Strivenn founder named to Marketing Week CX50 2026 for life sciences
Dr Matt Wilkinson
Recognition lands as life science commercial teams move from adopting AI to building closer buyer understanding with it.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, June 11, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Matt Wilkinson, founder and CEO of life science marketing consultancy Strivenn, has been named to the Marketing Week CX50 2026 in the list's life sciences strand. The CX50 is compiled by Marketing Week in partnership with Cognizant and Google Cloud, and recognises the customer experience professionals setting the standard for the year ahead.
Wilkinson is one of this year's new entrants. He is recognised for nearly 15 years of work helping life science companies get closer to their customers and builds AI-powered representations of their buyers, so that customer insight drives commercial decisions rather than gathering dust on a shared drive.
The life sciences strand reflects a sector turning to AI precisely because of its demands for trust, precision, and accuracy. Relationships in this market are built over years, shaped by regulation, and held to a standard of dependability that few other industries require.
What separates the leaders
For Wilkinson, the difference between the teams pulling ahead and the rest is cultural rather than technical.
"The ones that are really starting to make a difference have an organisational imperative, not just top-down but enabling bottom-up learning," he says. "You need to build a safe space to explore, and you need to position AI as an accelerant for what we do, not a way to get rid of people. Teams need to feel that."
He frames responsible deployment in terms of brand.
"Brand equals trust. And if brand equals trust, then you can't undermine it by putting out incorrect information," he says. "You don't just need it to be faster. You need it to be dependable."
That standard, dependability over novelty, is what Strivenn's work is built to protect. Its synthetic customers are bounded by real buyer evidence, giving commercial teams a way to test messaging and strategy before it reaches the market.
A partner's view
"Cognizant is proud to partner with Marketing Week and Google Cloud to recognise the leaders shaping the future of customer experience in life sciences," says Rohit Gupta, UK and Ireland managing director at Cognizant. "In a sector where trust is non-negotiable and personalisation has never been more complex, the leaders on this list are doing something distinct: they are building with AI, not just adopting it. They are using it to rethink what a patient or practitioner relationship can be, and what it means to deliver experience that is genuinely individual, at scale."
Closer to the customer
For Wilkinson, the recognition points back to a single purpose.
"We don't just need to create more. We need to create better and get closer to the customer in the process," he says. "That's how we're going to help humanity progress."
About the CX50
The CX50 is selected by assessing each individual's achievements over the past year and across their career against three criteria: impact, innovation and influence. Candidates are drawn from Marketing Week and Cognizant's professional networks alongside independent research into organisations that perform highly on customer experience.
About Strivenn
Strivenn is a life science marketing consultancy operating in the UK and US, working at the intersection of AI, go-to-market strategy and commercial execution. Its work centres on synthetic customers: queryable, evidence-grounded representations of real buyers that help commercial teams test messaging and strategy before they reach the market. The guiding principle is synthetic for directional, human for decisional. Strivenn has been a HubSpot Solutions Partner since 2012. Founder and CEO Matt Wilkinson, PhD, MBA, holds a BSI ISO/IEC 42001 credential and is the author of the forthcoming book The Buyer in the Loop, with a foreword by Mark Schaefer. Learn more at strivenn.com.
Dr M Wilkinson
Strivenn
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