adoption is accelerating, and that individual communicators are moving faster than their organizations.

This week, we take a look at our next finding: The appetite for AI adoption is there, but support is thin.

AI learning is still largely self-directed One of the clearest findings from the survey is the extent to which communicators are figuring AI out for themselves: 89% of respondents cite informal self-learning as part of how they are building their AI skills. 56% say they learn from peers 26% say they have received internal training from their organization. Communicators are experimenting, comparing notes, and building their own learning paths.

The biggest barriers are practical The survey didn't find significant resistance to AI adoption in our field. Instead, the leading barriers are practical and specific to our profession: 26% said they don't trust AI's accuracy or reliability enough 25% said they don't have enough time to learn or experiment. 23% said they have the tools but don't know how to use them effectively for specific tasks, 22% cited lack of access or organizational restrictions.

In other words, the biggest challenge in front of us is helping communicators use AI well in the context of our actual day-to-day work.

Moving from experimentation to practical fluency

Taken together, the findings point to an interesting disconnect: high appetite + self-directed learning + limited time = uneven depth.

Communicators are motivated to build their AI capabilities. But moving beyond experimentation will require help with real communications use cases: better prompting, task-specific workflows, and practical ways to use AI while maintaining the judgment, context, and verification our work demands.

That creates an opportunity for organizations, and for our profession more broadly, to make AI learning more relevant to the work communicators are doing day to day.

If you haven't already, you can download the full executive summary from the survey -- led by T2B's AI Roundtable, with support from Knowledge Partner Syneos Health Communications -- to explore all five survey findings in detail:

​AI in Biopharma Communications Survey – Full Executive Summary​

Coming up next, we’ll look at where the biggest opportunities lie for improving biopharma communicators’ AI skills, and how we see AI adoption panning out in the future.

Lynnea

P.S. - T2B is taking these findings and applying them directly to our programming. Don’t miss our recent Roundtable resource from our Culture Connect team: How AI is Changing Internal Comms.​