New Delhi: In global healthcare today, adopting technology is no longer what sets organisations apart. It is simply the baseline. Most large pharmaceutical and medical device companies have already digitised their core functions, from CRM platforms to AI tools. The real shift now, observes Prabha Sinha, Co-founder, ZS, is not about adding more technology but about using it more intelligently.
“There’s digital to create customer impact and how the ROI is really in the customer impact piece. Digital can keep the lights on, like SAP—an infrastructure play,” he added. “But the real return on investment comes when digital drives customer impact.”
That shift—from infrastructure to impact—is reshaping how life sciences organisations think, act, and compete.
From Projects to Digital Assets: Four Engines of Impact
Sinha outlined four key “engines” driving the shift from traditional projects to scalable digital impact.
“One is that through digital, you can move from work being done by project teams to work that’s done by digital assets,” he said.
Earlier, major business decisions—such as restructuring a sales force for a new product launch—could take up to a year. “Ten years ago it would take six months to study it and another six months to implement it. So the cycle was typically about a year. Now that cycle is down to three months,” Sinha noted.
Second, decision-making cycles have compressed dramatically. “Decision making can be speeded up or planning and execution can be merged,” he said. Instead of quarterly planning cycles, “now it happens on the fly. It’s become a continuous process, rather a discrete process,” he added.
Third, digital tools are breaking silos. “Traditionally, especially in large companies, the sales, service, different marketing departments are quite siloed… and now digital is cutting across these vertical boundaries,” Sinha explained.
Finally, he emphasised the role of centralised analytics: “All this is possible through the centralization of marketing and sales analytics—that’s the fourth piece.” Metrics, he said, are shifting “from infrastructure… where metrics are around adoption usage to metrics around impact.”
How the West Is Moving and India’s Expanding Role
In the United States and Europe, AI-driven sales and marketing is already deeply embedded. “Of the top 100 pharma companies in the US, all of them are doing it,” Sinha said, referring to AI and analytics in customer engagement. Differences lie in sophistication, but “in terms of assisting salespeople, assisting marketers with how to deploy resources, that’s kind of a universal AI-driven activity now.”
India, meanwhile, is not merely supporting this transformation—it is shaping it. Around 70 per cent of ZS’s global workforce is based in India, and much of the intellectual property behind ZAIDYN, the company’s proprietary AI-powered platform, is developed here.
“For us, India is not just a cost centre, it’s also a talent centre,” Sinha said, noting that Indian teams are increasingly client-facing and central to innovation. “Much of the innovation… many of the algorithms programmes are developed in India.”
Trust, Transparency, and the Human-in-the-Loop
Healthcare remains one of the most regulated industries in the world, making governance frameworks critical for AI deployment.
“There is very little of autonomous bots that companies are deploying with customers or even with physicians,” Sinha observed. “In almost every case, there is human checking of what happens.”
While AI adoption is expanding, “in a regulated industry, we can’t take the chance of somebody dying from the recommendation,” he said. “So I think that the trust is through a person right now.”
He pointed to the rise of OpenEvidence, widely used by physicians in the United States, as an example of structured AI operating within defined boundaries.
Better Decisions—Not More Technology—Will Drive Healthcare’s Next Leap
Healthcare data volumes are expanding rapidly—from consumer searches to physician-level queries and millions of annual sales interactions within a single large pharma company.
“The value… is going to come from understanding patterns across similar physicians, similar decision makers, similar hospitals,” Sinha explained. He argued that better information symmetry could reduce waste and improve alignment between products and patient needs.
“Three-year implementation cycles are no longer viable,” Sinha said. “Technology is evolving faster than companies can deploy it.”
Platforms such as ZAIDYN, he added, allow organisations to “be up and running within weeks rather than years,” enabling them to plug in evolving tools without rebuilding infrastructure each time technology advances.
The Bottom Line
Healthcare’s next breakthrough, Sinha maintains, will not come from incremental technology adoption.
“Competitive differentiation will come from superior decision intelligence rather than technology deployment alone,” he said.
Technology may provide the tools, but the advantage will belong to organisations that transform data into faster, smarter, and more accountable decisions across the healthcare ecosystem.>
