Mid-Year Check-In: Has Pharma's Commercial Caution Lifted?

Pharmaceutical Commerce recently caught up with Emma Banks, CEO of ramarketing, to follow up on an outlook she shared back in February on how 2025 shaped up, and what it could mean for the pharma commercial landscape heading into 2026. In that piece, Banks described 2025 as a "year of two halves," with early-year optimism giving way to caution as budgets tightened, decision-making slowed and geopolitics, funding volatility, regulatory pressure, pricing scrutiny, tariffs and AI drove whiplash across the sector.

Pharmaceutical Commerce checked back in with Banks at the midpoint of 2026 to see how those observations have held up. In a written Q&A, she discussed whether 2026 has followed the same two-halves pattern, how precision marketing has actually played out commercially, what the AI-human balance looks like in practice, and what she expects from the back half of the year.

PC: In your February piece, you called 2025 a "year of two halves," with early optimism giving way to caution. Has 2026 followed that same pattern so far?

Banks: Looking back, I don’t think 2026 has followed quite the same “two halves” pattern I expected. The caution hasn’t disappeared; it’s evolved.

The more meaningful divide this year isn’t optimism versus caution. It’s visibility versus uncertainty. Some companies have strong order books and are investing with confidence. Others are still competing hard for every opportunity. That gap feels wider than it did twelve months ago.

We’re still seeing clients invest in marketing, but every decision is being examined much more closely. It’s less about cutting budgets outright and more about making sure every pound delivers a measurable outcome. That continues to change the conversations we’re having as an agency. We’re seeing a shift in the layers and seniority of decision-makers, and the elongation of the timelines involved in marketing investment, with the evidencing of commercial impact more critical than ever, particularly as we observe fewer marketers and more C-suite and technical personas involved in pitches, procurement, and contract negotiations.

Trade pressures and tariffs have undoubtedly added another layer of complexity, but this industry has always been remarkably resilient. Pharmaceutical supply chains have adapted to regulatory change, geopolitical shifts, and global disruption before. I expect they’ll continue to do so, even if the journey isn’t straightforward.

Investment activity also feels like it’s returning, although the capital continues to favour businesses with more mature technologies and clearer routes to commercialisation. That’s encouraging for parts of the sector, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into confidence across the whole ecosystem.

You predicted a parallel shift toward precision medicine, mirrored by precision marketing and commercial tactics, targeting fewer, high-value therapies/patient groups instead of broad reach. Has this been the case in 2026?

Precision is becoming about far more than therapeutic expertise. Clients increasingly want deep scientific understanding, commercial insight and, perhaps most importantly, confidence in the people sitting across the table. Expertise matters, but trust has become the deciding factor.

One thing that struck me walking around BIO this year was how many companies seemed to be returning to more traditional corporate branding, particularly the use of blue. It may simply have been my perception, but it felt as though organisations were choosing reassurance over differentiation at a time when the market remains uncertain. There’s an interesting contradiction there. We talk a great deal about precision: reaching the right audiences with the right message at exactly the right time. Yet many organisations are presenting themselves in increasingly similar ways. Those two trends don’t naturally sit together.

You predicted AI would absorb a lot of execution through automation and data processing, while human judgement, context and trust remain parts AI can’t replace. How have you observed this balance play out in commercial operations in 2026?

If anything, my prediction around AI has strengthened. The technology itself isn’t proving to be the difficult part. It’s moving incredibly quickly and, in many cases, doing exactly what people expected it would.

The harder challenge is helping people understand where their value now sits. That’s not simply a conversation about jobs. It’s about identity. Every profession is having to rethink which activities genuinely require human judgement and which can now be accelerated through technology.

For leaders, that changes the role. It’s no longer enough to introduce AI tools. We also have to help people understand how their expertise evolves alongside them, because the pace of change is faster than many organisations are comfortable with.

What is your outlook for the rest of 2026? Will the second half be distinctly different from H1, or a longer-term continuation driven by a variety of forces?

I expect the second half of the year to continue many of the trends we’ve already seen. The technology will keep improving, but I don’t think that’s where the biggest challenge lies. The harder work is helping organisations redefine value, both for their customers and for their own people.

From an agency perspective, clients are rightly expecting technology to remove effort where it can. I don’t see that as simply asking for “more for less”. It’s more nuanced than that. Clients are becoming much more discerning about where they genuinely need expert thinking and where technology should now make delivery faster, more efficient, or more scalable. Our job, as a commercial agency partner, is to harness technology alongside human expertise, and that’s why we are focused on building long-term client relationships that leverage strategic integrated marketing activities to deliver impact to help companies to grow.

Agencies are having to become much clearer about the value they bring. Routine execution, reporting, and coordination is increasingly being automated, because they can be. Value is shifting towards judgement, interpretation, strategic thinking, recommending, advising and guiding, and demonstrating accountability. In regulated industries like pharma, those things matter enormously because someone still has to stand behind the advice, the decisions, and ultimately the outcomes.

For me, the real challenge for the rest of 2026 isn’t whether we use AI. That will increasingly be taken for granted. The differentiator will be whether we can clearly demonstrate where technology adds value, where human expertise makes the difference, and how the two work together to deliver better outcomes for clients.