Clarkston’s Anna Ivashko and Nathan Keliher recently attended the 2025 Veeva Commercial Summit, which brought together marketers and medical, field, and operation teams in the life sciences to discuss the latest trends and challenges in the industry. This year’s conference focused heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) in the commercial and medical ecosystem. Veeva has jumped into the AI race this year with a modest roadmap of purpose-built tools for the commercial and medical ecosystem. This change in direction aims to unlock capabilities like voice control and free text in CRM as well as drive efficiency in material review. Below, Anna and Nathan dive deeper into this year’s Veeva Commercial Summit and its shift in strategy surrounding AI in the commercial and medical ecosystem: 

Recapping the 2025 Veeva Commercial Summit  

1. Leaning into AI 

Veeva has changed course and is full steam ahead on their AI roadmap with new solutions coming out December 2025 to stay competitive with the Salesforce suite. Veeva shared their AI strategy to be primarily ‘Bring Your Own LLM’ model that would play well with the client’s existing LLM decisions and allow for the swap out of models down the line. Where Veeva is looking to add value is the enablement of agents – or purpose-built ‘prompt packagers’ that integrate into the Veeva suite and allow users to engage with the LLMs. Most notably, agents in the CRM and PromoMats suite were demoed at this summit. 

2. AI in Sales

The CRM bot – a response to Salesforce’s AI embedded capabilities in their planned CRM solution – made its appearance this year. While the functionality is not yet live, several demos showcased the intended AI agent. Main use cases included:  

1. Sales team assistance Q&A from approved content  
2. Sales team assistance on HCP channel preference or other data  
3. CRM tool navigation support  
4. Compliance monitoring for call notes free text field 

The last use case caused quite a stir as Veeva demonstrated the option to live record a medical interaction with full transcript capabilities. While the demo provides clients with options to save this recording or keep in ephemeral mode just to support call note drafting, even the presence of free text call fields seemed to cause some clients to sit back in their seats.  

It is clear that Veeva is making a statement that they’re still in the AI game. However, the word is still out whether clients will find product-enabled functionality as effective as custom AI agents that leverage their proprietary data as well as the Veeva suite to serve field suggestions that won’t match those served to everyone on the platform.  

3. AI in Marketing

While the CRM bot is embedded into the Vault CRM ecosystem, clients will have the option to purchase a separate license to enable MLR bot within their PromoMats instance. Main use cases demonstrated include: 

• Context-aware chatbot answers questions about existing documents 
• Content quality checks for drafts to highlight issues such as 
  • Spelling and grammar 
  • Red Flag phrases 
  • Inconsistent Important Safety Information (ISI) 
  • Missing components, such as boxed warning or unsubscribe links 

Benefits include faster and fewer review cycles, resulting in quicker overall approval of new materials. Veeva claims that “MLR Bot is the fastest path to approved content.” 

Various partners showcased solutions that push the envelope in material development, threatening agency’s role in the content development ecosystem. While Marketing is first up, Veeva is looking to enable a MedComms agent next that will match medical content statements and complete predefined quality checks for documents.  

These capabilities as well as add-on solutions from Veeva partners aim to bring efficiency to the MLR process that previous efforts around tier-based reviews and modular content attempted.  

4. CRM Migration 

While AI took center stage across the suite, several sessions marked the beginning of the Vault CRM migrations with lessons learned. Veeva featured some early adopters whose advice ran the gamut from including fields teams into UAT for migration, to leveraging screenshots to identify security issues, to avoiding other updates (e.g. SSO) during migration. 

Veeva seems to have taken a white glove approach to supporting these early adopters and learning with them to improve migrations down the line – like ensuring that sandbox data and users that are required to be created manually today will be loaded automatically in a future release. In these overviews, Veeva shared key clarifications for those planning their migration:  

• 2 years of transactional data will be brought over in a migration 
• Dashboards must be recreated  
• Clients are recommended a big bang approach to migration to avoid managing two instances and refereeing data conflicts. 

While many have not yet aligned their stance to stay or go, many clients are considering this as an opportunity to evaluate their commercial ecosystem in the next few years.  

Final Thoughts 

While customers brought a varied level of skepticism and/or enthusiasm to the AI arena Veeva introduced this year, it was universal that clients are looking for the applications and use cases that truly add value to their process.  

This change in strategy means that AI has become tablestakes for commercial teams enabling technology. While competitors will have nuances around their approach for enabling these tools for their clients, client decisions will no longer mean choosing between integrated AI or not. As competition heats up, this will create better and better tools and options for pharma and biotech organizations.  

Veeva is taking a calculated approach to integrating AI in their expansive toolset, focusing on areas where AI can best assist knowledge workers to be more efficient. They are focusing on areas where AI can complement the functionality and the investment they and many of their customers have made in the Vault platform, and they do not see AI replacing core applications.  

In addition to the new AI capabilities that garnered most of the attention at the summit, they also demonstrated commitment to development of new features and connectivity across their Vault portfolio. What this means about connectivity from the Veeva suite to its competitors is still to be determined. 

Reach out to us to chat more about our Veeva Commercial Consulting Services. 

Contributions by Nathan Keliher