A survey of more than 400 sponsors, CROs, and sites conducted by WCG CenterWatch reveals just how uneven AI adoption remains across clinical research, even as industry rhetoric has raced well ahead of implementation. The WCG CenterWatch 2025 AI Benchmarking Report, published this month, offers the clearest cross-sector snapshot yet of where organizations actually stand, what they are genuinely using AI for, and where the gap between aspiration and execution is widest. The timing matters: the FDA released its draft guidance on AI supporting regulatory decision-making for drug and biological products in January 2025, raising the stakes for any organization that has been treating AI as a pilot project rather than a validated process.
The adoption numbers circulating from other recent surveys put the gap in sharp relief. Data published in Applied Clinical Trials in June 2025 showed that as of late 2024, only 11% of nearly 80 companies surveyed had fully implemented AI or machine learning to support clinical trial activities, with another 22% reporting partial implementation. That means roughly two-thirds of organizations were still at the exploratory or planning stage, despite years of vendor promises. The CenterWatch report provides benchmarks that let individual organizations locate themselves within that distribution and, critically, identify which use cases are generating real efficiency gains versus which are still theoretical.
For sites and smaller CROs in particular, this kind of benchmarking carries a competitive pressure that is easy to underestimate. Large CROs have been committing capital aggressively: Parexel expanded a multi-year strategic partnership with Palantir in 2024 to deploy Palantir’s Foundry and AI Platform across clinical data delivery. Organizations without comparable infrastructure now face a choice between building internal capability, partnering with platforms that offer AI-enabled services, or accepting that certain trial types will migrate toward better-resourced competitors. The CenterWatch data gives that decision a factual foundation rather than a speculative one.
The single metric worth watching as this report circulates through the industry is the percentage of organizations reporting full AI implementation in protocol design and patient recruitment, the two functions sponsors consistently identify as their biggest cost and cycle-time drivers. If that number has moved meaningfully above 11% since late 2024, it signals genuine operational shift. If it has not, the industry’s AI conversation remains mostly a positioning exercise.
Source link: https://cms.centerwatch.com/insights/wcg-centerwatch-2025-ai-benchmarking-report/
Moe Alsumidaie, MBA, MSF, is founder and Chief Editor of Vanguard Publications, which publishes Clinical Trial Vanguard, Pharma Vanguard and BullScope, and Head of Research at CliniBiz. He has two decades in clinical trial operations and data science, with earlier roles at Genentech, Abbott Vascular and Stanford University Medical Center, and is a guest lecturer in clinical trial sciences at Rutgers University.
