DeepIntent is expanding beyond its healthcare-focused demand-side platform with the launch of Cora, an agentic AI platform designed to bring market intelligence, audience planning and omnichannel advertising activation into a single workflow for pharmaceutical marketers.
The company says Cora allows marketers to interact with purpose-built AI agents using natural language rather than moving between multiple datasets and advertising tools. The platform is intended to support healthcare-specific tasks including audience development, campaign planning, activation and optimization.
The launch represents a broader shift in advertising technology toward AI systems that can participate in campaign workflows rather than simply provide recommendations. For pharma marketers, that distinction is particularly relevant because audience planning often involves healthcare, clinical and media data that must be handled within specialized privacy and compliance requirements.
Cora builds on DeepIntent Helix, the healthcare marketing cloud the company launched earlier in 2026. DeepIntent says Helix provides the data infrastructure behind Cora and is being expanded to incorporate payer and formulary signals as well as additional diagnostic data.
The platform also extends beyond conventional DSP functionality. DeepIntent says marketers can plan and activate audiences across channels, with an integration with VideoAmp supporting linear television planning and forecasting. That positions Cora as a planning and activation layer spanning more than programmatic media buying.
Another component is Cora’s collaborative workspace, which brings marketers, agencies and AI agents into shared project environments. The objective is to reduce handoffs between research, planning, activation and optimization teams while maintaining human involvement in approvals and campaign workflows.
DeepIntent reported that 95% of 275 customers surveyed during a closed beta said they experienced substantially faster research, planning and activation workflows, with reported time reductions of 50% or more. Those figures come from the company’s own beta survey and should not be interpreted as independently verified productivity benchmarks.
The strategic rationale reflects a difficult commercial environment for pharmaceutical launches. McKinsey has previously found that roughly two-thirds of new drugs in one historical sample failed to meet prelaunch consensus sales expectations in their first year. In more competitive markets, its analysis found that 60% of launches failed to meet prelaunch expectations.
That context helps explain why faster audience intelligence and campaign planning could matter to pharma marketers. But faster execution does not necessarily translate into better commercial outcomes. The value of an agentic system will depend on the quality of the underlying healthcare data, the accuracy of its recommendations, human oversight and the ability to demonstrate measurable campaign impact.
Cora is now available to DeepIntent clients through an open beta. Its launch gives healthcare marketers another example of how agentic AI is moving from experimentation toward operational roles in advertising, particularly in complex verticals where planning, compliance and data integration are central to campaign execution.
Market Landscape
AI in advertising is moving beyond automated bidding and optimization toward systems capable of assisting with planning, audience development and campaign execution. DeepIntent’s existing platform already combines healthcare-specific audience targeting, omnichannel activation and measurement, while its Helix cloud provides the underlying data infrastructure.
The healthcare market adds another layer of complexity because advertisers work with specialized patient and healthcare-provider data and must maintain privacy and regulatory safeguards. That makes the quality and governance of the data powering AI agents as important as the interface used to access it.
Cora also reflects the convergence of DSP functionality with broader marketing operations. By incorporating linear TV planning alongside programmatic and other channels, DeepIntent is positioning agentic AI as a layer across the media workflow rather than simply as an optimization feature inside a DSP.
Strategic Outlook
The most important implication is the potential reduction of fragmentation between research, audience strategy, media planning and activation. If agentic systems can reliably move between those stages, agencies and brands could spend less time translating information between disconnected tools.
However, healthcare advertising creates a higher bar for automation. AI-generated recommendations must be grounded in appropriate data and remain subject to human review, particularly when campaigns involve sensitive health audiences.
The competitive question will also shift from whether advertising platforms use AI to how much of the workflow their AI can responsibly manage. DeepIntent’s expansion beyond DSP functionality puts it into a broader competitive space spanning media planning, data intelligence and campaign operations.
Top Insights
- Cora brings agentic AI into healthcare advertising planning and activation.
- The platform extends DeepIntent beyond conventional DSP functionality.
- Helix provides the healthcare data foundation behind the new platform.
- VideoAmp integration expands planning capabilities into linear television.
- DeepIntent’s reported beta productivity figures are company-reported, not independently verified.
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