TLDR: Tarun Mathur, CTO of Indegene, highlights the critical need for strong guardrails to ensure the responsible and scalable adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) within the pharmaceutical industry. He stresses compliance, data privacy, and addressing emerging challenges as key factors for successful GenAI integration, noting Indegene’s initiatives like ‘GenAI@Work’ to embed an AI-first mindset across its workforce.
Bengaluru, August 10, 2025 – The successful and responsible scaling of Generative AI (GenAI) within the pharmaceutical industry hinges on the implementation of robust guardrails, according to Tarun Mathur, Chief Technology Officer at Indegene. In an interview with Sudhir Chowdhary of The Financial Express, Mathur underscored the importance of compliance, data privacy, and addressing the unique challenges posed by AI adoption in healthcare.
Indegene, a healthtech company based in Bengaluru, is at the forefront of developing GenAI capabilities aimed at accelerating drug delivery to patients while simultaneously reducing sales and marketing costs for pharmaceutical firms. The company offers a comprehensive suite of services, including digital solutions, commercialization strategies, and support for clinical trials, safety, and regulatory operations. Indegene reported a strong financial performance in Q1FY26, with revenues reaching Rs 760.8 crore, up from Rs 676.5 crore in Q1FY25, demonstrating stable and profitable growth.
Mathur noted that GenAI adoption in pharma has progressed significantly, with a diverse range of use cases moving beyond experimental stages into production. He stated, “Pharma has a diverse range of use cases where GenAI-backed transformation of existing processes could yield valuable business as well as patient, caregiver, and regulatory outcomes.” However, he emphasized that enterprises are still exploring new opportunities and that experimentation remains a continuous part of innovation, with leaders actively working on scaling solutions and managing the associated change.
Addressing the crucial aspect of responsible AI use, Mathur detailed the necessary guardrails. From a technological standpoint, he asserted that “governance is crucial.” This involves establishing standards for enterprise-specific guardrails, determining which models and technical frameworks to trust, defining deployment strategies, and ensuring observability around the AI agents. He also highlighted the increasing compliance requirements from global health authorities, stressing that building trust with GenAI necessitates systems designed for transparency, data provenance, and fairness. Furthermore, AI models trained on patient data must strictly adhere to data privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Looking ahead, Mathur identified two significant emerging trends. Firstly, he believes that “all information will be designed for natural language conversational GenAI,” leading to shifts in data and interoperability standards. He cited Microsoft’s NLWeb as an early indicator of this trend, which carries substantial implications for designing risk-mitigating and trust-establishing systems with robust guardrails in the pharma industry. Secondly, he pointed to the rise of “deep research enabled agents” that will drive innovation and complex process transformations, referencing recent product launches from companies like Perplexity and OpenAI.
Indegene’s commitment to the life sciences domain spans over 25 years, with experience working with the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies. Mathur explained that while GenAI is fueling pharma transformation, core issues like accuracy, compliance, safety, and change management remain bottlenecks. He affirmed Indegene’s unique position at the intersection of deep domain expertise and advanced technical competencies, stating, “We are dialing up investments in GenAI and investing in building a strong workforce.” The company utilizes its Cortex platform to build, test, deploy, monitor, and improve GenAI agents.
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To foster a GenAI-first mindset across its teams, Indegene has launched ‘GenAI@Work,’ a transformative program empowering nearly all of its 5,000 employees. This initiative aims to prepare the workforce for future-ready careers by training them to leverage GenAI for personalized solutions, enhanced customer engagement, workflow automation, and smarter decision-making. Mathur noted significant productivity gains from deploying GenAI within their core business processes. Additionally, the ‘Geniuses’ program provides formal training on advanced GenAI topics and offers hands-on mentorship and experience across various functions.
