Supply Chain Visibility Needs Context Before AI, Says PAXAFE’s Mark Talens

At LogiPharma USA 2026, the keynote panel on building a truly end-to-end supply chain centered on a familiar industry problem: visibility exists, but it remains scattered across functions, systems and partners, and too rarely shapes real decisions.

Mark Talens, chief commercial officer at PAXAFE, brought an operator's perspective to that conversation. Before joining the end-to-end cold chain and decision intelligence platform, Talens spent more than two decades running operations, including roles at Merck and Organon. He says fragmentation defined that career. Logistics, planning and customer support teams were strong on their own, yet each chased its own piece of the supply chain and reacted to the events generated within its own vertical.

In this video interview with Pharmaceutical Commerce, Talens explains where pharma companies capture the most value once they move from fragmented tracking to shared visibility across distribution. His answer begins with restraint. Knowing which events not to react to, he argues, matters as much as knowing which ones demand action, because uncoordinated responses set off a bullwhip effect that ripples through both demand and supply.

Talens describes PAXAFE's approach as contextualization, built around three questions: what am I looking at, what is the impact and what should happen next. Real-time tools now make that possible in a way legacy tracking could not.

He also offers a caution for companies racing to apply artificial intelligence to supply chain data. Layering AI on top of fragmented visibility, without first understanding and contextualizing what the data shows, will not produce the outcomes companies are after. In a GxP environment where speed and compliance have to coexist, Talens says the real goal is making decisions with confidence and the right context.