Key takeaway
Only 11% of life sciences transformations fully hit their targets, and omnichannel is no exception: 97% of pharma leaders call it critical but only 10% have integrated data. Four levers from our stage for moving from pilots to everyday practice: people, ecosystem, support and buy-in.
Short answer: Because they are run as technology projects when they are change programmes. Almost every pharma leader now calls omnichannel critical, yet only a tenth have integrated data, a quarter run field and digital as one system, and most next-best-action recommendations are ignored. The gap between a working pilot and everyday practice is organisational: who owns omnichannel locally, whether tools talk to each other, what support markets actually get, and whether general managers believe in it. On our stage, Karol Wolak set out four levers for closing that gap, with one rule above them all: "Omnichannel is part of everyone's job".
The industry has spent years deciding what to pilot. A 2024 ZS analysis of 13 global pharma companies found that 80% had scaled their data foundation and analytics platform to more than five markets, but only 20% had developed content personalisation or omnichannel orchestration, and fewer than 15% had secured cross-functional funding or managed an efficient transition of capabilities to local teams. As the authors put it, a lot of the focus and the noise has been on what to pilot.
The 2025 and 2026 surveys show the same shape. In BCG's June 2025 survey, 90% of leaders named siloed systems as the top barrier and only 7% were using AI or generative AI broadly. In Accenture's October 2026 survey of 60 commercial leaders, a quarter had field and digital working as one system across the enterprise and 58% had integration only in pockets. An agency survey of 100 pharma digital decision-makers in early 2025 found half rating themselves "advanced", while their own written answers described fragmentation and difficult orchestration. Self-assessment and reality have parted ways.
The human numbers are harder still. BCG's 2026 study of 6,000 executives and employees in 15 countries put the failure rate of transformations at around 70%, unchanged for decades. Gartner found in 2025 that only 32% of leaders report healthy change adoption, 79% of employees have low trust in change, and only a quarter of the workforce embraces change as quickly as leaders want. The sector-specific picture is no better: Bain's August 2026 analysis found that only 11% of healthcare and life sciences transformation programmes fully achieve their targets, while 83% settle for less, against 75% across all industries. McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026, a survey of more than 10,000 executives, found fewer than 25% of organisations achieving sustained impact from change and 72% of leaders saying they are not fully ready for what is coming. There is one encouraging finding: organisations that regularly adjust their change plans based on how employees respond are four times more likely to succeed (Gartner, March 2026). Omnichannel asks reps, marketers, medical teams and country managers to change how they work every day. That is a change programme, whatever the budget line says.
At the 4th Pharma Omnichannel HCP Engagement Conference in Barcelona in March 2026, Karol Wolak, Global Omnichannel Excellence Lead at Merck KGaA, spoke in a personal capacity about what he called genuine insights on omnichannel change, after nine years in local, regional and global commercial excellence roles. His starting point was the market: consumerisation of healthcare, price pressure that forces a lower cost to serve, more digital tools, and restricted rep access. On the customer side: information anytime through the right channel, unbiased and peer-reviewed content, personalised and relevant material, and agile support for product and patient questions.
His model of the journey was deliberately modest: "Journey of omnichannel transformation begins with a single step", through four stages he labelled crawl, walk, run and fly. Crawl is using multiple channels. Walk is designing coherent customer experiences. Run is tailoring the experience to HCP needs and preferences. Fly is adjusting in real time based on insights. Most of the industry, on the survey evidence above, is somewhere between walk and run.
The heart of his presentation was a two-by-two: four levers, each pulled differently at local and global level.
"Securing the buy-in and support is a key component for driving Omnichannel transformation, and the change linked to it"
Karol Wolak, Global Omnichannel Excellence Lead, Merck KGaA, 4th Pharma Omnichannel HCP Engagement Conference, March 2026
The local-global axis runs through all four. A 2026 L.E.K. paper on governance makes the same point: global strategic intent fails locally when governance is unclear, and country organisations are often under-resourced for what global expects of them. Pharmaceutical Executive's February 2026 analysis of scaling digital programmes found that local teams often comply on paper and revert to old behaviour in practice, and recommended treating global frameworks as toolkits rather than rulebooks.
The cost of a half-finished transformation lands on the customer. Veeva's 2024 data put HCP access to reps at 45%, down from 60% a year earlier, with half of accessible HCPs limiting engagement to three or fewer companies, and 65% of HCP engagements not synchronised with digital activity (vendor data). IQVIA's 2025 channel preference survey of more than 33,000 HCPs in 38 countries found that the match between the channels HCPs prefer and the ones they receive was 67% in Italy and 62% in Spain but only 43% in the UK and Germany (vendor data). ZS's January 2026 study of more than 700 US HCPs put pharma's average net promoter score at minus 10, with a spread from plus 26 to minus 57 between companies, and found that half of HCPs now prefer digital to in-person contact. HCPs are also moving faster than the companies that serve them: IQVIA's 2026 survey of nearly 24,000 HCPs in 34 markets found that 80% have adopted AI tools and 49% use them several times a week (vendor data).
Content tells the same story. Veeva's full-year 2025 data, published in March 2026, show field teams sharing content in 48% of HCP meetings and roughly 80% of approved content going unused, and report that 71% of top-20 biopharma executives say their operating model prevents effective cross-team collaboration (vendor data). In Sermo's 2025 survey of 499 physicians, 85% rated personalised content as important, while half said the amount of content was overwhelming and 46% struggled to find what was relevant (vendor). Omnichannel that stops at the pilot produces more content and more channels without more relevance, which is the opposite of what HCPs asked for.
We covered the measurement side in How Do You Measure HCP Experience, Not Just Reach? and the definitions in Multichannel vs Omnichannel: What Is the Difference in Pharma?.
Wolak's third lever, support and resources, is where most programmes are thinnest. BCG found that a third of companies offer no omnichannel training at all, and 95% of respondents said the training that exists is not highly effective. Accenture's 2026 survey ranked adaptability (72%), AI fluency (68%) and cross-functional collaboration (62%) as the capabilities commercial teams most need. A field-excellence analysis presented in 2026 counted 22 priority skills now expected of field teams, which it called far too much for one individual. Bain's June 2026 survey of 133 life sciences executives shows what separates the companies that scale: 93% of them run upskilling programmes, against 61% of the rest, and 69% report strong process redesign capabilities, against 5% of early explorers. The practical answer in Wolak's presentation was champions and ambassadors in the markets, a one-stop repository, and training tied to change management rather than to tools.
These topics will be on the agenda at the 5th Pharma Omnichannel HCP Engagement Conference in Barcelona on 10–11 March 2027, organised by UBIQ Events.
Most often because data and tools stay siloed, local teams lack ownership and resources, and buy-in is assumed rather than built. Surveys in 2025 and 2026 found only 10% of companies with integrated data platforms and 25% running field and digital as one system.
The work of changing how commercial, medical and marketing teams operate day to day: roles, skills, governance, support materials and incentives, so that orchestrated engagement becomes routine rather than a central project.
A four-stage view of omnichannel maturity presented at our conference: using multiple channels, designing coherent customer experiences, tailoring experiences to HCP needs and preferences, and adjusting in real time based on insights.
Global typically owns the platform, data standards, content factory and playbooks; local owns customer knowledge, journey choices and execution. Programmes stall when global frameworks are treated as rulebooks and local teams are under-resourced.
Adaptability, AI fluency and cross-functional collaboration top the lists in 2026 surveys, alongside data literacy and content skills. A third of companies offer no omnichannel training, which is the first gap to close.
The Pharma Omnichannel HCP Engagement Conference, organised by UBIQ Events, brings together omnichannel, commercial excellence, marketing and medical leaders from across Europe. The 5th edition takes place in Barcelona on 10–11 March 2027.
