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The Top Nine Technology Trends Reshaping Life Sciences Supply Chains
The Top Nine Technology Trends Reshaping Life Sciences Supply Chains

Forbes

time11-07-2025

  • Business
  • Forbes

The Top Nine Technology Trends Reshaping Life Sciences Supply Chains

Mike Walker is Vice President, Global Life Sciences Strategy, at Microsoft. Bringing paradigm-shifting digital innovations. From therapeutic complexity, FDA regulatory policy changes, geopolitical shocks and an AI race, life sciences supply chain leaders are forced to rewrite their playbook to stay relevant in the era of AI. Since my 2023 market outlook, the conversation has shifted from digital transformation to digital autonomy, whereby networks can sense, decide and act for themselves. I've pulled together the nine trends from my client engagements with the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, complemented by grounded analyst data, new surveys and live deployments. These trends set the agenda for the rest of the decade. Nine Life Sciences Supply Chain Tech Trends Traditional control towers relied on manually stitching together data and dashboards. That changes with agentic AI. Pharma clients that I advise are running AI agents to improve demand forecasting, optimize inventories and reduce lead times in real time. In McKinsey's 2024 State of AI survey, supply-chain and inventory management was the most cited function for material revenue gains from generative AI deployments, with 53% of adopters already seeing uplift. Second-generation twins fuse process historians, ERP signals and risk feeds, enabling a virtual knock-down of change orders before a vial is filled. AstraZeneca's World Economic Forum Lighthouse site in Sweden logged a 56% productivity jump after scaling line-to-network twins along with other digital solutions. IDC analysts estimate "that by 2027, 35% of G2000 companies will employ supply chain orchestration tools featuring digital twin capabilities, with the aim of boosting supply chain responsiveness by 15%." (Disclosure: AstraZeneca is a Microsoft client.) Since ICH Q13 became final in 2023, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) have moved CM from pilot to mainstream review to push the number of FDA-approved CM applications into the double digits. Shop floors are now AI-equipped with vision systems and autonomous mobile robots. For example, VisionNav Robotics' automated industrial vehicle forklifts enable CM in material handling through multilayer frame stacking, which improves efficiency. The CGT modality of drugs is evolving fast and requires even faster supply chains to move this living medicine from a single patient and then return it to that same patient. Market analysts put the CGT supply-chain and cold-chain segment at about $1.5 billion today but forecast it to reach $4.4 billion by 2034. Moving goods to a transparent, modular and trustworthy point-of-care solution turns a historically linear, week-long CGT supply chain into a high-velocity loop that keeps patients confident that the right cells arrive on time, every time. Leading pharma executives are treating optionality as essential among multiple tariff-agnostic sources as a strategic hedge. The pharma companies I advise are upgrading their digital backbone for increased tariff agility. GSK's CEO highlighted how diversified manufacturing footprints flatten the curve of tariff exposure, allowing the company to protect U.S. margins. Technology can mitigate tariff turbulence through the implementation of AI agents that continuously monitor tariffs, provide proactive what-if analyses and perform sub-second telemetry that can pivot production or sourcing before tariff costs hit the P&L. (Disclosure: GSK is a Microsoft client.) Pharma's next performance leap won't come from a shiny new robot; it'll come from tapping into all data sources. A "factory digital backbone' streams real-time shop-floor signals to AI agents that solve the operational issues that plague pharma. It's the nervous system enabling agentic AI to provide clean, trustworthy and continuous data flow for autonomous decision making in manufacturing. Eli Lilly, for example, is already turning raw telemetry into faster cycle times, higher yields and lower costs with predictive maintenance. (Disclaimer: Eli Lilly is a Microsoft client.) Nearly every high-growth therapy solution, from mRNA vaccines and CGTs to biologics like GLP-1, fails without a sustainable ultra-cold supply chain. Although forecast accuracy is important, a single temperature excursion can wipe out an entire lot in seconds and trigger shortages that no demand algorithm can undo. With increased focus on biologics and CGTs, temperature-controlled products grew 21% faster than non-cold-chain drugs between 2018 and 2024. Regulators are digitizing. FDA Commissioner Dr. Makary outlined a goal of cutting approval times 'from 10 to 12 months to just one to two months (paywall)' using AI decision aids. Companies that align AI models and DSCSA data streams early can turn compliance from a monthly paperwork sprint into a minute-by-minute digital handshake with faster approvals and an iron-clad audit trail. OT networks are vulnerable due to the amount of outdated technologies and the rapid digitization of factories that may open holes that didn't exist before. Gartner now warns that applications protected by public-key cryptography algorithms will be unsafe by 2029. NIST's final FIPS 203/204/205 standards give plants a certified toolkit for mitigating quantum computing risks. Why All This Matters Across all nine trends, one strategic mandate emerges: speed with trust. The winners of the next few years will run agentic AI on a real-time digital backbone with robust quantum-ready security. Understanding these trends will equip life sciences leaders with the knowledge to convert volatility into sustainable advantage. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

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