Future-Proofing CRM Investments in Life Sciences: Observations from Dreamforce 2024

Derek Choy, President and Chief Product Officer, Aktana

The life sciences industry is at a crossroads. We face unprecedented challenges in how we engage healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients while navigating the complexities of therapeutic advancements, cost pressures, and shifting customer expectations. At Dreamforce 2024, I witnessed firsthand the industry’s enthusiasm for innovations like Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud and Agentforce. But alongside that excitement was palpable concern about the risks inherent in transitioning to new technologies.

Specifically, as Veeva CRM transitions customers to Veeva Vault CRM and Salesforce introduces Life Sciences Cloud, the new world order will force some difficult decisions about how to migrate CRM systems while still meeting innovation needs of today. Whether companies choose Veeva Vault CRM or Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud the risks are real—lost investments, increased costs, and possible disruptions to business objectives.

My observations coming out of Dreamforce 2024, coupled with very recent announcements about AI at Veeva Commercial Summit in Madrid and Agentforce World Tour NYC 2024 are bringing more clarity about the challenges ahead. These are my key takeaways:

CRM migrations are uniquely complex in life sciences

The industry is experiencing a generational shift to an AI-native world, and the time to prepare for change is now. The future is bright with innovations such as Agentforce, CRM Bot, and AI-powered Voice Control.

However, adopting new tools isn’t just a matter of upgrading systems. It’s about ensuring continuity of care, safeguarding investments in data and strategy, and future-proofing the ability to deliver life-changing medicines. Moreover, in recent months while talking to industry leaders, partners, and customers about the options ahead, one overarching theme has crystallized: the decisions we make today will either secure our future or leave us behind.

Non-transferable elements

There is significant concern about reducing the effort and cost of migration to take advantage of the new innovation. For example, if a company migrates from Veeva CRM to Salesforce Lifesciences Cloud any MyInsights visualizations built to support the field will not automatically migrate and must be replaced. Similarly, migrating Vault content remains complex, and while it’s often claimed that only 10-20% of content is actively used, the reality is that all content and visualizations play a vital role in supporting brand objectives. So maximizing current investments is more critical than ever to control costs and maintain operational continuity.

And while it is a conventional expectation that disruption is a necessary evil to deliver on innovation, this does not have to be the case. Migration can happen while still protecting prior investments.

Balancing migration with current demands

An unresolved challenge is how to balance migration efforts with addressing pressing business imperatives, such as reducing costs and supporting an unprecedented number of product launches. The transition process must not compromise current operational needs or hinder opportunities for new product success. Unfortunately, while this challenge is now being acknowledged, no clear solutions are on the horizon.

This all begs the question: What is the best path forward to preserve existing investments, minimize disruptions and still be able to innovate and have flexibility to adjust for future technology leaps? To ensure CRM strategies stand the test of time, I’ve identified three core principles for walking the tightrope from today to the future successfully.

Three principles for future-proofing CRM investments

1. Future focus

The technology landscape is changing rapidly, and it is easy to make decisions that solve today’s problems without considering what we will need 10 years from now. During Dreamforce, I heard discussions about the importance of preparing for a future that supports the way MSLs, sales reps, HCPs and patients will want to engage with data and insights in the years to come.

While it’s impossible to predict the exact future, we need to invest in foundational capabilities which will be relevant regardless of how the landscape evolves—things like AI-powered engagement, platform-agnostic approaches, and seamless integration across channels.

We can take lessons from other industries that have faced similar technology choices, like what happened with Kodak and Fujifilm.¹ Both were photography giants facing the disruptive shift to digital technology from film.

Kodak, fearing cannibalization of its profitable film business, hesitated to embrace digital innovation and clung to its traditional model, ultimately declaring bankruptcy when it failed to adapt. They invested in incremental improvements, like better film emulsions, rather than preparing for a wholesale shift to digital. By the time they finally entered the digital market, it was too late.

In contrast, Fujifilm leveraged its expertise in chemistry and materials science to diversify into new markets like healthcare and cosmetics while simultaneously investing in digital imaging. Their work with film led to innovations in medical imaging and even skincare products which applied the same principles of light and chemical interaction they had perfected in film. They also invested heavily in digital imaging technology, ensuring they stayed competitive in the rapidly evolving photography market.

Lessons to be learned

There are important lessons we can take away from this example, as we manage the shift we are facing in our own industry:

Don't fear cannibalization: For Pharma, we have to embrace omnichannel engagement and AI-powered tools—even if it means changing how field teams traditionally operate.

Leverage existing strengths: Fujifilm succeeded because it found new applications for its core competencies. Pharma companies should similarly leverage its strengths—such as deep HCP relationships, rich data assets, deep product knowledge, and well-structured strategies and journeys —in order to successfully innovate in new areas like personalized engagement and AI-driven action agents.

Diversify with intent: Fujifilm’s pivot wasn’t random. It was a strategic extension of its unique expertise. Pharma CRM platforms should adopt the same principle by beginning to build solutions that extend beyond field engagement into fully integrated omnichannel and multi-stakeholder ecosystems.

Adapt before it’s too late: Kodak didn’t fail because it lacked innovation—it failed because it delayed acting on it. Companies must commit to innovation as an ongoing process, not as a reaction to external pressures.

By embracing those lessons, the road forward for our industry is to plan for AI-powered engagement that is designed to empower field sales reps and MSLs with the next generation of agentic AI tools that can revolutionize how they interact with technology – ultimately driving better outcomes for HCPs and patients.

A vision for the future

Here’s a snapshot of what that vision looks like in the future: Reps no longer sift through dashboards or predefined workflows but instead engage directly with AI agents in dynamic workflows, asking for exactly what they need—on demand.

AI delivers the requested information but also provides the reasoning behind its recommendations, fostering trust and understanding. And recommendations are no longer purely analytics-driven but are dynamically projected based on anticipated impact on constantly adapting strategic objectives and KPIs, ensuring every interaction is intentional and outcome-driven.

Field teams are seamlessly integrated into a broader omnichannel engagement strategy, where HCPs are just one of several key stakeholders influencing patient outcomes, alongside payors, patient advocacy groups, and health systems. Finally, follow-up actions—whether it’s presenting tailored content during a meeting, sending personalized outreach, or logging key information—are streamlined, with semi-automated options available today and full automation in the future.

To prepare for this world, organizations must enable actors like field reps and brand managers to interact with AI agents, asking complex questions and receiving tailored, explainable assistance in real-time. This requires the creation of a database of forecasted actions—structuring and scoring potential actions with traceable reasoning—ready for future AI reasoning and automation.

2. Abstraction

Adopting a platform-agnostic approach is key to decoupling essential elements—data, insights, and engagement strategies—from specific CRMs. This ensures flexibility as technology evolves. This approach provides companies with the resiliency to evolve, regardless of the specific platform they choose.

One example comes from a customer who was hesitant, like most in the industry right now, to commit to a new CRM because of uncertainties, including losing the investment in custom-built visualizations and data transformations in their MyInsights dashboards. They used an abstracted approach to their intelligence and precall planning visualizations, allowing them to feel comfortable that they can retain these investments, regardless of the CRM they would ultimately choose. They implemented configurable precall planning widgets that were able to be reused across brands and geographies. But more importantly, they abstracted data transformation, insight generation and prioritization logic, and visualization configuration from the source data and the CRM user experience, allowing them to innovate while keeping options open for future CRM decisions

The key here is to avoid getting locked into a single ecosystem and to ensure that all critical components—data, insights, and strategies—are preserved and adaptable. The benefits of abstraction are clear: reduced migration costs, easier adaptation to new platforms, and the ability to innovate continuously without being locked into a single ecosystem.

3. Business impact at every stage

Finally, one of the biggest needs I see today is for the ability to deliver measurable business impact at every stage. When we first started implementing AI-driven recommendations and omnichannel orchestration, several large customer engagements failed to deliver the desired impact because they were not measuring incremental value along the way. I’ve seen large rollouts stumble because of impatience, organizational changes and politics, or a lack of focus on short-term milestones.

A cautionary tale from the automotive industry paints a fair picture of why this principle is so important. General Motors (GM)² encountered serious failures by focusing too heavily on long-term electric vehicle (EV) development without focusing sufficient attention on short-term milestones in their existing vehicle lines. This resulted in financial losses and an inability to keep up with shifting consumer preferences during economic downturns. Meanwhile, competitors like Toyota balanced both long-term EV investments with continued innovation and optimization of their existing product lines, allowing them to maintain profitability and market relevance. The upshot is that while optimizing for long-term results is important, it is equally significant to pay close attention to short-term milestones to ensure resilience and adaptability in the face of changing economic conditions.

The solution is to set precise, measurable goals from day one, ensuring that both long-term and short-term objectives are addressed. I’ve worked with customers who have successfully implemented this approach, defining specific business objectives and KPIs for every strategy so they can be assessed and refined based on real-time data. This has allowed them to demonstrate value early, keeping stakeholders engaged, while continuously improving their approaches.

Seize the opportunity to build the future of engagement

The decisions we make today will determine whether we lead the life sciences industry into the next generation of customer engagement excellence or be at risk of falling behind. We can’t simply adopt the latest technology. Rather, we can be intentionally proactive in taking up the biggest opportunity we will have in our careers to reinvent engagement and set the industry up to thrive for the long-term.

By focusing on these key principles—future readiness, abstraction, and business impact—we can ensure that our CRM investments are not only future-proofed but also primed to deliver the personalized engagement that HCPs and patients desire.

I encourage everyone in the industry to take a step back, evaluate your current strategies, and consider how you can apply these principles to make your CRM investments more resilient, adaptable, and impactful. The future of life sciences is being built today—let’s make sure we’re all building it right.

Derek Choy, President and Chief Product Officer of Aktana

References

1. https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-tale-of-two-film-companies/
2. https://medium.failfection.com/general-motors-and-how-this-huge-company-lost-its-way-daeb4e01e7eb