Partnership Highlights: Atlas

How Atlas and Proximo bring their expertise together to help clients solve complex challenges and get more from their AI investments

Proximo’s Partnership Highlights series puts the spotlight on firms we work alongside, respect, and recommend to our clients. In this edition, we’re featuring Atlas, a woman-owned consulting firm with deep experience in life sciences, business transformation, AI, data and analytics, and program and portfolio management.

We’ve worked with Atlas for more than a decade, and one of the things we value most about the relationship is that our capabilities complement each other and, in some areas, overlap. That gives us the flexibility to bring together the right expertise for what a client actually needs, rather than approaching every project the same way.

As more companies explore AI, that flexibility matters more than ever. Some clients are still working through their data and technology foundations, while others are identifying opportunities, developing solutions, changing processes, or trying to get more value from investments they’ve already made. Together, Atlas and Proximo can help clients wherever they are in that journey.

Who Atlas Is

Atlas helps organizations solve business challenges and make changes that last. With deep experience in life sciences, the firm works across strategy, transformation, data and analytics, AI, program and portfolio management, and managed services. One of its strengths is connecting business priorities with the work required to achieve them, from identifying opportunities and making decisions to managing complex initiatives, implementing solutions, and supporting adoption.

Its program and portfolio management practice is a good example. Atlas helps organizations establish the right governance, improve how they prioritize investments, and manage work across teams, using an approach built on the “4Ps”: portfolio, program, project, and product.

“A PMO earns its place when leaders use it to make decisions, not when it produces more status reports,” said Rishi Dixit, VP, Head of Strategic Solutions and Innovation (Products and Partnerships) at Atlas. “We design governance around the decisions an executive team actually has to make: what to fund, what to sequence, and what to stop. Then we stay with the client until the new way of working is simply how the organization operates.”

Depth in Life Sciences

Atlas has worked across the life sciences industry for more than two decades, supporting organizations from R&D and clinical operations through manufacturing, regulatory, quality, and commercial functions. That experience matters because business challenges rarely sit within one department. A change to a clinical process, for example, may affect technology, data, regulatory requirements, and the people doing the work, and Atlas brings an understanding of those connections along with the discipline a regulated industry requires.

“In life sciences, speed, compliance, and patient safety are non-negotiable,” said Vicki McColley, Chief Operating Officer of Atlas. “But even the best technology delivers little value if it doesn't work for the people using it. That's why we bring business, technology, and human understanding together from day one. Whether we're transforming clinical operations or introducing AI, our focus is on making change practical, sustainable, and measurable.”

How Our Paths Crossed

Proximo and Atlas first crossed paths more than ten years ago, when both firms joined a collaborative of complementary businesses. There, Proximo CEO David Ricciardi met Atlas CEO Jacquie Cleary and COO Vicki McColley. Soon after, the firms were collaborating on a large Proximo client engagement, with Atlas leading execution, and that work laid the groundwork for the closer collaboration that followed.

Where We Complement Each Other

Over the years, we’ve found that our best opportunities to work together aren’t projects where Atlas does one thing and Proximo does another. Both firms bring established business and technology capabilities, and our complementary strengths let us take on more complex client challenges together. Sometimes one firm leads and the other brings additional capabilities; other times we work side by side across several parts of an engagement. Two examples show what that looks like.

• AI-Enabled Research Transformation and Productivity. For a leading life sciences research organization, Atlas and Proximo partnered on a multi-phase transformation integrating business strategy, operating-model redesign, Microsoft Fabric-based data modernization, and AI-enabled automation. The engagement included deploying Atlas Intelligence, an enterprise AI assistant, supported by workforce training and adoption. The business case identified the potential to reduce manual reporting effort by approximately 65%, freeing up an estimated 8,600 hours annually. Together, the firms helped the client move from fragmented research processes toward integrated, AI-enabled operations with measurable productivity potential.

• Analysis for a global leader. For one of the largest life sciences companies, Atlas and Proximo collaborated on an AI-assisted quality assessment, analyzing two years quality management system data across 78 organizational scopes and 57 performance metrics. The analysis identified critical data-quality issues, including missing information in 8.23% of applicable records, inconsistent performance thresholds, and reporting anomalies. Atlas and Proximo delivered more than 30 recommended data validation and governance controls, along with a roadmap for predictive analytics and AI-enabled early-warning capabilities to help the organization identify potential quality issues before they escalate.

Beyond these engagements, we’ve pursued new client opportunities together, and as AI becomes a bigger part of how organizations operate, we see even more room to collaborate. Clients need help with everything from data and architecture to identifying use cases, building solutions, managing risk, and getting people to adopt new ways of working. The specific roles change from project to project, but the reason we work together stays the same: we can bring more to clients together than either of us can alone.

“Our clients rarely have a problem that fits neatly into one box. Data, process, technology, and people are all tangled together,” said David Ricciardi, CEO of Proximo. “What makes the partnership with Atlas work is that both firms understand the business and the technology, so we can shape the team around the client’s problem instead of around our org charts. The client gets one coherent effort, not two firms handing work back and forth.”

“Proximo is a partner we trust to go deep, whether the challenge starts with the data, the architecture, or the business question behind them,” said Rishi. “They understand that a dashboard or an AI model is only as good as the data and decisions underneath it, and they stay focused on the business outcome, not just the technology. That makes them an easy partner to bring to our clients.”

What Drives Atlas

When we asked Rishi what Atlas is most passionate about, he pointed to what happens after the plan is approved.

“Anyone can create a roadmap. I've created enough of them myself!” said Rishi. “The real test is what happens after the PowerPoint is closed. Are people working differently? Are leaders making better decisions? Is the business seeing the value we promised? At Atlas, we believe transformation must keep humans at its heart, especially in the age of AI. Technology will change how work gets done, but it's people who give that work meaning and purpose. That's what drives us. We take ownership of outcomes, because a successful transformation isn't measured by what we implement, but by what actually improves for the people and the business.”

The same question shapes Atlas’ work on AI literacy and workforce readiness. In conversations with pharmaceutical learning leaders, the focus has been on role-based AI capability, practical use cases, and the judgment employees need to evaluate AI output. Completing a course is easy to count; showing that someone's work has improved is the harder test.

Looking Ahead

We asked Rishi how he sees the opportunities for Atlas and Proximo evolving as AI continues to change the way clients work.

“I think we're asking the wrong question when we ask how AI can make our existing processes faster. The bigger question is whether those processes should exist in the same form at all,” said Rishi. “AI is changing how work gets done, how decisions are made, and what organizations need from their people. That's where I see the real opportunity for Atlas and Proximo. We bring complementary expertise to help clients rethink the work, build the right data and technology foundations, and turn those ideas into measurable results. Frankly, if all we've done is automate yesterday's way of working, we haven't thought big enough.”

A Few Favorites

We like to end these conversations on a lighter note, so we asked Rishi a few of our favorite questions.

His favorite food? Oh, that's a tough one! I love all kinds of cuisines. But more than the food or the drink, it's the company that makes all the difference. Obviously good company deserves a nice drink! 😊

His favorite hobby? Absolutely, hanging out with my kids! Although I'm not entirely sure they would call that their favorite hobby!

His dream concert, by anyone dead or alive? Don Henley and the Eagles! I waited over 30 years to finally see them live at Madison Square Garden. Worth every year of waiting! And yes, I'd happily go again.

Thank you to Rishi, Vicki, and the Atlas team for sharing their time and perspective, and for allowing us to share a little about their firm and our partnership. To learn more about Atlas, visit https://www.chooseatlas.com.

For more information about Proximo, please contact us at info@proximo.com or reach out to us at https://www.proximo.com/contact.

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