Trust as Pharma's Fastest-Rising Concern in Marketing Strategies

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Here’s why trust is now pharma’s fastest-rising worry

Published 15 June 2026. By Patrick Charlton, CEO, Buzz Radar.

We transcribed six years of pharma conference dialogue, 1.73 million words, and tracked which themes were climbing and which were fading. The fastest-rising is trust, and it is moving in the wrong direction at the worst possible time, just as consumers are pulling back from anything that looks AI-made.

If you want one number that explains where pharma marketing is heading, it’s this: on the conference stage, speakers from across the industry now talk about trust more than three times as often as they did two years ago.

We can be precise about it because we have transcribed and counted the lot. Buzz Radar has captured every NEXT Pharma Summit session from October 2020 to May 2026, 475 in total, counting how often each theme comes up and normalising to mentions per 10,000 words so the years compare fairly. Trust is the steepest climb in the set. And the thing driving the anxiety is AI itself, meaning technology that was supposed to be building brands up is also one of the biggest risk factors in the way those same brands are perceived.

What does six years of pharma conference data actually show?

Trust mentions sat at 2.95 per 10,000 words in 2024 and 5.11 in 2025. In 2026 they reached 9.64, more than triple the 2024 figure and the highest reading in the dataset outside the 2020 pandemic spike, when “trust” mostly meant trust in vaccines and the science behind them. Here is how that line compares to AI, the loudest theme in the room.

Source: Buzz Radar analysis of 475 NEXT Pharma Summit sessions, 2020 to 2026.

AI volume is near its ceiling. Trust is the line still climbing.

And it’s not just how often trust comes up that has changed, but how it is talked about. In 2023 the conference stage treated trust as something you accumulate, a brand asset to build steadily over time. By 2026 the language has turned defensive. As one Dubrovnik panellist put it, patients and doctors do not trust the industry with their data, and regulators are not ready for what that means. The room did not push back.

Trust and AI are rising together in the data, and they are not unconnected. The more the industry talks about deploying AI, the more the question of what that AI says, and whose interests it serves, follows it onto the stage.

Why is the public pulling back from AI just as pharma leans in?

Gartner surveyed 1,539 US consumers in late 2025 and found that half would rather do business with brands that do not use generative AI in their consumer-facing content. Sixty-eight per cent said they frequently wonder whether what they see online is even real.

It gets worse when you narrow to whether any of this shifts a purchase. Klaviyo’s research found only 7% of consumers trust a brand more when it visibly uses AI-generated marketing, while 31% trust it less. In health, MM+M puts distrust of AI-generated health information at 30%, up from 23% in 2023. Pharma is betting heavily on a technology its own audience is increasingly wary of.

Have HCPs already made AI their clinical front door?

The debate about whether doctors would embrace AI has been settled by the doctors. More than 80% of physicians used AI professionally in 2026, according to the American Medical Association, more than double the 38% who did three years earlier. OpenEvidence, a clinical-AI platform, recorded one million doctor-AI consultations in a single 24-hour period in March.

But the same survey shows what they are watching for. Patient privacy and the integrity of the doctor-patient relationship are physicians’ leading concerns, and 92% want more training before they lean on AI any further. These are people who have already built the technology into their working day and are still asking hard questions about whether they can trust what it hands them. That is the room pharma is marketing into.

Six years in

For six years pharma told itself the hard part was the technology. The data says the opposite. Capability is now cheap and everywhere. The part that is getting harder, and the part that cannot be automated, is trust: knowing what AI is telling people about a brand, and whose voice that brand’s audience still believes. It is also, as it happens, exactly what we built BRIANN to do: track what the AI engines are saying about a brand, map the clinicians an audience actually trusts, and show whether the picture is shifting. None of that is guesswork, and all of it is sourced. The companies that come through an inflection point well are rarely the loudest adopters. They are the ones who know what is actually being said about them, and by whom.

Patrick Charlton Published on August 31, 2026 12:36 pm