As part of Nutraceuticals World’s 2026 State of the Industry review, Pelin Thorogood and Jeff Chen, MD, Co-Founders of Radicle Science, reviewed how AI and decentralized clinical trials are transforming evidence, transparency, and consumer trust. They describe a future where verified data, real-world outcomes, and precision insights drive both purchasing decisions and product innovation across the wellness industry.

AI is rapidly emerging as the biggest consumer transparency tool in wellness. In the past year, more than a third of shoppers report using AI to for wellness recommendations.

Consumers can now effortlessly diligence the brands they use (or are considering using) by asking AI to audit labels and claims; summarize published clinical trials in plain English; flag contradictions; and score whether an ingredient or finished product has rigorous science versus testimonials, small observational studies, or low-quality trials done overseas.

They can also ask AI for curated shortlists of brands proven effective for their specific health profile and goals. Similar tools can also be harnessed by businesses, such as retailers, regulators, and litigators, to easily diligence a product in question or scour the market to identify dubious products that warrant further investigation. The power dynamic flips: if your product has demonstrated that it truly works, AI will surface it; if it hasn’t been able to do that, AI will expose it.

In parallel, decentralized, tech-enabled trials have moved from novelty to necessity. Blinded, placebo-controlled trials with at-home blood, stool, and saliva kits — plus digital biomarkers and wearables — now deliver rigorous evidence at a fraction of the cost and time.

The scientific and business community have recognized that decentralized trials (DCTs) broaden diverse participation and generate evidence that is more generalizable and real-world.  Moreover, the scale and diversity enabled by DCTs also allow for simultaneous clinical testing of multiple products to parallel process innovation — and allows for more sophisticated types of analytics to go beyond averages and reveal how subpopulations benefit differently.  

What’s Coming in 2026 …

• AI shopping copilots become default: Embedded in search, retail, telehealth, and creator channels — ranking products by verified health evidence, not ad spend.
• Label/OCR (Optical Charter Recognition) + provenance + outcomes converge: One scan reveals origin, quality signals, trial summaries, and post-purchase health impacts captured from real consumers.
• “Show me the evidence” hardens: Aided by AI tools, regulators and retailers reward, if not demand, transparent, reproducible data and penalize fuzzy or inflated claims.
• Precision starts to replace averages: Think “effective for perimenopausal women with stress,” not just “supports stress” — enabled by large, diverse datasets and AI subpopulation analysis.
• Rapid iteration cycles operationalize: Brands test multiple formulations, doses, and subpopulations in parallel — and can continue to optimize their product portfolios for improved benefit to target consumer segments.  

The Takeaway

With AI emerging as the consumer trust layer, rigorous evidence is the new currency. Wellness finally has affordable access to gold-standard medical evidence at consumer speed: DCT infrastructure is the engine, large-scale real-world data is the fuel, and AI makes the evidence legible to everyone. The brands that win in 2026 and beyond will lean into science, make precise, substantiated claims, instrument the post-purchase consumer journey — and give AI something trustworthy to amplify for an increasingly savvy consumer.