Midyear 2026 Check-In: Megha Sinha on Pharma's AI Skills Gap

Access Part 1 of this interview on how digital twins run pharma supply chains but miss the regulatory execution needed to launch changes across market.

In part 2 of a 3-part interview, Megha Sinha, founder and CEO of Kolter AI, returns from earlier in the year to speak with PharmTech about how the industry has developed in the first half of 2026. She turns to the skills gap behind pharma's AI rollout. The orchestrator role, she says, has gained the most visible traction across the industry, but too often it's been title-deep rather than skill-deep. "People got called the orchestrators without being taught how to orchestrate or use the engine to help them," Sinha says. That gap has been especially stubborn in lifecycle change execution and geographic expansion, where no system existed to generate a plan for teams to challenge. "You cannot train a team to pressure test a plan for site transfer across 40 markets when no system generates that plan," she notes, arguing the absence of a tool, not a lack of training, hid the real problem.

Sinha says that is now shifting as pharma companies bring engines like Kolter AI into live programs, computing an entire cross-market change, including filings, label updates, and country-by-country implementation waves, before a single affiliate is contacted. Local teams then validate a computed plan rather than building one from scratch over months, a shift she frames as a change in the job itself, from constructing plans to interrogating them.

She also pushes back on industry timelines that place connected, cross-functional orchestration a decade out. "The connective tissue that everyone described as years away is exactly what we built," Sinha says, describing the missing piece as automated impact assessment spanning regulatory, quality, manufacturing, and labeling functions. Companies approaching Kolter AI, she says, aren't asking whether this kind of orchestration is possible after years of doing it manually. They're asking how quickly they can adopt it, which Sinha takes as confirmation that the shift from aspiration to operational reality is already underway.