This we set out to do by ensuring 100% legal compliance at the lowest possible cost (which is, one way or another, billed to patients). Our tech solutions are crucial for this. Automation and AI is no longer the future of pharmacovigilance; it is the present.

Routine PV tasks across the full pharmacovigilance system can be completely automated, together with real application of AI. With the 2025 version of Tepsivo OnePV, we’re already very close to complete automation of everything that is routine in PV. So, it’s about time we start paying closer attention to the long-term effects of our disruption.

As our end-to-end PV solutions are going mainstream, and some people have started following our lead, we need to now ask the question: once we’ve moved the industry to the modern day and automated away all of the routine PV work, what will happen to all the current pharmacovigilance jobs?

From the technology side, at least with Tepsivo OnePV, the solution is already here. People in PV no longer need to spend their time with administrative work.

This argument cannot be understated. Any keen observer and anyone who’s worked in pharmacovigilance knows that the administrative component of traditional PV jobs is in fact the vast majority of it, and in most cases, the job itself. This isn’t true of course of every job in PV, and many senior PV experts play important executive roles. But even for them, this is likely after putting in long years of manual (keyboard-typing) grunt work.

Given how many passionate life-sciences degree holders and others wish to genuinely contribute to patient safety, their allocation to mundane admin work seems like a gross misplacement of their talent. That is, after all, a key reason why we started our disruption 5 years ago, removing needless mundane work with our solutions from day 1 and allowing scientists to do science.

In 2025, as our solutions take their place in the market and many competitors look to adopt our vision, the way I see it, it’s now a question of how fast automating away all admin PV work will be adopted across the whole industry and what that will actually mean for the labour market in pharmacovigilance.

Effect On Jobs

Broadly speaking, there is of course an ongoing debate about the impact of AI and automation on people’s jobs and whether these will be needed in the future. 

Perhaps contrary to the hype, there seems to be little evidence that AI is indeed taking jobs away from people in large numbers. This is true of the seemingly most vulnerable “information” sector, under which pharmacovigilance falls. Generally, rather than replacing the “white-collar” workers from the workforce entirely, AI seems likely to empower them to be more productive at their role.

Enhancing “white-collar” jobs with better productivity is likely one of the salient impacts of AI on our daily jobs now and in future. My best guess on why artificial intelligence is not yet taking away “information” jobs in large numbers is that it is only temporary, with the larger disruptive effects on labor markets already in motion but yet to take hold. 

Furthermore, as AI can help existing white-collar workers be more effective and no longer require low-level support, the trends may not bode well for those entering the workforce in the near future. Some prominent leaders in AI are already raising alarm bells on the effect of graduates’ employment chances, including a warning that AI can wipe out half of all entry-level jobs.  

So, the possibility that people will indeed lose jobs is not insignificant and worth taking note of. Whether that is positive or negative is not up to us, but society and politics at large. For clarity, this post does not have the ambition or any intention to go deeper into the larger topic of what work generally should look like in the future, if any should even exist, and how the governments should or should not react, perhaps with economic propositions such as universal income. Let’s leave that for someone else.

These are just a few limited angles on the topic, and only touching the surface. There are a great number of scenarios for the future and it’s anyone’s guess what really will happen. Diving any deeper into these subjects and a plethora of others related to the effect on automation and AI on the workers would take so many hours that the author of this text won’t have much left to run the PV company, just to produce this blog post. So, let’s stop there.

Instead, indulge me in pondering about what the upcoming changes could mean to the people working in pharmacovigilance organizations as these are naturally people close to us, or actually, literally “us”.

Effects Today

Briefly, let’s look at some of the angles from the previous section. Here we’re using real-life examples closest to us: Tepsivo OnePV.

This should be a resounding yes. As we can see first hand in our own Tepsivo OnePV, our inhouse software, now empowered by AI, takes care of the vast majority of the routine PV process whether that’s case processing, literature review, reconciliation, or overall PV system management from A to Z. 

All of the mundane administrative work is already unnecessary. That means that the Tepsivo PV specialists and anyone connected to our solutions, such as pharma companies’ internal EU QPPVs can already spend their time on value-added tasks instead. 

Those may be the more scientific work behind evaluating signals, more strategic incorporation of the global PV system within an organization, communication with authorities, or – in the case of providers – more dedicated customer support, among others.

Broadly speaking – PV scientists can now focus on what matters: science.

This is also quite likely given the industry-wide trends in pharmacovigilance where most PV companies, and typically providers, hire recent graduates to do grunt work. If that grunt work is no longer needed as we automate away all of the admin overhead, will there be any room for newcomers to the industry?

In our experience, that is still a yes. The main difference is that the entry-level jobs will simply no longer be low value-added, boring work, but instead more engaging and science focused. What we’ve seen in the industry is that years of experience as a factor alone is typically not the most telling. Quite often, you can find great talent among the 25-somethings far outperforming the “veterans”.

So, most likely, there will still be room for newcomers into pharmacovigilance. More limited in job offerings, but a lot more engaging. The PV career will now allow fresh pharmacists or MDs to meet their excitement about work in patient safety and science.

In the past, the number of people who, with a fresh life-science degree, jumped into work in pharmacovigilance to help protect patients only to face a hard disappointment in finding out their work for years to come is basically an admin assistant, is probably beyond count. That will no longer be the case and only the most skilled will occupy new PV positions.

So, starting a career in PV will now really enable passionate life-science degree holders to truly contribute to patient safety from the early days of their work life.

At least to some extent, this is quite likely. Ultimately, pharmacovigilance will return to what it was meant to be (science), before it took a wrong turn and largely became an “information” job. AI will also likely create new jobs within PV; much like in most other industries, with new demand for data scientists, people to “manage” AI agents, etc. Tasks that do not require much skill will be otherwise automated. 

At this stage, it’s an impossible task to calculate with any accuracy how many jobs will be left unneeded entirely, but it is a fairly safe bet to say that, in the coming years, the total number of jobs will decrease.

So the total number is likely to shrink, but the jobs that are left will be engaging, scientific, and overall value added.  

Let’s see what else can happen in the long run.

Long-term Effects on PV Jobs

There is no clear statistic on the total number of jobs in pharmacovigilance, but for approximation, LinkedIn shows over 260,000 results of individuals you can find with the keyword “pharmacovigilance”. That is imperfect, with LI not being a validated labor market dataset, but for the lack of availability of anything better, let’s say that is a conservative estimate. In each case, it suggests there is a high number of people whose jobs can fundamentally change in the not too distant future. 

We are futurists and, quite obviously, advocates of automation and AI, so we believe the disruption in PV is going to bring value for the society, while it probably reshapes the labour market in pharmacovigilance. 

If done right, the potential reshuffling of the labor force in PV can have very positive effects, not least on what PV was meant to do in the first place: looking after patient safety.

Below are some scenarios of what can happen once we, and companies who follow our lead, will have automated the vast majority of routine PV tasks across the industry.

For clarity, this is nowhere near a complete list. After all, the future is anyone’s guess.

PV jobs in regulatory agencies will become dream jobs

Regional and national regulatory agency jobs can become more competitive and sought after. 

Without passing any judgment on whether such work is already a dream job for some just by its nature, it is not a far stretch to argue that these are not typically the most sought-after positions, either due to typically lower compensation than industry or due to its heavily administrative character that is natural within a governmental body (especially in the EU, bureaucratic institutions are not known for their efficiency, to put things mildly).

In such an environment, it is also not out of place to speculate that these organizations are not the likeliest places to attract the best talent from the job markets. 

Assuming the elimination of mundane tasks seeps into the work of agency PV staff, they can replicate what we have enabled for the pharmacovigilance staff within our Tepsivo system: give them time to focus on scientific work. 

This can make the agency jobs a lot more fulfilling as well as better compensated with presumed cost cutting through removal of mundane admin (should the bureaucracy allow for it). 

Ultimately, this would lead to tougher competition on the regulatory side, which should only bring about further efficiencies and quality of work in monitoring the benefit-risk profiles of medicinal products. At the least, it should further remove the burden on MA Holders and the industry at large by concentrating the PV monitoring within one central place. 

On the flip side, any such centralization can naturally cause the risk of higher bureaucratization of the industry with the agencies more strongly imposing themselves and ultimately possibly creating new rules to dictate to pharma companies in order to cement their own position in the field. Whether this cycle has already happened in the past is perhaps worth thinking about. Either way, bureaucratization polemics is not within the scope of this post.

But then again, if regulatory agency jobs become some of the most sought after in the industry, it is more likely that one way or another, it will lead to a more efficient system that works for its end-users: patients. 

Such a move can lead not only to better monitoring for products on the market but, crucially, to faster approval for functioning medicines if regulatory bodies become more effective and find ways to streamline the path from discovery to market.

Closer Look At New Medicines

By and large, pharmacovigilance obligations apply to any MA holder or sponsor regardless of the medicinal product in question. Once on the market, certain drugs require extra monitoring with additional risk minimization measures such as a “Post Authorization Safety Study” that result in extra effort and closer scientific attention. But, with a holistic look at the industry, this applies to a fairly small number of licenses and, therefore, companies. So, only a small portion of the total PV obligations across the industry is actually dedicated to innovative medicines.

That means that the vast majority of PV tasks, and therefore jobs, still revolve around routine activities to meet regulatory obligations on well-established medicines whether that is at the level of a MA holder, their PV vendor, or the regulatory agency overseeing them. 

Does that sound right? Shouldn’t we ensure, first and foremost, that the brightest minds dedicate their time to sufficiently, but also timely, reviewing the safety profiles of new drugs and continuing to monitor them once approved? 

With the PV disruption (that we’re spearheading), removing massive chunks of human workload on pharmacovigilance for well-established drugs will enable more focus on the innovative medicines, ensuring they are truly safe to be used but also ensuring they are faster brought to market to those who need them.

People Move Outside of PV

Arguably, there are many highly qualified and immensely talented people educated as pharmacists or medical doctors who were attracted to jobs in pharmacovigilance by its presumed high-minded role in society to save patient lives, only to learn that the vast majority of their day is purely administrative and mostly completely unnecessary. PV’s role in society is to potentially help save patients’ lives but in reality most PV jobs today have very little to do with that.

As we change this and remove the needless routine PV activities and, therefore, these jobs, such talent will either move to the scientific part of PV, or will start to look for other opportunities in different fields and presumably seek innovation of their own, perhaps even in fields yet unknown. This is of course one of the larger arguments of the AI “revolution” and its effect on jobs. It should apply here, too. 

Now, do we claim that such talented people capable of genuine innovation need us to remove the administrative work, so they can go out and start thinking up new things? Of course not. Likely, this has already been happening with or without automation, but we all know how easy it is to get comfortable in your own job once you’re in it and it is fairly safe to argue that there are still great many talented individuals stuck in mundane PV activities who could use the nudge to move elsewhere.

If those admin jobs are gone and they can choose to compete for the value-added scientific work in PV or start looking in different fields, many more will choose the latter. Either way, likely benefitting the society a lot more than continuing to fill out endless trackers with data that can already be fully managed through automation and AI, among many other things.