The pharmaceutical industry has spent decades learning to sell blockbuster drugs to millions of people. Now it is trying to figure out how to sell very small drugs to very few people — and an ad technology company thinks it has an answer.

DeepIntent, which helps pharmaceutical marketers like Bayer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson buy digital advertising, has introduced what it calls Cora, a platform that uses artificial intelligence agents to handle campaign planning through conversational commands. The company is positioning the product as a way for health care marketers to execute tasks that once required teams of people and weeks of meetings.

In beta testing, the platform reduced planning time by 50 percent, with more than 95 percent of clients reporting faster workflows, said Chris Paquette, the founder and chief executive of DeepIntent.

Mr. Paquette said the timing is not accidental. More than 100 medications are currently in early-stage clinical trials with the Food and Drug Administration, and many of them target conditions affecting fewer than 10,000 people worldwide. When those drugs reach the market, their manufacturers will need to find patients with considerable precision — a task that traditional media planning was not built to accomplish.

"We need to radically rethink the way that drugs are brought to market and commercialized," Mr. Paquette said. (The rethinking, it turns out, involves talking to a computer.)

The platform includes an integration with VideoAmp for linear television planning and connects to Helix, a DeepIntent application that provides aggregated health care data while ostensibly protecting patient privacy. Dave Leitner, executive vice president and head of media at Eversana Intouch, a DeepIntent partner, said in a statement that the platform enabled "smarter media investment decisions from day one."

Mr. Paquette acknowledged that the data powering the system may be more valuable than the artificial intelligence itself — a dynamic that has become familiar across the ad technology landscape. In building its advertising tools, he said, the company assembled "one of the most comprehensive data sets that is representative of what's happening in the healthcare market at any given time."

Whether the market for 10,000-patient drugs will support an entire advertising infrastructure remains to be seen. But DeepIntent is betting that the answer is yes — and that the infrastructure will need to be considerably smarter than the one that sold cholesterol medication to half of America.

Original story published in adweek.com: "DeepIntent Releases Agentic Ad Platform As Pharma Marketing Grows More Complex"