Life sciences has a clarity of purpose that runs through everything it does. The work exists to improve lives. To get the right treatment to the right patient, to make a device that works seamlessly in someone's daily routine. To ensure that the science translates into outcomes that matter. What has changed is the scale and complexity of delivering on that purpose. The number of touchpoints has multiplied. The expectations of patients and healthcare professionals have risen. And AI is now reshaping how relationships across the entire ecosystem are built and sustained. The professionals recognised in this year's CX50 are the ones ensuring that complexity serves the mission.
Now in its eighth year, the CX50, produced by Marketing Week in partnership with Cognizant and Google Cloud, remains the UK’s definitive recognition of customer experience leadership.
In life sciences, customer experience has a direct line to patient outcomes. Every improvement in how a treatment reaches a patient, how a device integrates into daily life, or how a care pathway is navigated translates into something tangible for real people. The organisations seizing that opportunity are the ones investing now in the people, processes, platforms and data that allow AI to accelerate and personalise that delivery at scale. They are not waiting for the technology to mature. They are building the foundations that will define the next chapter of patient-centred care.
What this year's cohort demonstrates is that the most effective CX leaders in life sciences treat AI capability and AI governance as a single discipline, not two separate workstreams. Getting the technology right and getting the oversight, transparency and accountability right are not sequential steps. They are the same project, pursued together, because that is how AI delivers the trust and consistency that patients and healthcare professionals depend on.
AI is embedded across the life sciences value chain, spanning drug discovery, clinical development, connected devices, manufacturing quality control, and commercial engagement. Cognizant’s New Minds New Markets research, drawing on over 8,400 consumers across the US, UK, Germany and Australia, found that life sciences consumers score 11 points below the global average for AI inclination in the purchase phase.³ In the sector where the stakes of getting AI wrong are high, patients and healthcare professionals are the most cautious. That gap is not a problem to be managed. It is the central challenge every CX leader on this list is working to close. Trust in this sector cannot be bolted on after the fact. It must be designed into the architecture: transparent about what the AI knows, honest about what it doesn’t, and calibrated to stakes that include clinical outcomes. That bar is genuinely high, and the CX50 cohort is the group of people in the UK who are meeting it.
“The CX50 life sciences list reflects something we see every day working with the UK’s leading pharma and MedTech businesses: the organisations pulling ahead are not the ones experimenting with AI the most: they are the ones embedding it most thoughtfully. Customer experience in life sciences is becoming inseparable from how responsibly you deploy the technology behind it. These ten individuals understand that, and they are building for it.”
Rohit Gupta, Country Head, UK and Ireland, Cognizant
The agentic shift is the part most organisations are still underestimating. The AI capability that defines the next generation of life sciences CX is not on a roadmap. It is running today, in production, inside the companies that have moved from piloting to operating. AI agents are taking on active roles in R&D environments, designing experiments, generating hypotheses, running simulations. In manufacturing, AI systems are predicting failures before they occur. In commercial operations, AI is enabling personalised engagement with healthcare professionals at a scale that was not previously achievable.
The competitive logic is stark. A company that has built the right foundations brings a smarter device to market faster, generates richer real-world evidence, and iterates its commercial model while competitors are still assembling their last update manually. That is not a technology gap. It is a structural advantage, and it compounds.
As with many industries, data is the key to AI’s success. Success comes down to a few key things: whether the right people are in place to govern AI-mediated relationships, not just deploy them; whether processes have been redesigned for an agentic world rather than having AI layered on top of old workflows; whether platforms can orchestrate at the speed AI enables; and whether data from every device, every clinical touchpoint, every commercial interaction, connected, governed, and feeding back into the system in real time. The organisations best placed for the future are the ones that have built those foundations deliberately.
“According to our own research, 73% of healthcare and life sciences leaders are already seeing positive returns from AI within the first year. What separates them is not the sophistication of the technology – it is the quality of the data and infrastructure underneath it. The CX50 life sciences cohort are the people building that foundation, and the results speak for themselves.”
Google Cloud¹*
Read across the ten profiles and three directions emerge. The convergence of the patient and professional journey is accelerating, driven by connected devices, the shift toward value-based care, and patients who arrive at consultations already deeply informed. The CX leaders best positioned for the next decade are designing for both simultaneously. Real-world data is becoming a CX asset, not just a regulatory obligation: post-market signals are feeding directly into commercial engagement, and the mandatory activation of EUDAMED modules this year is pushing the whole market in that direction. And security has become a CX issue: a peer-reviewed analysis of FDA safety communications found that 94% of cybersecurity vulnerabilities flagged in medical devices are classified as high-risk.² A breach does not only create a compliance problem. It destroys the trust that everything else depends on.
At Cognizant, we work with life sciences organisations every day on the people, process, platform, and data dimensions of this transformation, helping them build the capabilities that allow AI to deliver real and lasting impact, not just proof of concepts. The ten professionals on this year's CX50 life sciences list are doing work that matters beyond the metrics. We are proud to recognise them.
Congratulations to the ten professionals who have earned their place in it this year. In a sector where experience directly shapes outcomes, that is worth celebrating properly. Find out more: https://www.cognizant.com/uk/en/cmp/cx50-2026
¹ Google Cloud, ROI of AI in Healthcare and Life Sciences, 2025. Full report: https://cloud.google.com/resources/content/roi-of-ai-healthcare-life-sciences
² Frontiers in Digital Health, Cybersecurity breaches in medical devices: analysing FDA safety communications, March 2026. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2026.1701551
³ Cognizant, New Minds New Markets: AI and the Customer Experience, 2025. https://www.cognizant.com/us/en/aem-i/new-minds-new-markets-ai-customer-experience
Cognizant is an official partner of the CX50 2026, produced by Marketing Week in association with Google Cloud. To find out more about Cognizant’s work in life sciences, visit cognizant.com/uk/en/industries/life-sciences-technology-solutions.
