Welcome back to Second Opinion, where this month we’re taking on one of the biggest buzzwords in business: data.

Take 100 leaders from every major industry in the economy and ask what they believe will be the biggest trend in the next decade, and almost all of them will say ‘data’ or ‘AI’. In fact if any of them don’t, we at Second Opinion would consider eating our shoes.

Certainly in the pharma world, data is set to be a crucial catalyst for commercial operations for the next five years. Keep reading to understand why it’s so important in this part of the value chain, and also how to move past the hype cloud to concrete next steps.