At the recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Orlando, Novo Nordisk’s Director of Field Systems, Frank Armenante shared his team’s transformative journey from traditional “2D analytics” to a deeper, fluid 3D analytics via Tellius’ AI analytics platform. Below are the key learnings from this insightful session to help you along your journey to unlocking business value with AI in the commercial pharmaceutical space.
Written by: Chris Walker,
Head of Product Marketing at Tellius
In This Post
Challenge: Data Overload in a High-Growth Environment
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Novo Nordisk experienced explosive growth for several of their products, generating unprecedented volumes of data. Their commercial execution teams—sales force, market access, and medical professionals—found themselves overwhelmed with information but lacking efficient tools to derive actionable insights that could help them engage effectively with healthcare providers (HCPs).
The existing analytics infrastructure presented several challenges:
❌ Inflexible. Legacy “2D analytics” was too close-ended, with predefined analysis paths.
❌ Long development cycles + missed opportunities. New reports/dashboards took 6-12 weeks to develop + deploy, by which time business opportunities had often passed.
❌ Lack of self-service. Field teams were dependent on home office analytics support.
Solution: A Strategic Approach to AI Analytics Implementation
Novo Nordisk partnered with Tellius to bring conversational, AI-powered analytics to their commercial operations teams, creating a bridge between their strategy and execution members to enhance field performance through:
✅ Deep, Flexible Adhoc Data Q&A. Natural language conversational interface to granular enterprise data.
✅ Rapid Answers + Actionable Insights. Users explore IQVIA data and other pharma data sources, create and share territory performance drivers insights directly.
✅ Modern AI-assisted Self Service Analytics. Non-technical Field leadership and home office team members now analyze HCP engagement patterns, prescribing behaviors, field team performance tracking and more–without long ques or waiting on the analytics team for answers.
Novo Nordisk’s commercial operations team is leveraging Tellius to drive self-service analytics, augment strategic business planning, and rapidly perform diagnostic analysis of performance drivers:
Rather than rolling out the platform company-wide immediately, they took a thoughtful, targeted approach.
In the initial pilot phase, Novo Nordisk deployed Tellius to 30 home office sales professionals. Based on usage and feedback, they course corrected to a more strategic user selection where they targeted directors, execution team members, and existing “power users” in the field who were curious about data and willing to try new tools. They then established a support system with proper expectations about the learning curve. A turning point came when a power user conducted an entire business review for the Western sales area using only Tellius. Regional directors and sales leaders with limited technical backgrounds were encouraged by the ease and speed of answering their own adhoc questions. The platform has had organic growth ever since going from that initial team to 100+ users in less than a year.
Outcomes — Strategy-Impacting Commercial AI Insights
Tellius has delivered significant business impact across Novo Nordisk’s commercial operations:
☑️ Time savings. Territory analysis that previously took a week now takes 10 minutes.
☑️ HCP targeting insights. Leveraging automated root cause analysis, Frank’s team was able to get to the key drivers of a business fall-off in an area by identifing that healthcare providers who received product samples showed the greatest growth, enabling more strategic targeting and sampling initiatives.
☑️ Market share impact: Frank pointed out that a 1% market share improvement for certain geographies translates to appreciable volume growth that impacts the bottom line.
☑️ Field productivity: Regional Directors and Area Business Managers can now create and share insights without waiting 6-12 weeks for reports from commercial operations teams.
☑️ User adoption + Leadership buy-in: 100+ engaged users across field leadership, with projections of 150-200 power users in the near future, while on the leadership side complete business reviews of entire sales areas conducted directly through the platform.
☑️ Patient impact: Beyond financials, faster insights translate to products reaching more patients more quickly.
Key Lessons Learned
Frank distilled his AI analytics journey success into three critical steps:
1️⃣ Find the right people. Identify users with the passion and mindset to embrace new analytics tools, rather than those stuck in traditional approaches.
2️⃣ Establish the right processes. Provide proper training, create a safe environment for learning, and ensure support systems are in place.
3️⃣ Choose the right technology. Select tools that can deliver both time savings and business growth like Tellius’s AI-powered self-service commercial pharma analytics platform.
Exploring Agentic Analytics in Pharma
Looking ahead, Novo Nordisk is excited about the evolution from AI/GenAI analytics to agentic analytics for their commercial teams. A few commercial pharma agentic analytics use cases Frank touched on include:
❇️ Automated identification of HCP targeting opportunities in territories where market share is declining
❇️ AI agents that proactively develop pull-through strategies and HCP engagement plans
❇️ Weekly automated analyses of territory performance delivered directly to field teams
❇️ Optimization of sampling strategies based on historical response patterns
❇️ Proactive identification of access barriers and formulary challenges
Parting Thoughts — Transforming Pharma Data into Commercial Action
Novo Nordisk’s experience demonstrates that successful AI analytics implementation in the pharmaceutical sector is as much about people and process as it is about technology. By finding the right commercial leaders, providing proper support, and selecting appropriate tools that integrate with their numerous data sources and existing 2D analytics (which Frank pointed out still have an important place), they’ve created a foundation for continued analytics evolution and agility.
The ultimate goal remains consistent: helping sales force, market access, and medical teams save time while driving business growth and improving patient outcomes. As Frank noted, “If you can give a salesperson 15 minutes early in the morning to get the kids off to school, or 15 minutes at the end of the day to go make dinner, that’s invaluable.”
By transforming their approach to analytics, Novo Nordisk is not only improving commercial operations, but they also drive positive patient outcomes by getting their products into the hands of more people. Leveraging AI, Novo Nordisk is boosting the quality of work and life for their field teams and driving commercial—a powerful testament to the human impact of AI when implemented thoughtfully in pharmaceutical commercial operations.
Want to learn more about how AI analytics can transform your commercial pharma operations? Schedule a personalized demo of our platform, including our latest agentic workflows.
