AI is no longer changing just one part of pharma. It is reshaping everything, all at once.
R&D teams are identifying drug candidates in weeks instead of years. Manufacturing floors are catching quality issues before they happen. Regulatory submissions are being drafted in minutes, not days. Field teams are being evaluated and optimised by algorithms.
According to a report titled, ‘Scaling gen AI in the life sciences industry’, researchers from McKinsey Global Institute, estimated that generative AI alone could unlock $60–110 billion annually for the pharma and medical products sector by accelerating discovery, speeding development and improving commercialisation.
Individually, these changes look like upgrades. Together, they signal something much bigger. A fundamental shift in how pharma organisations think, decide and operate. And right at the centre of this shift is a function being redefined in real time: HR.
A transforming playbook
The questions HR leaders are being asked today look very different from before. It used to be about headcount, appraisals, attrition and hiring metrics. Now it is this: How do we lead people through a technological revolution that is rewriting the rules of one of the world’s most regulated industries?
For the people inside pharma organisations, the nature of their work is changing, the skills required to do it well are changing, and the judgment they are expected to exercise is changing too. This is not a talent question. It is not just about change management. It is a question about power, architecture and ownership. About who shapes the system before the system shapes the organisation.
Puneet Rajput, CHRO of Piramal Pharma, puts it clearly, “HR leaders are now seen as enterprise shapers, rather than functional stewards. Capability building that supports organisational growth and promotes innovation takes precedence over traditional HR functions such as hiring and developing policy frameworks.”
That shift is already visible on the ground. Animesh Dhari Singh, GM – Human Resources, Naprod Life Sciences, describes what it looks like across India’s pharma sector, “In India’s pharma industry, people leadership has evolved from a support function into a core driver of business performance and long term growth.
Talent strategies are now closely aligned with scientific pipelines, regulatory demands, and market realities. Across organisations, culture is being shaped deliberately to support innovation in research, discipline and quality in manufacturing, and ethical, sustainable growth in commercial functions. The focus has shifted from managing headcount to building futureready capabilities that can support complex therapies, global compliance expectations, and rapid industry change.”
This is the new reality of HR in pharma, and the boardroom has taken notice. As Rajput outlines, “In the VUCA world, pharma companies have a unique position at the intersection of science, regulation, technology and patient impact. The strong alignment of people strategy with business strategy, focus on innovation, adaptability will lead to an overall multiplier effect on organisations that will strive and thrive in this fast-changing world. This is changing expectations of CEOs and Board of Directors from HR leadership.”
Today, the mandate for pharma HR leaders is clear. It is to design how humans and machines work together across a complex value chain.
The gap that cannot be ignored
Yet as the expectations placed on HR leaders grow, a critical gap is emerging.
The workforce disruption driven by AI is real. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, drawing on data from over 1,000 companies, found that 63 per cent of employers identify skill gaps as the single biggest barrier to business transformation. An estimated 59 out of every 100 workers will require reskilling or upskilling by 2030. In high-complexity sectors like pharma, the pressure is acute.
Which makes one thing clear. This is not just about adopting AI. It is about deciding how work itself will be defined.
And that is the risk now. Despite being deeply involved in implementing AI, be it deploying tools, enabling adoption, or managing the human side of change, fewer HR leaders are part of the decisions that actually shape how these systems work.
Yet, boards are asking more of HR leadership than ever before. As Rajput describes it, “To foster an environment where decision-making, ownership and problem-solving will be widely distributed, boards of directors are now relying on HR to develop deep levels of leadership throughout the organisation. In an industry characterised by a simultaneous focus on quality, speed and regulatory requirements, leadership cannot continue to be limited to the top echelon of an organisation.”
She informs,”There is also a strong push to future proof the workforce. This includes building digital fluency, data literacy, and advanced scientific capabilities, while ensuring employees are equipped to work in increasingly technology enabled and cross-functional environments. At the same time, culture has become a board level priority. HR is expected to embed purpose, ethics, inclusion, and patient and customer centricity into everyday behaviours, making culture a driver of performance and trust.”
“Another emerging expectation is improved workforce intelligence and HR leaders are increasingly expected to give forward-thinking insights into skills, succession, and organisational readiness so that leadership teams may make proactive decisions. Finally, CEOs and boards regard HR as a custodian of agility and resilience, tasked with creating an organisation that can adapt to change and disruptions while delivering both economic success and societal benefit,” she adds.
This, then, is a moment of choice for HR leaders. They can remain enablers of AI, or step into a more strategic role, shaping the principles, decisions and systems that will define how organisations actually function.
John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor and author of Leading Change, argues that the central failure of most change efforts is not a lack of effort but a lack of urgency at the right level. “Whenever smart and well-intentioned people avoid confronting obstacles,” he writes, “they disempower employees and undermine change.”
For HR leaders, that urgency is not just about driving initiatives, it is about being present where key decisions are made and shaped.
Because the companies that get this right will not just be faster. They will be better designed. And HR leaders will be central to that design: moving from technology adopter to business strategist.
De-risking change
Alind Sharma, President and CHRO, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, frames the people strategy imperative well and states, “In today’s fast-evolving pharma landscape, a strong people strategy is built on three strategic pillars: leadership, engagement and talent. Of these, leadership acts as a force multiplier across the two. Transforming on the people front begins with leadership clarity. It shapes engagement through opportunity, growth, and culture, and defines how talent is identified, attracted, and developed across the organisation.”
At the centre of this sits the CHRO. As Sharma puts it, “The CHRO operates at the intersection of business and people strategy ensuring that capability gaps do not become execution gaps. The role is not just to enable transformation, but to actively de-risk it. At Glenmark, this translates into building future-ready capabilities, fostering a purposedriven, performance-led culture, and enabling our teams to apply science with purpose, expand access at scale, and deliver with disciplined execution.”
In an AI-driven organisation, the risks are not only operational. They are ethical and cultural, embedded in the design of systems that will determine how people are hired, how they are evaluated, how their career trajectories unfold, and how the organisation responds when things go wrong.
And, de-risking begins before an employee walks through the door. Ajay Trehan, CEO and Founder of AuthBridge, insists that trust must be operationalised, not assumed, “In highly regulated sectors like pharma, trust is not just cultural, it is operationally critical. CHROs must move beyond viewing verification as a backend HR process and embed it into the organisation’s core governance framework.”
That means rethinking where verification sits in the hiring journey. As Trehan explains, “A key strategy is to establish verification-led hiring, where identity checks, credential validation, and employment history screening are integrated early in the hiring journey rather than treated as a post-offer formality. This ensures discrepancies are identified before onboarding, reducing downstream risks.”
And AI is making proactive risk management possible in ways that were not previously feasible. As Trehan notes, “Advanced systems can analyse large datasets, crossreference multiple databases, and detect anomalies such as identity inconsistencies, falsified credentials, or undisclosed histories with far greater accuracy.” The implication is significant, HR leaders who harness this capability move from reacting to risk to anticipating it, earning a seat at the strategic table that reactive processes could never have secured.
Building culture as infrastructure
In Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella borrows from poet Rainer Maria Rilke and says, “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” It posits that change does not begin with a strategy deck, but with a shift in how people inside an organisation see themselves and their work.
In a sector as complex as pharma, culture needs to be infrastructure. It determines whether AI tools are adopted with curiosity or faces resistance, whether the organisation learns from failure or conceals it.
Singh describes what building that infrastructure looks like, “Within research and development, emphasis is placed on creating environments that encourage scientific thinking, collaboration, and continuous learning. Career paths increasingly recognise research contribution and domain expertise, while workforce planning is aligned to emerging areas such as biologics and advanced therapies. In manufacturing, strong attention is given to quality-first mindsets, frontline leadership, and accountability, recognising that people behaviour directly impacts compliance and patient safety. In commercial teams, performance is being balanced with ethics, digital readiness, and responsible engagement with healthcare stakeholders, ensuring growth is sustainable and reputation-led.”
Thus, culture needs to be an operational strategy deliberately designed, function by function, to hold the organisation together as technology pulls it in new directions. And, HR leaders are uniquely positioned to build it by shaping the everyday conditions such as how decisions are made, how dissent is heard, how capability is rewarded, and how an organisation behaves under pressure.
And when that internal transformation is done right, as Nadella writes, “when people and cultures re-create and refresh, a renaissance can be the result.”
Enabling effective and ethical governance
Culture, however, can only carry an organisation so far. As AI moves into core business processes, the questions of governance such as who sets the rules, who monitors the outcomes, who is accountable when systems fail, become urgent. And HR cannot afford to leave these questions to technologists alone.
Trehan notes that at scale, the challenge is not merely screening people once, it is building systems that remain vigilant continuously. He says, “At scale, workforce integrity is sustained not just by prehiring checks, but by building a continuous trust framework where verification, compliance, and risk management operate as interconnected systems rather than isolated processes.”
Governance, in this context, is not a compliance exercise. It is about ensuring that as AI takes on more responsibilities of the organisation, its values and standards remain intact. Leaders who will engage in the design of AI systems, not merely their rollout, will help determine whether their organisations earn or erode the trust of the people they employ and the patients they serve.
Tackling the trust deficit: A key challenge
Transformation fails when people do not trust it. And trust is fragile in pharma, an industry built on evidence, scrutiny and the understanding that what you do affects patient lives.
Fear of obsolescence is real. Pharma professionals across functions, be it R&D, manufacturing, quality or commercialisation, worry about AI replacing them and wonder whether their roles will become redundant.
The real leadership challenge in Indian pharma today is not about deploying AI faster. It is about helping scientists, medical representatives, quality professionals and medical affairs teams feel relevant, valued and capable in a landscape that is shifting beneath their feet.
This is where HR’s expertise becomes irreplaceable. No algorithm can navigate tough conversations with senior scientists whose roles are changing as AI takes over parts of their work. And, chatbots cannot guide a sales manager through the human side of leading a team when AI starts setting targets. These are fundamentally human skills and in pharma, where the stakes are higher, they are more valuable now than ever.
As Singh captures it, “Across functions, greater effort is being made to align diverse work cultures under a shared purpose centred on patient outcomes and public health impact. Performance frameworks now combine results with behaviours, leadership accountability, and values-based decision-making. At the same time, organisations are investing in reskilling, digital adoption, and employee experience to support transformation. Together, these shifts reflect a more strategic approach to people and culture, one that directly influences innovation, operational excellence, and long-term competitiveness in India’s pharma sector.”
Because in the end, the organisations that get this right won’t just be the ones that used AI well. They’ll be the ones that stayed human in how they led their people through it.
lakshmipriya.nair@expressindia.com
laxmipriyanair@gmail.com