AI made the draft fast. Sign-off is still the slow part.
Pharma and medical education teams can draft with AI now. Every piece still needs a named person to sign it, so the useful work is making that signature faster to give and easier to audit.
A medical affairs team can get a first draft in minutes now. The piece still goes through medical, legal and regulatory review before a doctor sees it, and that part takes as long as it did before.
So drafts pile up at review. In 2024, more than 150,000 promotional pieces went to FDA's Office of Prescription Drug Promotion, up 7.9% (FDA, 2025). Each of them had to clear a company's own reviewers first. When drafting gets faster, more pieces reach the same few people.
Where the time goes
Most of the wait is between reviews. A draft sits in a document while comments arrive by email, in meetings and in the review portal. Someone merges them into one version, then chases the next approval.
CME works the same way. An accredited provider or a clinician has to put their name on every course, and a reviewer checks each claim against its reference. Course drafts wait in the same gaps.
Why we don't let the model approve
It's tempting to let AI approve the routine pieces. We don't build that. In licensed work a person has to sign, and an audit asks who it was.
So the model drafts, checks and sorts. A named reviewer approves every piece.
What we build around the reviewer
- A check before review. Each draft is checked against your rules and references before a person reads it. Every claim links to its source, and anything the model isn't sure of is flagged.
- A queue with a name on it. Each draft goes to one reviewer, with a due date everyone can see.
- An approval log. It records who approved what, when, and which version they saw. It stays in your own accounts.
All of it goes into the tools your reviewers already use, so nobody has to learn a new portal to approve something.
Measure the wait first
Before you change anything, time the gap between review rounds. It's usually the slowest step, and it's the number that shows whether a new workflow helped.
Then run the workflow on live pieces, with the reviewers who will sign them. They keep every decision, and they spend less of the week chasing drafts.
There's more on our pages for pharma and biotech teams, CME and med-ed providers and human-in-the-loop workflows.
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