In this field, that is the only question that matters. The tools have changed since. So has the guidance. So has the model your team was taught to use carefully.
Most pharma organisations can name the month they trained their teams on AI. Very few can say what is left of it. Skill decay after training is one of the better-measured phenomena in organisational psychology, and the answer is not comforting. Accuracy-dependent capability erodes from the day the session ends. Past roughly ninety days of non-use, decay shows up consistently in the research – and cognitive, accuracy-dependent work goes fastest of all.
AI adds a second erosion on top of the first. Ordinary skill decay assumes the subject stays still while the person forgets. Aseptic technique does not change while you forget it. AI does. The model your team was trained to use carefully behaves differently now. The guidance has moved. Capabilities that did not exist when the training was designed are already sitting inside the interface your people open every day, untouched.
Which produces the condition we see most often, and the one nobody has a name for: capable teams, working confidently, from a version of AI that no longer exists. In most industries that is inefficiency. In a regulated one it is exposure – and confidence decays slowest of all.
1. When were your people last trained on AI? Not informed, not licensed. Trained. Month and year.
2. What has changed since then – in the tools they use, the guidance that governs them, and the techniques that were current when they learned?
3. Who owns keeping it current? Not the platform, not the policy. The working knowledge of the people doing the work.
If the third question produces a pause, that pause is the reason we wrote the paper.
On 1 September we publish The AI Capability Crisis in Pharma – the evidence on how quickly AI capability erodes in regulated environments, why the highest-value pharma workflows go first, what that exposes in a GxP setting, and what the functions getting this right are doing instead.
Eularis has worked on AI inside pharma since 2003. Dr Andree Bates has delivered AI programmes for the majority of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, with more than forty public endorsements from pharma executives.
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