Controlant: Powering the AI workforce in pharmaceutical supply chains

As pharmaceutical companies accelerate their journey toward AI- and data‑driven operations, one requirement consistently stands out: a trusted, AI‑ready foundation of high‑quality, compliant data. As the company’s CEO and CCO explain, this is where Controlant plays a critical role.

“Controlant does more than monitor shipments. We enable our customers’ AI workforce—their data scientists, operations teams, and emerging AI agents—to work faster, smarter, and with confidence in a regulated environment,” says Gísli Herjólfsson, Controlant CEO.

The Controlant platform brings together curated data across shipments, locations, products, excursions, and quality outcomes into a single, harmonized data foundation. Rather than exposing fragmented or raw telemetry, the platform structures and enriches data so it can be reliably used for analytics, automation, and AI‑driven decision making.

Controlant is inherently AI‑driven

“Our platform already combines real‑time IoT data with AI‑driven analytics, carbon footprint tracking, and GenAI‑powered recommendations to help customers reduce cost, improve quality, and accelerate decision‑making,” says Herjólfsson.

"We extend this even further with the ability to build Agentic AI solutions for our customers, as well as enabling them."

— Carsten Lützhøft, CCO at Controlant

Today, advanced analytics and geo‑spatial modeling help customers understand lane risks, packaging performance, and systemic supply‑chain weaknesses. As we move towards predictive analytics and prescriptive and agentic AI, the extent to which AI can not only predict outcomes but also recommend or trigger actions, is being determined largely by the extent to which our clients can share data. To that end, we have started combining other data sources with a new API to enable combining internal and external data sets.

Generative AI serves as a natural extension of our analytics suite, which provides customers with tailored insights and recommendations, while allowing them to set up smarter workflows.

A platform built to enable customers’ AI and machine learning

Controlant is designed to make its curated data directly accessible to AI agents. Through modern interaction patterns aligned with the MCP (Model Context Protocol), the platform exposes rich operational context in a way that AI systems can reason over and act upon.

This allows AI agents to ask meaningful questions about shipments, stability risk, excursions, and quality outcomes, and receive answers grounded in validated, GxP‑relevant data. The result is AI that understands not just data points, but the operational reality behind them.

“Controlant’s solution is designed to enable our customers’ own AI initiatives,” explains Lützhøft. “We provide enriched, curated analytics data models, so customers do not need to start by cleaning, structuring, and harmonizing raw IoT and shipment data.”

Conversational intelligence and agent collaboration

On top of the foundation, Controlant delivers conversational intelligence that allows users to interact with supply chain data using natural language. These conversational capabilities are designed to operate as part of a broader agent ecosystem.

By supporting agent‑to‑agent collaboration patterns, Controlant enables AI systems to work together across domains and platforms. This creates opportunities for coordinated intelligence, where insights and actions can flow between internal systems, partner platforms, and customer environments.

Pharma‑grade guardrails for AI innovation

AI adoption in regulated supply chains requires trust. Controlant’s platform is built with data integrity, traceability, and auditability in mind, ensuring that AI‑driven insights and automation align with GxP expectations and quality standards.

“AI innovation in life sciences cannot happen without trust."

— Gísli Herjólfsson, Controlant CEO

“Controlant provides the pharma‑grade guardrails that make AI adoption viable in regulated environments,” says Herjólfsson.

Our platform is built on validated quality systems and strong governance, including ISO 9001, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, and compliance with FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and EU Annex 11. Data is securely hosted within the EU on AWS, with comprehensive audit trails, access controls, and data integrity safeguards.

Enabling the next generation of supply‑chain intelligence

By enabling its customers’ AI strategies, Controlant frees teams from data engineering, reduces operational noise, and provides a validated foundation on which human experts, machine‑learning models, and AI agents can all collaborate.

“That is Controlant’s value as an AI partner: not just using AI internally, but empowering a scalable, compliant AI workforce across the pharmaceutical supply chain,” Lützhøft concludes.