Pfizer at Forrester CX Summit: How every inch of insight matters

Inside Amsterdam's historic Beurs van Berlage, the auditorium was packed with CX leaders who had lived the problem Grace de Athayde, Journey Ecosystem Lead at Pfizer, was about to describe. The slide behind her named the pattern: teams duplicate work, critical insights are missed, actionable opportunities die on slide 102 of a deck that costs the organization $250k+.

In pharma, that problem is amplified by an extraordinarily complex ecosystem of caregivers, healthcare professionals, nurses, suppliers, partners, and internal teams, all of whom play a role in whether patients receive the treatment they need.

"A common situation in large organizations," Grace told the audience, "is to have research and personas and journeys spread across different OneDrive folders. And when you need to actually act on those insights, it can be hard because you don't know if the primary research was from this year or last year." 

Grace joined Pfizer two years ago as Journey Ops Lead, a role that has since evolved into Journey Ecosystem Lead in the organization’s Commercial AI Accelerator. Early on, she saw a familiar problem shared by most large organizations: teams invest in journey mapping without ever reaching journey management.

Pfizer had that same problem. Years of research, hundreds of journey maps, and countless customer interviews existed across the organization. But when teams needed to make a decision, they often couldn't find what they already knew, or trust that it was still current. Discovery work revealed field reps copying and pasting across 20 different tools just to connect medicine to patients. So teams did what was easiest: they started over. "We have new initiatives that trigger new primary research," Grace said, "when we are basically surfacing things we already knew."

Clearly, the challenge wasn't generating more insight, but instead, making existing insight usable. So she posed a question: Instead of producing maps and insights that informed workshops but rarely changed how the business operated, what if everything — the research, the data, the work itself — was organized around the customer experience?

That question became the foundation of what Pfizer built: an operating system for turning customer insight into coordinated action. And that was the story she brought to share with Forrester CX Summit attendees in Amsterdam.

The why behind the work

Before Grace showed a single patient journey map, she played a Pfizer film that aired during the Super Bowl with the company’s mission as its premise:  Life is won in inches. Breakthroughs don't arrive all at once; they come from thousands of small advances that compound over time. The company is working toward eight cancer breakthroughs by 2030, and every day brings decisions that could help or hinder that progress. That's why Grace's story wasn't really about journey management.

At one point, she described stepping away from her desk to get a coffee after spending hours immersed in oncology journeys. "Just getting in touch with the experience people are going through, the worst of their lives," she said. Somewhere inside those journeys are people waiting for diagnoses, navigating treatment, managing uncertainty, and hoping for more time, she explained.

Viewed through that lens, the problem Grace was trying to solve goes deeper than journey mapping or management.  It’s about making sure the right insight reaches the right team in time to make a difference.

Year 1: Getting out of the building

"Sometimes we get to our ivory tower, and we are very safe there," Grace told the audience. "We need to get out of the building. Work with the business teams, see what the struggles are, and actually work evidence-based."

For six months, her team worked with market teams across Pfizer's international commercial organization to test a simple idea: what happens when journeys stop being deliverables and start becoming a shared way of organizing work?

Instead of creating journey maps that sat in presentations, they brought research, insights, opportunities, and actions into one place. Business stakeholders were involved directly. Teams reviewed journeys together, discussed what the evidence told them, and used that information to prioritize next steps. The goal was to make existing knowledge easier to find, trust, and act on.

Before each pilot, the team interviewed country CEOs. Afterward, they interviewed them again to understand whether the approach was actually helping teams make decisions. Grace recounted a response from one of the CEOs in the Nordics, who said, ‘'We've been trained in journey management for four years. This is the first time we've actually made progress. And we made progress in less than three months.' His response underlined the value of giving teams a shared view of what was happening, where the biggest opportunities were, and what should happen next.

The pilots proved that Pfizer needed a better way to use the insight it already had. Once journey information became part of how teams planned and prioritized work, leaders stopped treating journey management as a CX exercise and started using it as a decision-making tool. Journey prioritization moved from a once-a-year activity to a quarterly one. Teams could continuously identify opportunities, align around priorities, and act on what they were learning.

The first groups to go through that cycle are now seeing the results. Grace couldn't share the numbers, but she was clear about the cause and effect: "That insight they had in the opportunity of prioritization one year ago," she said, "they are now reaping the rewards."

Year 2: From pilot to operating model

The pilots proved that journey management could drive better decisions. The second year was about making that way of working repeatable. The team and its work moved into Pfizer's Commercial AI Accelerator. By then, this was no longer just a CX initiative. It was becoming part of how the commercial organization planned, prioritized, and operated.

Teams began organizing around journey phases rather than traditional functions. For field representatives, that meant structuring work around the reality of their day: preparing for conversations with healthcare professionals, managing follow-ups, and staying current on patient needs across a therapy area.

As the model spread, information started moving differently through the organization. Research that had once been buried in reports became reusable. Insights surfaced across teams instead of remaining trapped within them. New joiners got up to speed faster because the context already existed. It was organized and accessible.

The impact showed up in the pace of decision-making. Insight-to-decision cycles came down from one year to two weeks, Grace reported. Pfizer had built a system for continuously turning signals into action. The journey became the context layer that connected four movements:

• Sense: Continuously gather signals from patients, healthcare professionals, field teams, market research, and operational data.

• Decide: Use AI-driven recommendations within human-defined guardrails.

• Act: Coordinate action across teams and functions.

• Learn: Feed outcomes back into the system so every cycle becomes smarter than the last.

At the time of the presentation, Pfizer was managing more than 400 journeys across business units, updating them daily. The team had delivered 53 solutions, each traceable to a specific insight in the system, and reduced insight-framing time by 90% through AI-assisted workflows. In just two years, journey management had evolved from a practice into an operating model.

How the work actually runs

Pfizer's scientific DNA shapes how the team handles data at every step. "Science will win" is one of the company's core principles, and that rigor extends to how insights enter and move through the system. Interviews are conducted, findings are anonymized, insights are extracted, reviewed, and approved collectively. Nothing enters the system casually. That structure matters because AI is only as useful as the context it can work with.

Working with TheyDo, an experience context platform, Pfizer has been developing AI agents that help organize and maintain journey context at scale. Grace pointed to a simple example. Rather than relying on traditional user stories, the team uses job stories because, as she put it, "context matters more sometimes than the roles of who is doing certain things."

The agents handle the mechanical work: structuring information, connecting journeys to insights, and preparing material for journey reviews. The team still provides the judgment. "We've been able to speed up what I call journey management readiness," Grace said, referring to the point at which a journey contains enough evidence, context, and organizational alignment to be actively managed. The goal isn't to replace human decision-making. It's to remove the assembly work that slows decision-making down.

The tipping point

For months, progress came in small increments. The team continued to build journeys, run ceremonies, train stakeholders, and create new ways of working until something finally shifted. "For a long time, we saw minimal change," Grace said. "And now it's just blowing up."

Teams began learning from one another. Research became reusable rather than being recreated. Insight cycles shortened. New knowledge stopped living inside individual projects and started benefiting the broader organization. "Every new learning, every coordinated action, every inch compounds," Grace said. That, she told the audience, is the reality of transformation. It accumulates slowly, often invisibly, until the organization reaches a point where progress accelerates on its own.

Her advice to practitioners was direct: get out of CX land as early as possible. Don't spend years perfecting taxonomies before proving value. Let the structure evolve with the teams using it. Think like a startup with a short runway. And lead without authority by building something so useful that people choose to engage because they can see the benefit.

At the start of her talk, she had shown a film about the fight for inches: small advances, tiny gains, progress that compounds over time. By the end, the same logic had played out across two years of work at one of the world's most complex organizations. "It's not about the maps. It's about building the operating system that connects patients to breakthrough truths that can save their lives."

Every inch. Every moment. Every day. Matters.

Grace de Athayde presented "From Mapping to Managing: How Pfizer is Making Journey Management Operational" at Forrester CX Summit in Amsterdam on June 9, 2026.