Clinical Maestro at OCT Nordics 2025. Transform Procurement: Harnessing AI for Strategic Sourcing

The Next Step in Intelligent Sourcing

At OCT Nordics 2025, Anca Copaescu, Founder and CEO of Strategikon, delivered a compelling session demonstrating how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping clinical outsourcing, strategic sourcing, and vendor management.

Her presentation, “Transform Procurement: Harnessing AI for Strategic Sourcing,” moved beyond theory — showing how modern technology and structured data are transforming the way sponsors plan, source, and manage clinical trials.

“Our industry needs pricing transparency,” Anca stated. “We shouldn’t be guessing. We should be predicting, anticipating, and negotiating based on facts and data.”

From Vision to Application — Leveraging AI in Clinical Outsourcing

Anca’s talk focused on the real-world application of AI in clinical procurement. While AI is already driving progress in patient recruitment and safety monitoring, she highlighted that clinical outsourcing remains underdeveloped in AI adoption — largely due to unstructured data, inconsistent pricing frameworks, and legacy systems.

Clinical Maestro, Strategikon’s end-to-end clinical business management platform, directly addresses these challenges. Through structured data, automation, and embedded AI intelligence, the platform enables secure, private, and efficient sourcing operations — without external data exposure or hallucination.

It delivers:

• Accurate trial cost prediction through benchmarking and historical data.
• Automated RFP management and bid due diligence with side-by-side comparisons.
• Deviation detection across rate cards to ensure rate and scope compliance.
• Vendor performance oversight through metrics, governance, and risk tracking.

“Procurement is a fertile area for AI,” Anca noted. “When data becomes structured and standardized, it enables sponsors to make evidence-based decisions — reducing manual effort and improving financial predictability.”

Transforming Data into Strategic Advantage

At the core of this transformation is Maestro AI, Strategikon’s proprietary AI engine designed for clinical cost intelligence and sourcing logic. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Maestro AI understands relationships between study assumptions, cost drivers, and vendor activities.

Anca showcased how Maestro AI can:

• Generate and summarize RFPs in seconds.
• Compare and analyze bids automatically.
• Map CRO bid grids to sponsor formats with measurable accuracy.
• Deliver real-time performance insights and compliance tracking.

This functionality allows clinical procurement teams to shift from operational execution to strategic decision-making, supported by reliable, structured data.

Building Transparency and Compliance Across the Ecosystem

Anca also introduced Vision, Strategikon’s vendor management and oversight module, co-developed with a major pharmaceutical sponsor. Vision enables full transparency across the vendor lifecycle — from qualification and audits to performance monitoring and governance reviews.

With the growing focus on oversight under ICH E6(R3), Vision ensures compliance and strengthens accountability across complex outsourcing frameworks.

“Our goal is to make sponsors and vendors ‘superhumans,” Anca said. “AI doesn’t replace expertise — it amplifies it with data-driven precision.”

A Glimpse Ahead

Looking forward, Strategikon is extending its AI capabilities through Sira Sight, AI its sister platform ; the industry’s first AI-based solution for fair market value (FMV) assessment in clinical trial agreements. Supported by EU funding, CyraSite will provide standardized FMV insights and negotiation intelligence for sponsors, CROs, and sites, driving further transparency and efficiency in CTA negotiations.