The New Era of Pharma Track & Trace: AI as Copilot, Not Autopilot

In mid-September 2025, the IPMMA's editorial team reached out to me after AltiusHub's impressive debut at Pharma Pro&Pack 2025. They wanted to know if I would be willing to write a contributory piece on AI in pharma track and trace, given what we have been building at AltiusHub and the conversations we have been part of as we work to challenge some of the incumbents in this space. I said yes, partly because the topic felt timely, but also because there is something I have been wanting to say for a while.

A lot of software vendors in the pharmaceutical serialization and traceability space are building AI capabilities that sound impressive and do very little. Not because the teams building them are not capable, but because the use cases are not grounded in the day-to-day realities of pharmaceutical supply chain traceability operations. They are designed to win a demo, not to solve a live compliance problem when it actually matters. That gap is worth talking about honestly.

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The AI question the industry keeps getting wrong

Every platform in the pharma serialization and compliance space seems to have updated its messaging in the last 12 months. AI-native. Agentic Orchestrations. Intelligent automation.

The language is everywhere. The substance, in many cases, is not.

A lot of vendors are claiming AI capabilities without seriously asking whether the use case has been designed for the realities of a regulated industry. In pharmaceuticals and lifesciences supply chain operations, every decision is auditable, every regulatory submission is accountable to a named entity, and the integrity of data is not negotiable. AI that does not start from those constraints will either create risk or quietly get abandoned by the teams it was supposed to serve.

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Where the conversation should actually head

The piece covers where AI creates genuine leverage in serialization, pharmaceutical traceability and compliance operations. The theme running through all of it is this: the most valuable AI in pharma will augment human judgment, not attempt to replace it.

The companies making real progress are not asking how much of the compliance process they can hand over to a system. They are asking where experienced compliance and supply chain professionals are spending time they should not have to, and building AI that addresses exactly that. That reframe changes what you look for in a pharma track and trace software vendor, how you evaluate an AI claim, and what success looks like in practice.

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Fundamentals to remember

There is one principle I keep returning to in any AI conversation in this space. Being fast and Being right are not the same thing in pharmaceutical compliance. Being Right requires regulatory knowledge, contextual judgment, and accountability. No system replicates that. The companies getting this right are building AI that makes the human in the loop more capable, not one that tries to remove them.

The pharmaceutical supply chain was built on a straightforward promise: every medicine reaching a patient is genuine, safe, and exactly what it claims to be. Delivering on that promise has always required both capable systems and accountable people. The best AI in this industry will honour both sides of that.

The full article is in the IPMMA's October–December 2025 magazine themed 'Artificial Intelligence - The Pharma Industry Disruptor'. If you are evaluating where AI genuinely fits into your pharmaceutical serialization or supply chain traceability operations, or trying to cut through the noise in vendor conversations, the piece goes deeper on the specifics.

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Read the full IPMMA PHARMA PRO&PACK issue →

(Page 66-68)