Hi!

Throughout the summer, we’ve taken you inside the findings from our inaugural AI in Biopharma Comms Survey, developed through the T2B AI Roundtable with Knowledge Partner Syneos Health Communications. There were five big takeaways (full report here), and today we’re taking a closer look at #3: access, governance, and trust are uneven.

The short version: guidance exists in many organizations, but guidance alone doesn’t create confidence.

As AI becomes part of everyday comms work, many organizations are still working through what responsible implementation should look like.

Guidance exists, but enforcement is inconsistent Among company-employed respondents, 83% say their organization has at least some AI guidance. But only 32% say formal AI policy is actively communicated and enforced. Another 31% say a formal policy exists but isn’t well communicated or consistently applied. For communicators like us working in highly regulated environments, that creates uncertainty. AI may be in use, but expectations around when, where, and how to use it responsibly are not always clear.

Trust lags behind adoption While AI use is growing more common among individual users, confidence in how organizations are governing and deploying it has yet to catch up. Only 47% of respondents say they trust their organization or clients to use AI responsibly. At the same time: 75% are concerned about AI's broader impacts on ethics, the environment, and labor. 83% worry that over-reliance on AI could erode critical skills for the next generation of communicators.

So even as biopharma communicators are using AI pragmatically, many are still questioning whether organizations are creating the conditions for responsible, transparent, and sustainable use.

AI resources from T2B

The survey suggests that responsible AI adoption will require investing in people – and in the training required to create teams confident in responsible use. To that end, we’re continuing to provide resources to our community, which T2B members can find in their Dashboard.

A couple of the most recent resources worth highlighting:

➡️ AEO for Biopharma Communicators article - a primer on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which are the practices that help organizations become discoverable and cited in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Google's AI Overview.

➡️ Q3 AI Roundtable Event – How Agentic AI Is Moving Strategic Communicators From Prompting to Delegating replay - interactive session that explored what agentic AI is and what it looks like in practice for communications professionals working in regulated and high-trust environments

And, definitely consider attending our upcoming second annual Virtual Biopharma Comms Forum on October 6th & 7th, where we'll host a workshop on "Scoping Your First Agentic Workflow!"

We’ll share more soon about survey finding #4, which explores barriers to effective AI use. To see all five survey findings in more detail, download the full executive summary: Download the AI in Biopharma Communications Survey Executive Summary​

Have a fabulous weekend!!

Lynnea