Foresight & AI Strategy

Will people still wear perfume in 10 years? Will they still walk into pharmacies?

Real foresight starts where the data ends.

Sectors Pharma · FMCG · Retail
Citizenship European Union
Languages EN · PT · IT · ES
Status Open to permanent EU roles
Selected experience across
Heineken Philip Morris International Grupo Boticário UCB Biopharma
01

About

A note from Patrick
Patrick Sobral

I run foresight, AI strategy, and innovation governance programs for senior leaders facing technology bets without obvious answers. The work is rarely about the technology itself.

AI in regulated healthcare. The next generation of beauty. Governance across hundreds of digital product teams.

I lead the work of navigating uncertainty and exercising systems thinking to decide what to build now.

Eight years across pharma, FMCG, and retail. Engineering shaped my thinking. Four languages give me range. Consulting independently while I find the right permanent role.

Education
Chemical Engineering, UERJ
MBA, USP
Career Track
Heineken · GSK · Philip Morris
Grupo Boticário · UCB Biopharma
02

Practice areas

How I work
i.

Strategic Foresight

Long-term scenario planning, megatrend analysis, and structured frameworks for executive R&D and technology investment decisions under deep uncertainty.

ii.

Innovation Governance

Tech radars, prioritization frameworks, and governance models that help senior leadership choose which emerging technologies to adopt, when, and why.

iii.

AI Business Strategy

Picking which AI bets are worth running. Designing the experiments that test them. Building the adoption roadmap that protects the brand and shows measurable commercial value.

03

Selected work

Six projects
Strategic Foresight

Four scenarios for digital therapeutics, on a 10-year horizon.

UCB Biopharma · Global R&D Strategy

UCB needed a defensible framework to prioritize R&D investment under deep uncertainty about how AI will reshape healthcare. The brief was a single question: how will AI reshape healthcare consumption in the next 10 years?

Leading the foresight methodology across a UCB and Bakery team, we built a Python script to run a systematic literature review on 1,200+ academic papers, triangulated against 300+ news items, 40+ business reports, and 30+ interviews with patients, physicians, and pharma leaders.

We identified 15 megatrends, refined them to 6, then to 2 complementary lenses: Patient Empowerment and R&D Speed. Crossing the lenses on a 2x2 matrix produced four 10-year scenarios, each with named consumer behaviors, North Star metrics, AI healthcare journeys, and benchmarks of who is preparing today.

The framework was extended into a regional intelligence engine for UCB Germany, translating the global megatrends to a structured local signal-monitoring framework.

What changed

We added an outside-in layer to UCB's strategic planning, naming the digital capabilities that keep the company's strategic edge across whichever scenario lands.

UCB foresight scenario card from the deliverable
Innovation Governance

An emerging tech radar across a $6B retail roadmap.

Grupo Boticário · Emerging Tech Radar & Governance

The innovation lab was running disconnected experiments while the company's $6B digital roadmap moved without a shared view of emerging technology.

Working with the lab and 50 internal experts across the business, we built a backcasting framework with three horizons (Tactical 1-2y, Strategic 3-5y, Transformational 5+y) and a 60-card radar covering five functions. We connected the radar to the strategic planning forums (PET, PEC, CVM), embedding it inside the company's recurring decisions.

The lab moved from experimentation overhead to strategy and intelligence function for the CIO and 300+ digital product leaders.

The radar fed two flagship strategic documents: Beleza Ampliada, the company's playbook for new categories and channels, and Future of Beauty, the single source of truth on megatrends across the business. Both now circulate at C-level and Board. NPS 100 from product leadership, CSAT 4.7/5.0 from C-level.

What changed

A scattered innovation lab now sits inside the CIO's quarterly priorities and shapes the roadmaps of 300+ product owners across a 4,000-store retail network.

Real radar dish, analogical stand-in for the emerging tech radar
AI Business Strategy

Saying no to the AI hype trap.

Grupo Boticário · FOL.IA campaign experiment

When ChatGPT exploded, the CMO came to the Innovation Lab asking for a "ChatGPT for Boticário" product-recommendation chatbot. The hallucination risk was unacceptable for a regulated cosmetics brand and the token economics made ROI invisible.

We reframed the conversation: walked the CMO through how GenAI was evolving, named a real pain her marketing team was already feeling (budget constraints meant they could not produce SKU-level imagery for every product), and proposed an experiment that solved that pain while testing whether GenAI could drive measurable conversion.

We packaged it as a Carnaval campaign with explicit learning hypotheses. We generated 20+ makeup-look references with GenAI. Real makeup artists and influencers recreated each look using Boticário products. Every tutorial linked to a PDP with the exact SKU bundle.

The campaign delivered 5x organic traffic uplift and 30% of total campaign revenue, in a season historically owned by beverages and snacks.

What changed

Customer pain became the start of the AI conversation, with technology choice second. The framing now governs AI bets across the company.

AI-generated makeup concepts

Above: AI-generated concepts. Below: real influencers recreated each look with products.

Real influencer recreations
Consumer Research

Decoding a misunderstood audience.

Grupo Boticário · Gamer consumer strategy

Conventional wisdom said gamers don't buy beauty. The brand was losing relevance with Gen Z and needed to know if there was real opportunity behind the stereotype.

I designed a multi-method research program (netnography, ethnographic observation, qualitative depth interviews, and a quantitative survey of 1,000+ players) to understand the Brazilian gaming landscape from first principles.

The research showed four distinct gamer tribes with very different motivations, behaviors, and beauty product needs.

It also showed an uncomfortable truth: the majority of gamers in Brazil were women, but women were almost absent from competitive scenes due to chat toxicity. That insight shifted the brand's stance from category entry to category-shaping action.

What changed

Boticário entered gaming through purpose, sponsoring an all-female CS:GO tournament and earning credibility before launching products. The brand was named Most Beloved Brand by Gamers for three consecutive years.

Heroínas do Game brand campaign
GTM Strategy · Machine Learning

Building the IQOS launch playbook for a country with no heat-not-burn category.

Philip Morris International · IQOS Brazil

PMI needed to launch IQOS in Brazil, a country where heat-not-burn tobacco did not yet exist as a category.

Vapes had not taken off, the consumer behavior was unknown, and there was no domestic benchmark for what an ideal launch playbook looked like.

Working with the local consumer insights and global strategy teams, we built a launch playbook based on cross-country pattern recognition. A machine learning clustering model grouped 30+ markets by consumer behavior signals and the IQOS playbook each had used.

Brazil placed into the closest reference cluster. The cluster reference, triangulated against local qualitative and ethnographic research, told us which launch patterns to copy and which to skip.

What changed

PMI Brazil went into its IQOS launch decision with an evidence-based playbook built from cross-country pattern recognition, instead of guessing the entry from scratch. The work earned PMI's Above & Beyond award.

Earth at night satellite imagery, analogical stand-in for cross-country market clustering
Consumer Journey · GTM

Selling Marlboro contactless, when nobody wanted to talk to clerks.

Philip Morris International · Marlboro & cigarette portfolio

The pandemic shut down the in-store consumer journey for the Marlboro and broader cigarette portfolio.

Working with the consumer journey and innovation teams, we identified a specific pattern under lockdown: consumers were embarrassed to ask the clerk for cigarettes daily. Touchless purchase became the new pain to solve.

Vending machines validated the demand but didn't survive the CFO's CAPEX threshold, so we shifted to autonomous condominium stores: an asset-light format just emerging in Brazil at the time that matched the same consumer need without the heavy investment.

We validated the format with retail-tech startups, then handed the program to the key accounts team. Today: 2,000+ stores across Brazil. The startups we backed grew from emerging to dominant retail-tech players in the country.

What changed

A regulated cigarette category proved it could operate contactless at national scale, asset-light. The startups that ran the experiment now dominate retail-tech in Brazil.

Brazilian autonomous condominium store with phone purchase
04

Speaking & thought leadership

Keynotes · panels · podcasts

I keynote, moderate, and join panels at European retail and innovation forums, on how senior leaders are navigating AI adoption, foresight, and the questions that don't fit on a quarterly dashboard.

Patrick Sobral on a panel discussion
Masterclass

Strategic Foresight & AI

For Evolve, a senior digital commerce community: training premium members on how AI is reshaping commerce and how to apply foresight methods to strategic decisions.

Keynote

Future of AI in Retail & Commerce

Speaker at industry events on how senior leaders are navigating AI adoption, foresight, and the long-horizon technology bets that take years to play out.

Podcast

Retailistic with Deborah Weinsig

Conversation on AI Business Strategy, emerging technology adoption, and Strategic Foresight applied to consumer goods and life sciences.

Panels

Innovation & retail forums

Regular panel participant on consumer foresight, AI adoption in regulated industries, and innovation governance at scale.

Active across Europe's leading innovation & retail forums
Innov8rs Berlin EuroShop Shoptalk Europe NRF Digital 1 to 1
05

Background

Career trajectory
2025 - Present
Independent Foresight & AI Strategy Consultant
Self-employed
Advising senior leaders on AI adoption, foresight programs, and innovation governance across pharma, retail, and digital commerce. Recent engagements: UCB Biopharma DCTx Foresight (Belgium & Germany, contracted via The Bakery, Sep 2025 - Jan 2026), Evolve digital commerce community, and ongoing speaking work.
2022 - 2025
Digital Innovation Strategy Manager
Grupo Boticário
Led emerging technology strategy and innovation governance for a $6B beauty group. Built the Emerging Tech Radar adopted by 300+ digital product leaders and the CIO. Designed the company's 5-year Future of Beauty innovation strategy.
2021 - 2022
Marketing Strategy & Consumer Insights Manager
Grupo Boticário
Led consumer research and marketing strategy programs that produced new product launches and digital journey improvements across e-commerce, CRM, and brand teams.
2020 - 2021
Innovation Strategy Consultant
Philip Morris International
Built a machine learning clustering model that grouped 30+ countries by consumer behavior signals, used as the launch playbook reference for IQOS Brazil. Designed and prototyped a contactless retail program for the Marlboro cigarette portfolio during COVID-19, which scaled to 2,000+ stores. Above & Beyond award.
2019 - 2020
Commercial Strategy Analyst
The Heineken Company
Built business cases using Nielsen and Kantar insights to guide regional campaign investments and improve trade efficiency across key channels.
2018 - 2019
Revenue Management Analyst
GSK
Pricing and revenue strategy across consumer health portfolio. First commercial role after engineering, the foundation for everything that came next.
Let's talk

Tell me what you're trying to decide. The bet that takes years to play out, the one where nobody else is asking the right questions yet.

patrickcgsobral@gmail.com
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