IDC MarketScape: ZS named a Leader in life sciences R&D AI in clinical trials

EVANSTON, Ill., Dec. 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- ZS has been named a Leader in the inaugural IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Life Sciences R&D AI (Including GenAI) in Clinical Trials 2025 Vendor Assessment (doc # US53704325, August 2025). This recognition is seen as especially important as more life sciences companies pursue in silico clinical trials.

Why ZS was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape

Here are seven of ZS's strengths, according to the report:

1. Timely AI insights: "(ZS's) AI agent solutions provide real-time insights and decision support across diverse clinical functions."
2. End-to-end perspectives and solutions: "ZS brings to the table business advisory, domain consulting, and technology consulting, in addition to its AI accelerators to scale adoption and drive value realization."
3. Specialization and scale: "Over 90% of ZS's business is related to life sciences, enabling ZS to embed deep life sciences expertise in building out its AI accelerators."
4. Continuous improvement: "(ZS's) accelerators are progressively enriched to ensure that they remain relevant. ZS's business advisory and tech transformation teams help clients determine the right areas for automation and implement these solutions, leveraging ZS's AI frameworks."
5. Sustainable solutions: "ZS builds foundational AI components, and reusable accelerators that can be leveraged across multiple clinical trial applications, allowing clients to realize value faster while maintaining flexibility for future innovation."
6. Change management: "(ZS's) change management specialists help organizations embed these AI-powered solutions into functional workflows, ensuring adoption and scalability."
7. Scalable architecture: "ZS offers a scalable AI architecture framework, and comprehensive domain-rich ontologies and metadata frameworks that integrate structured and unstructured data, enhancing model accuracy and operational efficiency."

The IDC MarketScape also noted, "ZS offers a wide range of GenAI capabilities across the clinical trial value chain, including site selection, patient engagement and retention, statistical analysis, pharmacovigilance, clinical data management, risk-based quality management, real-world data analysis, automated document generation, document extraction for generating competitive intelligence, biomarker identification, and clinical trial supply chain." The report went on to say, "ZS reports that its AI models achieve 80%–95% accuracy, depending on the complexity and the risk associated with the use cases, and a 5%–20% improvement in the rate of generating novel insights."

"ZS's more complex AI/GenAI in clinical trials technology implementation engagement involves helping a major pharma develop a next-generation gen AI platform, as a centralized capability hub for clinical trials," the report continued. "This platform will enable the digitization and standardization of clinical data and documents, will provide AI-powered knowledge assistants to provide comprehensive insights, and will use natural language-driven analytical tools for exploratory analysis and literature synthesis. It is also designed to support AI-driven clinical document authoring for regulatory and scientific reporting. ZS forecasts $25 million in savings through this initiative."

"ZS reports that its AI models achieve 80%-95% accuracy, depending on [complexity and risk], and a 5%-20% improvement in the rate of generating novel insights."

Client perspectives from the IDC MarketScape

The report includes detailed client testimonials describing ZS's collaborative approach and leadership in AI adoption. Here's what two leaders had to say:

Senior director, IT for global drug development, major biopharma company: "ZS's strength, in general, is that its leadership is very strong. They put their attention and focus on an initiative and they provide a lot of guidance to their team members to ensure that the solution is being implemented with best practice. It's the proactiveness and the problem-solving that I really appreciated. It's a very special team that I am currently working with. I would definitely highly recommend ZS."

Director, AI-assisted clinical operations, R&D IT, major pharma company: "They don't tell you what you want to hear. Their strengths are innovation, entrepreneurship, bringing thought leadership into a discussion, accountability and transparency. They are doing a great job with both strategy and execution, though strategy is definitely their strong point."

Delivering real-time insights and scalable AI for clinical development

The report noted, "[ZS] also has partnerships with AWS, Medidata, Snowflake, Appian, Databricks, Informatica, Veeva, and Salesforce."

"At ZS, we're reimagining drug development as an AI-enabled end-to-end digital process so we can help clients accelerate breakthroughs and improve life and how we live it," said Aaron Mitchell, ZS's global R&D solution area lead. "We believe being named a Leader in this IDC MarketScape assessment recognizes our commitment to helping our clients develop an AI-native workforce, embed AI across clinical trial workflows and bring them closer to a future with in-silico clinical trials." 

The report's ultimate goal is to provide life sciences companies with information they can use when selecting an R&D partner to deliver AI solutions, support implementation and leverage AI in clinical trials. It concluded:

"Consider ZS Associates when you are seeking to partner with deep life sciences domain expertise, with a clear focus on enabling digital data flows, and a strong footprint in implementing AI/GenAI in clinical trials, in niche areas such as site selection, patient recruitment, and document authoring, consulting expertise in AI enterprise wide implementation strategy, supported by ZS's own AI frameworks and reusable AI accelerators, an innovative, problem-solving mindset, and a core ecosystem of partnerships."

About IDC MarketScape:

IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each supplier's position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of technology suppliers can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective suppliers.

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