Fredrik Holmboe

It did not start with AI

It started with a mailing list in a text file.

Around 2001 Fredrik was a sales rep with his own customer base and a weekly stack of manufacturer offers he had no chance of phoning through before the week ran out. So he asked his customers whether they wanted a simple email on Monday morning with that week's offers. Roughly ninety-nine out of a hundred said yes. He kept the addresses by hand, semicolon-separated, and pasted the lot into the blind copy field in Outlook every Monday.

The company mail server sat in a room down the corridor, and it went down every Monday morning. The IT manager complained to the CEO, and Fredrik was told to stop. He agreed, and said only that he was selling considerably more because of it. Two days later he was called back in, with the sales director in the room instead of the IT manager, and asked to explain what he was actually doing. The company rebuilt its website, every rep was told to start collecting email addresses, and within a fortnight the Monday mail went out properly designed with a large logo on it.

And people unsubscribed. His own version had been a bare list of article numbers and prices, which was exactly what they had said yes to. The polished version was marketing, which was not. That is the first thing he learned and it has not stopped being true: permission is given for something specific, and organisations are very good at turning it into something else.

Then it became about access

He joined a pharma company in the autumn of 2006, straight into constant talk of the good old days. The rules on what counts as a bribe in a business relationship had just been tightened, the industry had pulled the handbrake hard on how it interacts with healthcare, and access to clinicians had become much harder.

Access came up as a problem in every internal meeting and at every internal congress. When the same problem is raised over and over and nobody solves it, Fredrik cannot leave it alone. Reading Seth Godin and then the two HubSpot founders gave him the shape of an answer: put the customer's actual need at the centre, reach them through digital channels, and do it properly. He already knew from the mailing list what happens when you do it badly.

Then it became personal

In 2011 he was a product manager in Sweden running the launch of a focus product, with a newborn son at home. That December he had his first panic attack and was signed off sick. He burned out inside precisely the working processes he had been trying to improve.

That is where a logical conviction turned into something he actually cares about. It took a few years to come out. He gave his first talk in February 2016 and published his first article the following February, and has not stopped since. Everything after that, including the AI work, is the same question asked in a new decade: enthusiasm for what a channel or a technology could do, and no working model for how anyone is supposed to approve it.

What he has actually shipped

22,000 healthcare professionals across 117 countries. A global webinar series for an aesthetics portfolio, designed as a content strategy rather than a campaign, built from brief to first live broadcast in seven days when COVID removed every in-person touchpoint.

An EU master HCP portal for a rare-disease programme, now running across more than twelve European markets. Dualia leads the Nordic localisation across four countries with full MLR compliance.

An in-house broadcast studio that paid for itself in eleven months, built during eighteen months as Customer Experience Manager for the Nordics, alongside aligning commercial, medical and digital around one customer journey and introducing the affiliate's first structured investigator feedback loop.

More than 2,000 hours hands-on with generative AI inside pharma workflows, including Veeva PromoMats. Not slideware about AI. Time spent in the systems where the work is approved.

The ABC+ Content Excellence Framework

His own method, and the reason the work travels between organisations: audit what exists, build the buyer personas, set the content strategy, then produce against it. It has been deployed across more than twenty organisations, from Microsoft enterprise partners to life-science companies including Envirotainer, Jenoptik, Biotage and US Pharmacopeia.

Writing and speaking

Seventeen articles published in Pharma Industry between 2017 and 2023, on multichannel marketing, SEO, social media, webinars and customer segmentation. More than seventy keynotes at industry conferences, and eight chair roles at congresses.

He speaks on AI adoption and on what actually survives a review process, which is a narrower and more useful topic than most AI talks.

How he works with clients

Every sprint is run hands-on. The discovery interviews, the workshop and the governance design are done by Fredrik directly, not handed to a delivery team. That is deliberate, and it is why Dualia takes a small number of engagements at a time.