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Every pharma team is asking the same question, even if few say it out loud in meetings. Will AI take our jobs?
Some respond by signing up for every AI course they can find. Others wait and hope the dust settles by itself. Both reactions come from the same place: uncertainty about what work will look like once AI is part of everything.
On a recent episode of Pharma Talks, host Nataliya Andreychuk, CEO of Viseven, put the question directly to Karol Wolak, Global Omnichannel Lead at Merck.
Wolak has spent almost ten years at Merck working on customer engagement, from the early multichannel days to today’s omnichannel approach. Before that, he worked in consultancy, advising pharma clients on marketing and digital when digital was still something of a novelty. In his view, digital and omnichannel now cover nearly every pharma interaction: with HCPs, with patients, and with employees.
His answer to the jobs question is short. Its reasoning is more interesting.
Wolak describes himself as a fan of AI who stays critical of the hype. When he hears predictions that AI will replace everything and everybody, he admits he tends to smile.
“From my experience and observation, the answer would be very sharp and crisp: no. AI will not replace us, at least not now.”
He allows that this could change in the distant future. For the present, he sees two separate reasons: what AI is not suited to do, and what the technology cannot yet support.
That does not make him an AI sceptic. He is firmly against ignoring it.
“I’m not saying no to AI. We have to play with it, use it, test it, learn with it.”
The value of AI, Wolak argues, is resource optimization. It can take repetitive work off the plates of skilled people so they can spend their time on work that needs them.
In pharma, he points to back-office tasks such as content tagging, parts of the MLR approval process, and data collection. These are the areas where AI and data capabilities already make a practical difference. Viseven has seen the same pattern in its work on AI assistants that boost mobile engagement, where automation handles routine interactions so that people can focus on higher-value ones.
For marketing, medical, digital, and omnichannel professionals, Wolak sees the change as a shift in how the role works, not the end of it.
“It’s not about replacing us. It’s more about accelerating those roles, or augmenting those roles.”
The same logic applies to content development and content authoring. Automating repetitive steps gives creative and regulatory experts more time for the judgment calls.
If AI can handle more of the repetitive work, what stays with people?
Wolak names a specific set of capabilities: context, ethics, judgment, strategic decision-making, and empathy. He admits this is not a groundbreaking claim, but he believes it holds, especially in healthcare.
“There is a unique value of us humans when it comes to context, ethics, judgment, strategic decisions, empathy.”
Empathy matters in an industry that calls itself patient-centric. Earlier in the conversation, Wolak described the patient as the core stakeholder and said the goal of the industry is to help people improve their quality of life. That goal is difficult to hand over to a system that does not understand what a diagnosis means to the person receiving it. It is one reason patient engagement in pharma depends on people as much as on technology.
Regulation adds another layer. Pharma is a highly regulated field, and Wolak believes that calls for caution. In his view, AI does not currently have the qualities needed to carry that responsibility, and he expects those human strengths to remain valuable even as the technology improves.
The conversation then turned to an angle Nataliya Andreychuk said she had not heard from other guests. AI needs enormous amounts of data, and storing and processing it takes energy.
Wolak noted that even everyday prompting consumes energy. With global climate in mind, he believes this cost deserves a place in the conversation. He did not claim to know whether it will slow AI’s development, but he sees it as a factor worth weighing.
Nataliya Andreychuk pointed out that most discussions about AI focus on regulation and safety, while the planet’s limited resources rarely come up. For her, the question becomes one of balance: between what AI can accelerate and what humanity needs in order to thrive. Wolak agreed that this was exactly the point.
It is a reminder that sustainable AI is not just a technical topic. It is a business and societal one.
Wolak reads and listens widely on the subject, and one pattern stands out. In many leadership teams, AI has become the top priority. When a company evaluates a new tool or solution, the first questions tend to be whether it has an AI component and how AI could be used.
He does not dismiss this. Innovation cannot be avoided, and AI is powerful. But he believes it is risky to view it from a single angle.
“We just cannot perceive AI, or any other innovation or technology solution, from one angle.”
Time savings, cost reductions, and revenue growth are real benefits, he said. But they are not the whole picture. Organizations also need to ask what longer-term consequences will follow, and where people will fit in a more technology-driven world. Some, he noted, even consider AI potentially dangerous, depending on how it develops or evolves by itself.
That is why ethical AI and AI governance matter. They ask teams to look past speed and productivity and consider how these tools should be used.
For listeners wondering what to do next, Wolak’s advice is clear. Waiting is not a good strategy.
“I would definitely not advise just to sit and wait and observe.”
The reason is pace. He asked listeners to compare 2020 with 2026 and consider how much has changed in such a short time. Some people argue that little of real significance happened in the decades after the moon landing, but the speed of recent technological change is hard to dispute.
His recommendation is to stay curious. Follow trends, try tools, and learn by practiсing. But he is just as firm that this should not become an all-consuming activity. Reading about AI or testing tools all day is tiring, and nobody needs to do it around the clock.
“Navigate through our life with our eyes wide open.”
He also encourages people to accept that experiments will sometimes fail, and that learning something new takes time.
The mindset he recommends is practical. He warned against acting out of fear of missing out, noting that nobody can keep up with everything.
“We have to be clever, we have to be rational, but definitely open-minded and quite flexible.”
It is a message that fits workforce reskilling and lifelong learning: not a crash course in panic, but steady, curious, realistic learning.
The episode does not promise that AI will leave every job untouched. Wolak himself says the future is hard to predict. But his view for today is clear: AI works best as an accelerator, human judgment still matters, and the smartest response is to stay informed and adaptable instead of waiting or panicking.
If this episode resonates with you, follow Nataliya Andreychuk and Karol Wolak on LinkedIn for more conversations on where pharma and technology are heading.
And if you’re looking for ways to bring AI, content, and pharma industry expertise together in your own work, get in touch with our team.
