HBW Insight Podcasts

In the second part of HBW Insight’s interview with IQVIA Consumer Health’s Volker Spitzer, we turn to the commercial implications of agentic AI, and what they mean for how consumer health brands compete, communicate, and manage risk. Spitzer – vice-president, global R&D/RWE services at IQVIA Consumer Health – argues that as AI agents increasingly mediate product discovery and purchase decisions, the traditional marketing model faces a structural shift. Visibility, emotional storytelling, and share of voice do not disappear, but their influence moves upstream, into the evidence packages, product data, and formulation transparency that AI systems use to evaluate and rank products. Brands, in effect, will need to become legible to machines as well as consumers. We also chat about the uneven state of industry preparedness, the accountability questions that arise when AI recommendations cause harm, and whether the scale of current AI investment warrants caution. Spitzer closes with a realistic assessment of timelines, suggesting the full agentic model in consumer health is most likely a five-to-10-year transition, but one that companies would be unwise to treat as distant.

In the latest episode of HBW Insight's Over the Counter podcast, Volker Spitzer, vice-president, global R&D/RWE services at IQVIA Consumer Health, returns to examine the implications of agentic AI for the consumer health industry – a topic he and colleagues explore in a recently published white paper. Unlike the large language models now familiar to most consumers, agentic AI operates with persistent memory, cross-platform autonomy, and the ability to act on a user's behalf over time, functioning less like a search tool and more like a continuous personal health advisor. In the first of this two-part conversation, we discuss important questions, such as: Can AI systems can yet be trusted to guide health decisions reliably? What is the role of the pharmacist in this evolution of health information technology? Is the existing product-focused regulatory framework equipped to govern a technology that operates as a dynamic, personalized recommendation engine rather than a fixed promotional claim? Part two – published in two weeks’ time on HBW Insight – will address the commercial implications, including what the rise of agentic AI means for marketing strategy, industry readiness, and brand risk.