3345: Veeva Systems and the Future of Agentic AI in Pharma

This video explores Veeva Systems' strategic approach to embedding agentic AI within the highly regulated pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. Chris Moore, President of Europe at Veeva Systems, discusses how the company balances cutting-edge AI innovation with stringent compliance requirements, leveraging its purpose-built, life sciences-specific cloud platform. The conversation delves into practical applications of Veeva AI, such as CRM bots for compliant free text and MLR agents for content review, emphasizing how these agents inherit application context and controls. Moore also addresses the EU AI Act, viewing it as a validating framework rather than a barrier, and outlines Veeva's flexible architecture designed to support customer-specific LLMs while ensuring data integrity and performance. The overarching theme is how AI can accelerate drug development, streamline operations, and ultimately improve patient outcomes by empowering specialist teams and reducing repetitive tasks.

Key Takeaways:

• Veeva's foundational advantage in AI integration stems from its purpose-built, life sciences-specific cloud platform, which inherently provides the necessary logic, structure, and controls for compliant AI deployment.
• Veeva AI leverages "agentic AI" to embed intelligent agents directly into applications, offering context- and user-specific controls that ensure compliance, as exemplified by their CRM bot for compliant free text and MLR agents for content review.
• The EU AI Act is viewed not as a barrier but as a validation, providing a framework that aligns with Veeva's disciplined approach to understanding AI's impact and ensuring responsible deployment in a highly regulated industry.
• AI shortcuts are designed to boost individual productivity by automating repetitive tasks for regulatory and medical affairs teams, such as summarizing documents, drafting communications, classifying content, and extracting metadata, while maintaining human oversight for final compliance checks.
• Veeva's strategy for future AI evolution includes a flexible "harness-based" architecture, allowing customers to integrate their own preferred LLMs or different models by geography or task, ensuring adaptability to rapidly changing AI capabilities and specific client needs.
• The ultimate mission of Veeva AI is to accelerate drug development and improve patient outcomes by making highly skilled life sciences professionals more effective, reducing manual work, and generating insights from large datasets.
• Veeva prioritizes a "last to announce, first to deliver" approach, focusing on demonstrable benefits, rigorous customer collaboration, and real-world testing to ensure global reliability and value before product release.