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Assess and Prioritize Agentic AI Use Cases in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Build a controlled path from decision support to bounded autonomy across the pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain.

Agentic AI adoption is limited by GxP exposure. AI that influences GxP-controlled processes is hard to deploy quickly without validation, auditability, and accountable human oversight.

CIOs cannot treat all digital knowledge as agent-ready. Agents need governed, current, version-controlled, and inspection-ready context, not just access to documents and systems.

Agentic AI exposes ownership gaps across the enterprise. No single function owns the full risk surface. CIOs need a governance model that clarifies who owns the agent, the data it uses, the decision it influences, the process it touches, and the evidence required to defend it.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

CIOs must make autonomy earn its place in pharma. Every agent that touches regulated work needs a defined decision role, approved knowledge sources, validated behavior, audit-ready evidence, and a named owner for the outcome; only then will agentic AI become scalable, defensible, and trusted.

Impact and Result

  • Classify agentic AI opportunities. Each use case should be classified by GxP exposure, decision criticality, autonomy level, and required evidence.
  • Define boundaries before selecting use cases. Each autonomy level should have clear rules for human review, auditability, validation, exception handling, and escalation.
  • Build an agent-ready knowledge foundation. CIOs must ensure that data sources are current, version-controlled, permission-aware, and semantically connected through master data and process taxonomies.

Assess and Prioritize Agentic AI Use Cases in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Research & Tools

1. Assess and Prioritize Agentic AI Use Cases in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Storyboard – A step-by-step document that helps CIOs and pharmaceuticals manufacturing leaders understand where agentic AI can unlock new operating capabilities.

Identify high-value opportunities for agentic AI by connecting pharmaceutical business priorities to the regulated operational capabilities required for governed autonomy. To move from AI experimentation to responsible agentic AI adoption, pharmaceutical manufacturers must understand where agents can create meaningful value, what regulated decisions they can safely assist, recommend, coordinate, or execute, and what data, process, integration, validation, security, and governance foundations are needed before autonomy can scale.

This storyboard will help you understand the capabilities and opportunities of agentic AI in pharmaceutical manufacturing, assess where agents can sense, reason, coordinate, and act across Plan, Source, Make, Deliver, Quality, Regulatory, and Commercial operations, evaluate use cases against business value, compliance exposure, and operational readiness, and build a practical roadmap for responsible adoption. It will also help you define the controls, decision rights, audit trails, human oversight, and accountability structures required to ensure agentic AI improves speed and performance without weakening quality, compliance, patient safety, or trust.

2. Agentic AI Use Case Tool for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing – A structured tool to help pharmaceutical manufacturing leaders prioritize agentic AI opportunities and build a roadmap for responsible adoption.

This tool guides pharmaceutical manufacturing leaders through the evaluation and prioritization activities required to build a practical agentic AI adoption roadmap. This Excel workbook helps you connect business goals to agentic AI opportunities, assess where autonomous or semi-autonomous capabilities can create measurable value, and determine which use cases are most appropriate to pursue first across discovery & development, clinical trials & regulatory reviews, commercial manufacturing, sales, marketing and customer support.


Assess and Prioritize Agentic AI Use-Cases in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Build a controlled path from decision support to bounded autonomy across the pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain.

Analyst perspective

Embed decision intelligence into systems to drive real-time, closed-loop execution.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers have spent years digitizing laboratories, manufacturing sites, quality systems, clinical operations, regulatory workflows, and commercial engagement. These investments have improved visibility, documentation, and process efficiency, but they have not removed the central constraint: regulated decisions remain slow, evidence-heavy, and dependent on fragmented human coordination. AI can now summarize documents, retrieve records, and generate recommendations, but most pharmaceutical workflows still struggle to turn intelligence into timely, defensible action.

This is not only due to a lack of automation, but also the absence of trusted decision infrastructure across good practice-controlled processes. Procedures, batch records, deviations, lab results, regulatory commitments, supplier evidence, and commercial content often sit across disconnected systems, with different owners, controls, and levels of readiness. In this environment, speed without evidence creates risk, and autonomy without accountability is unacceptable.

Agentic AI introduces a new operating possibility: systems that can retrieve context, reason across workflows, coordinate next steps, and take bounded action under defined controls. In pharmaceutical manufacturing organizations, however, the opportunity is not unrestricted autonomy. It is governed autonomy. Agents must be classified by the decisions they influence, constrained by the authority they are given, grounded in approved knowledge, and monitored through audit trails, validation, and human override.

For CIOs, this makes agentic AI a leadership test rather than merely a technology deployment. The mandate is to determine where agents can safely assist, recommend, coordinate, or act across regulated workflows without weakening quality, compliance, patient safety, or accountability. The manufacturers that move fastest will be those that make autonomy defensible, repeatable, and trusted.

Shreyas Shukla

Shreyas Shukla

Principal Research Director, Industry
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Agentic AI adoption is limited by GxP exposure. AI that influences GxP-controlled processes is hard to deploy quickly without validation, auditability, and accountable human oversight.

CIOs cannot treat all digital knowledge as agent-ready. Agents need governed, current, version-controlled, and inspection-ready context, not just access to documents and systems.

Agentic AI exposes ownership gaps across the enterprise. No single function owns the full risk surface. CIOs need a governance model that clarifies who owns the agent, the data it uses, the decision it influences, the process it touches, and the evidence required to defend it.

Common Obstacles

Validation approaches are not ready for agentic AI. Most pharma validation practices are built around predictable workflows, not agents that change behavior based on prompts, data, and model updates.

Master data and process taxonomies are inconsistent. Different systems may use different names for products, materials, sites, equipment, suppliers, tests, and quality events, which makes cross-system reasoning unreliable.

Accountability changes as the agent moves from assistive to autonomous. Ownership is simple when an agent summarizes information. It becomes harder when the agent recommends or triggers actions.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Classify agentic AI opportunities. Each use case should be classified by GxP exposure, decision criticality, autonomy level, and required evidence.

Define boundaries before selecting use cases. Each autonomy level should have clear rules for human review, auditability, validation, exception handling, and escalation.

Build an agent-ready knowledge foundation. CIOs must ensure that data sources are current, version-controlled, permission-aware, and semantically connected through master data and process taxonomies.

Info-Tech Insight

CIOs must make autonomy earn its place in pharma. Every agent that touches regulated work needs a defined decision role, approved knowledge sources, validated behavior, audit-ready evidence, and a named owner for the outcome; only then will agentic AI become scalable, defensible, and trusted.

Your Challenge

Agentic AI adoption is limited by GxP exposure.
Pharma CIOs cannot evaluate agentic AI as a normal productivity tool when it touches GxP-controlled workflows. The more an agent influences batch records, deviations, release decisions, lab investigations, distribution exceptions, regulatory commitments, or patient safety signals, the more it requires validation, auditability, access control, and accountable human oversight. This slows adoption because CIOs must prove not only that the agent works, but that it behaves reliably within regulated boundaries.

CIOs cannot treat all digital knowledge as agent-ready.
Pharma organizations may have digitized procedures, specifications, batch records, lab results, quality events, supplier files, and regulatory documents, but that does not make them usable by agents. Agents need current, approved, version-controlled, permission-aware, and context-rich knowledge to produce defensible recommendations. Without clean master data, consistent taxonomies, and clear evidence lineage, agents may retrieve the wrong information, miss critical context, or generate outputs that cannot be trusted in regulated workflows. Agentic AI exposes ownership gaps across the enterprise.

Agentic AI cuts across IT, quality, regulatory, manufacturing, lab, supply chain, data, cybersecurity, and legal teams, but no single function owns the full risk surface.
IT may own the platform, quality may own the process, regulatory may own commitments, and manufacturing may own execution, yet the agent may influence all of them at once. CIOs need a governance model that clarifies who owns the agent, the data it uses, the recommendation it makes, the decision it influences, and the evidence required to defend it.

In pharma, agentic AI adoption is constrained by whether regulated knowledge, decision rights, and GxP evidence are strong enough to make autonomy defensible.

Common Obstacles

Validation approaches are not ready for agentic AI.
Most pharma validation practices were designed for systems with predictable workflows, fixed rules, and repeatable outputs. Agentic AI may retrieve different context, generate different recommendations, interact with multiple systems, and change behavior when prompts, data sources, model versions, or workflow conditions change. This creates a validation problem because CIOs need to define the agent’s intended use, approved data sources, permitted actions, decision boundaries, test scenarios, exception paths, audit trail requirements, and monitoring controls before deployment. Without that, quality teams will slow or block adoption because they cannot defend how the agent behaves in a regulated process.

Master data and process taxonomies are inconsistent.
Agentic AI depends on reliable context that spans products, materials, active pharmaceutical ingredients, excipients, suppliers, sites, equipment, batches, tests, specifications, procedures, deviations, complaints, and regulatory commitments. These entities are often named, structured, and governed differently across enterprise, manufacturing, lab, quality, and regulatory systems. This makes cross-system reasoning unreliable. Until master data and process taxonomies are harmonized, agentic AI can assemble information quickly but still draw the wrong connections.

Accountability changes as the agent moves from assistive to autonomous.
Ownership is manageable when an agent only summarizes information or helps a user search controlled documents. It becomes much harder when the agent is influencing regulated decisions. This creates an accountability gap. IT may own the platform, but it cannot own the quality judgment. Quality may own the process but may not understand the model behavior. Manufacturing may own execution, but not the data pipeline. Regulatory may own commitments, but not the agent workflow. CIOs need a decision-rights model that changes with autonomy level, defining who owns the agent, the evidence it uses, the recommendation it makes, the action it triggers, and the failure modes it may introduce.

Agentic AI barriers cannot be removed one control at a time; pharma CIOs need to design one operating system for autonomy to account for validation, master data, process context, and decision rights.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Classify agentic AI opportunities.
Each opportunity should first be classified by GxP exposure, decision criticality, autonomy level, and required evidence. This forces the organization to distinguish between low-risk productivity support and workflows that could influence product quality, patient safety, batch disposition, regulatory commitments, or data integrity. This classification also prevents over-governance and under-governance. A document summarization agent should not be treated the same way as a deviation triage agent or a batch release readiness agent. By classifying opportunities upfront, CIOs can prioritize use cases that deliver value while matching the level of control to the level of regulated impact.

Define boundaries before selecting use cases.
CIOs should define what assistive, guided, conditional, and autonomous behavior means in a pharma context before deciding which use cases to pursue. Each autonomy level needs explicit rules for human review, auditability, validation, exception handling, escalation, and approval authority. A triage agent that routes general service tickets is very different from one that routes deviations, adverse event reports, or cold chain excursions. Boundaries should clarify what the agent can see, what it can recommend, what it can trigger, when it must stop, and when a human must take over.

Build an agent-ready knowledge foundation.
Agents cannot operate safely on fragmented or uncontrolled knowledge. CIOs must ensure that the data and content agents use is current, version-controlled, permission-aware, and semantically connected. This includes procedures, specifications, batch records, lab results, deviations, complaints, validation evidence, supplier records, regulatory commitments, and distribution data. The goal is to give agents reliable context that requires master data alignment, process taxonomies, metadata discipline, controlled document status, role-based access, evidence lineage, and clear rules for what sources are approved for agent use. Without this foundation, agents may work quickly but reason from incomplete, outdated, or misinterpreted information.

CIOs should make agentic AI deployable by turning every use case into a controlled design decision: classify the risk, bound the autonomy, and prove the agent is using trusted knowledge before it touches regulated work.

Rx ONLY. GxP-CONTROLLED. Agentic AI: Assess and Prioritize Agentic AI Use Cases in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.

Info-Tech’s methodology for adopting agentic AI for pharmaceutical manufacturing workflows

Phase Steps

1. Establish familiarity

  • Introduce the research and agentic AI selection framework.
  • Explain agentic AI concepts, autonomy levels, and value drivers.
  • Walk through the industry reference architecture and value streams.

2. Understand criteria

  • Review the tool structure and scoring model.
  • Explain the business impact criteria used in the tool.
  • Explain the implementation feasibility criteria used in the tool.

3. Evaluate use cases

  • Brainstorm and identify candidate use cases across value stream domains.
  • Consolidate and refine a shortlist of use cases to evaluate in the tool.

4. Define value

  • Define the primary value driver for each use case.
  • Determine the appropriate level of agent autonomy.
  • Identify the operational role of each agent.
  • Validate scoring assumptions and adjust scores through group discussion.

5. Prioritize deployment

  • Plot all evaluated use cases on the 2×2 decision matrix (business value vs. feasibility).
  • Discuss organizational constraints and sequencing considerations.
  • Define a phased implementation roadmap for selected use cases.
  • Identify ownership, next steps, and pilot opportunities.

Phase Outcomes

Gain a shared understanding of agentic AI and where it could create value in the organization.

Align on the organization’s value chain, the six value drivers, and the concept of agent autonomy. This creates a common vocabulary and ensures that all stakeholders evaluate opportunities through the same operational and strategic lens.

Gain clarity on how use cases will be evaluated and prioritized.

Understand the scoring logic used in the tool, including how business impact and implementation feasibility are assessed. This ensures that use case evaluation is structured, comparable, and grounded in consistent criteria rather than subjective opinions.

Shortlist realistic agentic AI opportunities.

Identify candidate use cases across the organization’s value stream and narrow them to a manageable evaluation set. The result is a curated list of opportunities that reflect real operational challenges and are suitable for structured prioritization.

Translate each use case into a clearly defined agent concept with measurable value.

Assign value drivers, autonomy levels, and operational roles to each use case. This step ensures that opportunities are no longer abstract ideas but clearly defined agent capabilities with identifiable value and implementation characteristics.

Establish a prioritized roadmap of agentic AI initiatives.

Map use cases on the impact versus feasibility matrix and identify the most practical starting points for deployment. The result is a phased implementation roadmap that balances value creation with organizational readiness and operational risk.

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals

Agentic AI Use Case Selection Tool for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

The tool helps CIOs evaluate where agentic AI should be applied across pharmaceutical manufacturing operations.

By systematically evaluating operational value, risk exposure, and governance readiness, the tool enables CIOs to identify where autonomy is appropriate, where it should remain constrained, and how adoption should be sequenced across the enterprise.

You get:

  • A ready-to-use list of high-value AI use cases to support roadmap design, funding discussions, and implementation planning.

Outcomes

Gain a clear view of which use cases should be explored first.

Justify where autonomy should be introduced and where it must remain constrained due to safety, regulatory, or operational considerations.

Produce a practical sequence of pilots and deployments that align autonomy initiatives with your operational priorities and governance requirements.

Blueprint benefits

IT Benefits

  • Identify where agentic AI is viable versus unsafe in regulated manufacturing. Separate human-reviewed use cases such as deviation triage, batch record review, and scheduling recommendations from actions that should not execute autonomously, such as batch release, quality disposition, or validated process changes.
  • Define boundaries across manufacturing, quality, and enterprise systems. Establish where agents can observe, recommend, or trigger workflow actions across manufacturing execution, batch record, quality, lab, enterprise resource planning, warehouse, and supervisory control platforms.
  • Enable controlled closed-loop execution across pharma workflows. Move from insight to recommendation to bounded action by routing deviations, flagging batch record exceptions, escalating cold chain excursions, or triggering maintenance work orders.
  • Expose readiness gaps for real-time agentic AI. Highlight missing capabilities such as reliable equipment-state visibility, governed master data, version-controlled procedures, validated integrations, and audit-ready data lineage.
  • Embed governance for agent-influenced decisions. Ensure every recommendation, escalation, and handoff is traceable, reviewable, explainable, and overridable where product quality, patient safety, data integrity, or regulatory commitments are affected.
  • Design for fail-safe and degraded operation modes. Ensure plants can continue operating when agents fail, lose connectivity, produce uncertain outputs, or encounter incomplete context.

Business Benefits

  • Accelerate regulated decision cycles without weakening compliance. Use agents to assemble evidence, triage exceptions, and coordinate reviews for deviations, batch records, lab investigations, supplier issues, and distribution excursions.
  • Improve release, quality, and responsiveness through governed coordination. Reduce waiting time between manufacturing, quality, lab, maintenance, and supply chain teams while preserving accountable human decisions.
  • Stabilize operations under volatility and constraint. Use agents to detect material shortages, equipment issues, environmental excursions, and schedule disruption early, then recommend controlled recovery actions.
  • Enable cross-functional optimization, not siloed automation. Coordinate decisions across Plan, Source, Make, Quality, Release, and Deliver so local improvements do not create compliance, inventory, or service risk elsewhere.
  • Increase consistency and repeatability of frontline decisions. Encode approved procedures, decision rules, and escalation logic into agents that support shifts, sites, and markets consistently.
  • Improve resilience through faster exception response. Detect and route deviations, cold chain excursions, maintenance risks, and supply disruptions earlier, with documented escalation and recovery paths.

Insight summary

CIOs must make autonomy earn its place in pharma. Every agent that touches regulated work needs a defined decision role, approved knowledge sources, validated behavior, audit-ready evidence, and a named owner for the outcome; only then will agentic AI become scalable, defensible, and trusted.

Pharma is not short on potential agentic AI use cases; it is short on the control structures needed to scale them safely. As agents move closer to regulated decisions, CIOs must ensure autonomy is bounded by evidence, accountability, and Good Practice requirements before it becomes operational.

Build a controlled path from decision support to bounded autonomy across the pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain.

In pharma, agentic AI adoption is constrained by whether regulated knowledge, decision rights, and GxP evidence are strong enough to make autonomy defensible.

Pharma CIOs are being asked to scale agentic AI in workflows where every decision must be explainable, traceable, and defensible. The challenge is determining where agents can safely influence regulated work without weakening evidence quality, decision ownership, or Good Practice controls.

Agentic AI barriers cannot be removed one control at a time. Pharmaceutical Manufacturing CIOs need to design one operating system for autonomy to account for validation, master data, process context, and decision-rights.

Agentic AI stalls when validation, master data, process context, and accountability are treated as separate problems. CIOs need to solve them together because an agent cannot be trusted in regulated workflows if its behavior, evidence, and ownership model are not aligned.

CIOs should make agentic AI deployable by turning every use case into a controlled design decision: classify the risk, bound the autonomy, and prove the agent is using trusted knowledge before it touches regulated work.

CIOs should make agentic AI deployable by turning each use case into a controlled design decision. Classify the regulated risk, define the agent’s boundaries, and ensure the agent can only act on governed, current, and traceable knowledge.

Measure the value of this blueprint

How can you measure the value of following Info-Tech’s approach?

The average IT consulting rate in the United States is $100 to $250 per hour.

The cost and effort involved in undertaking an AI use case selection and prioritization exercise varies depending on the size and scope of the project. The average price of a well-designed and executed AI use case selection exercise ranges from US$24,000 to US$40,000 at the lower end (assuming a two-member team charging the hourly average of US$100).

Measure the value of this blueprint. Table shows the time taken and average cost of each project step with and without info-tech resources.

Source: “Understanding IT Consultant Cost…”, Wildnet Edge, 2026

This blueprint will accelerate your agentic AI use case prioritization exercise.

We include all the guidance, tools, and templates you need to implement this program successfully.

Reach out to advisory services for assistance as you work through the blueprint, or request a workshop engagement and let us do the heavy lifting.

Recommended workshop participants

The recommended workshop participants for each of the 3 days of the workshop.

Before you proceed with the activities prescribed in the rest of this blueprint, do this…

  1. Download the accompanying Agentic AI Use Case Selection Tool for Manufacturing.Download the Agentic AI Use Case Selection Tool for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing
  2. Review related research for definitions and explanations on what agentic AI is, its maturity progression, common failure patterns, and everything else you need to get closer to implementing your first agentic AI pilot.Download the Design Your Agentic AI Prototype blueprint
  3. Review the key considerations section on how to effectively govern the use case selection process while keeping focus on structurally viable use case applications.Govern SelectionEnsure Structural Viability

CIOs should weigh two critical considerations when evaluating agentic AI solutions

Adoption is racing ahead, yet S&P Global finds 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI work in 2025, up from 17% a year earlier.1

CIOs must ensure that they have clarity on two points before proceeding:

Is it truly agentic?

Agentic validity: Is the solution actually reasoning, planning, using tools, and taking bounded actions, or is it a copilot, chatbot, analytics model, or workflow automation being marketed as agentic artificial intelligence?

Is it permissible?

Regulated permissibility: Is the organization allowed to use the agent in this workflow, given Good Practice requirements, data privacy, validation expectations, auditability, human accountability, and market-specific regulations?

80%+

of AI projects fail, twice the failure rate of IT projects that don’t involve AI.2

€35M / 7%

top EU AI Act penalty for a prohibited AI practice; up to €35M or 7% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher.3

Sources:

1 – “Generative AI…,” S&P Global, n.d.
2 – “The Root Causes…,” RAND Corporation, 2024
3 – “Article 99…,” EU Artificial Intelligence Act, 2025

Many “agentic AI” claims are overstated

Let’s look at some often-quoted agentic AI case studies and evaluate their claims

Agentic AI claims

Sources:

1 – “AI Across the…”, Sanofi, 2026 2 – “MSD explores…”, AWS, 2025 3 - “Roche:..”, Dataiku, n.d. 4 - “Agentic AI Platform…”, ZenML, 2025

A step-by-step reality check

What is being labeled as agentic AI today is largely a combination of retrieval-augmented generation, workflow orchestration, and advanced automation, not true autonomous agents.

Stage

Question

Common Failure Patterns

What “True Agentic” Requires

Goal Ownership

Does the system define or refine goals?All systems are triggered by humans or predefined objectivesSelf-directed objectives, not user-triggered tasks

Planning

Does it break goals into multistep plans?No dynamic decomposition of problemsDynamic task decomposition

Tool Orchestration

Does it select and use tools autonomously?At best, routing between prebuilt toolsCross-system decisioning, not pre-wired flows

Execution

Does it act independently across workflows?Works only within tightly engineered workflowsMinimal human triggering

Learning & Adaptation

Does it improve behavior over time autonomously?Improvements require human interventionClosed-loop learning with feedback

Determine whether a system is truly agentic vs. just automated AI

Each stage represents a higher bar of autonomy. A system is only “agentic” if it meaningfully passes all stages, not just the last one.

CIOs must ensure that agentic AI use cases are safe, controllable, and structurally viable before prioritizing value

Before evaluating business impact or feasibility, organizations must first determine whether a use case is structurally appropriate for agentic AI within a manufacturing environment. This step ensures that operational realities, safety constraints, and system dependencies are accounted for before any economic prioritization occurs.

Safety Criticality

  • Does the use case impact human safety or asset integrity?
  • Would an incorrect decision result in injury, damage, or regulatory breach?

High safety exposure requires human-in-the-loop or constrained autonomy.

Regulatory Sensitivity

  • Is the process governed by strict regulatory, audit, or compliance requirements?
  • Are decisions subject to traceability, explainability, or approval mandates?

High regulatory exposure limits full autonomy and requires audit controls.

Operational Centrality

  • Is the use case part of core operational flow?
  • Would failure disrupt primary service delivery or network performance?

Core operations require higher control and staged autonomy adoption.

Interdependency and Cascade Potential

  • Does the use case interact with multiple systems, workflows, or downstream decisions?
  • Can errors propagate across operational, network, customer, or financial systems?

High interdependency increases the need for coordination controls and supervision.

Reversibility and Containment

  • Can decisions be easily reversed or corrected without downstream impact?
  • Is there a clear mechanism to contain failures before they spread?

Low reversibility requires restricted autonomy and stronger guardrails.

Info-Tech Insight

High value does not justify high risk in manufacturing environments.

Even high-impact use cases must be constrained if they operate in safety-critical, highly regulated, or tightly coupled systems

Images have been generated using OpenAI’s GPT 5.4 large language model.

The compliance clock is already running

Many rules around governed and safe AI use are already in force now, while other regulations are fast emerging.

US/FDAFDA AI Guidance (2025)

EMERGING

Build a risk-based “context of use” credibility file now.1

21 CFR Part 11

IN FORCE

Agent actions on records need audit trails & human-bound e-signatures.2

Software Assurance (CSA)

IN FORCE

Focus validation effort on intended use, patient safety, product quality, and data integrity for AI tools.3

Privacy & Data

GDPR + DPIA

IN FORCE

DPIA is mandatory for AI systems involving profiling, decision-making, or data processing.4

FRIA – high-risk AI

UPCOMING

Requires documented details of autonomous actions and human oversight measures.5

HIPAA/PIPEDA

IN FORCE

Agents must provide BAA and not train on patients’ data.6

EU AI Act

GPAI model duties

IN FORCE

Providers must perform conformity assessments and deployers must ensure safe and compliant AI use.7

CE Marking

UPCOMING

Any high-risk AI system placed on the EU market or put into service must bear the CE mark.8

AI literacy (Art. 4)

IN FORCE

Mandates the skills, knowledge, and understanding required to make informed deployments of AI.9

Cyber & Global

NIS2 Directive

IN FORCE

Agents should not operate with blanket permissions and require end-to-end tracing.10

Prompt-injection

EMERGING

Restrict type and nature of prompts and implement security content filters.11

MHRA/Health Canada/PMDA

EMERGING

Combination of GMLP principles and geo-specific requirements for developers.12, 13, 14

  • In force (already deployed)
  • Emerging (draft ready or being prepared)
  • Upcoming (future deadline/2027 or later)
Sources:
  1. “Considerations for…,” US FDA, 2025
  2. “What Is 21 CFR….,” Lab Manager, 2026
  3. “Agentic AI in…,” USDM Life Sciences, 2026
  4. “How to Conduct…,” Kiteworks, 2026
  5. “Article 27…,” EU Artificial Intelligence Act, 2026
  6. “AI Agents and…,” Cyber Defense Magazine, 2026
  7. “The roles of…,” Stephenson Harwood, 2024
  8. “CE Marking for…,” Dilaig, 2026
  9. “AI Literacy…,” Anekanta AI, n.d.
  10. “NIS2 Compliance…,” FALNOA, 2026
  11. “Prompt Injection…,” OWASP, n.d.
  12. “Pre-market guidance…,” Govt. of Canada, 2026
  13. “Machine learning medical…,” Gov.UK, 2024
  14. “Action Plan for…,” PMDA, 2025

Info-Tech Insight

Agentic autonomy shifts compliance from one-time validation to continuous, auditable oversight.

Build a controlled path from decision support to bounded autonomy across the pharmaceutical manufacturing value chain.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Guided Implementation 1: Establish familiarity
  • Call 1: Review the capability map/value stream map.
  • Call 2: Identify domains where agentic AI may create value.

Guided Implementation 2: Understand criteria
  • Call 1: Understand agentic AI use cases across value stream domains.
  • Call 2: Define the decision boundaries and expected operational outcomes.

Guided Implementation 3: Evaluate use cases
  • Call 1: Evaluate fitment & risk scenarios.

Guided Implementation 4: Define value
  • Call 1: Estimate value for each use case using metrics.

Guided Implementation 5: Prioritize deployment
  • Call 1: Prioritize use cases by balancing value, risk, and readiness.
  • Call 2: Develop a sequenced adoption roadmap.

Author

Shreyas Shukla

Contributors

  • Tim Smart, IT Director, Global Pharmaceuticals Company
  • Steven Schmidt, Sr. Managing Partner, Info-Tech Research Group
  • 1 Anonymous Contributor
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