Inside Pfizer’s Digital Frontier: Tony Hogben on Leading Immersive Innovation

Tony Hogben is the Immersive Studio Lead at Pfizer Digital Omnichannel Services & Solutions (OSS). At the forefront of redefining how Pfizer engages with patients and healthcare professionals, OSS employs innovative digital strategies, advanced technology, and data-driven insights to deliver seamless, personalized, and impactful experiences. By integrating analytics, automation, and AI, the team enhances engagement, optimizes communication, and fosters meaningful connections across all digital platforms.

You’ve had an extensive career in digital innovation and immersive technologies. What sparked your initial interest in this field, and how did it lead to your current role?

My journey has been quite unconventional. After earning a degree in ‘New Media’ at the dawn of the digital age, I founded and operated my own digital agency. This was an exhilarating time, marked by the rise of Web 2.0, where we pioneered SAAS solutions and early mobile applications. Innovation was our daily mantra, with each project breaking new ground and driven by contagious entrepreneurial energy.

After selling my business just before the pandemic, I briefly enjoyed the downtime but soon craved a new challenge that leveraged my expertise. Joining Pfizer Digital allowed me to merge my creative vision with technical skills, leveraging nearly two decades of experience in digital transformation.

Building the Immersive Studio from scratch has been particularly fulfilling, creating an internal innovation hub to empower teams to harness immersive and interactive technologies. My current focus is on integrating AI solutions across various departments to help teams reimagine workflows and capabilities.

The most rewarding aspect of transitioning to healthcare is utilizing my passion for technology and human experience in a setting where our work has real-world impact. The precision, realism, and engagement we achieve through immersive technologies directly influence healthcare education and ultimately improve patient outcomes. This connection between technological innovation and human wellbeing fuels my passion daily.

Medical training is evolving with AI-driven simulations. How do these AI-powered experiences compare to traditional methods in terms of effectiveness and accessibility?

Immersive training experiences fundamentally reshape medical education by providing unmatched flexibility. Learners can revisit complex scenarios at their own pace, from virtually anywhere, and as many times as necessary. The evidence is compelling: knowledge retention rates for immersive learning can be up to 76% better than traditional methods*.

AI is transforming these experiences in four key ways:

First, in content creation, AI democratizes the development of high-fidelity simulations, speeding up processes that traditionally required specialized teams and months of work.

For learner experience, AI allows dynamic adaptation, adjusting scenarios in real-time based on decisions and skill levels, creating more realistic challenges.

On the feedback front, AI provides nuanced assessments beyond simple pass/fail metrics, analyzing movements and decision sequences to offer personalized coaching.

Finally, AI fosters collaborative learning through natural language processing and intelligent avatars for realistic patient and team interactions.

The accessibility impact is significant—AI-driven immersive experiences can be deployed broadly and cost-effectively, addressing training gaps globally and democratizing access to high-quality medical education, particularly in underserved regions.

*Bonde, Mads & Makransky, Guido & Wandall, Jakob & Larsen, Mette & Morsing Bagger, Mikkel & Jarmer, Hanne & Sommer, Morten. (2014). Improving biotech education through gamified laboratory simulations

Can you share insights into how AI-driven medical simulations are developed at your company? What are some challenges in building these high-fidelity simulations?

We are in the early stages of integrating AI into our approaches. While we have a clear vision, the regulated healthcare space requires methodical implementation and rigorous validation, creating tension between rapid innovation and careful progress.

Our AI efforts are focused in three areas:

1. Content Creation Acceleration: AI enhances our content development pipeline, enabling scalable production of evidence-based scenarios and clinical variations.
2. Technical Development Acceleration: AI streamlines our processes, enabling faster prototyping and deployment of new simulation features.
3. Learner-Adaptive Experiences: We are developing AI-driven simulations for more dynamic, responsive learning environments with personalized feedback systems.

While progress requires patience, we are excited about how AI innovations will transform medical training and patient outcomes.

Your 360-degree experience, virtual laboratory, is an innovative training approach. How does it work, and what feedback have you received?

The 360-degree virtual laboratory immerses healthcare professionals in a realistic lab environment, allowing them to interact with medical equipment, practice procedures, and solve real-world challenges.

This virtual lab complements in-person tours of working