Veeva Commercial Summit, Europe: AI Comes to Vault CRM and Other Industry Advances

Dec 16, 2024 | Chris Moore

Last year, two key opinion leaders (KOLs) observed during our closing keynote panel that while their interactions with the biopharma industry are essential, they are often inconsistent. To deliver real value, each engagement must be relevant, timely, and build on the last touchpoint.

With this message in mind, during this year’s Veeva Commercial Summit, we learned from customers, partners, and Veeva experts about use cases and capabilities that will improve customer centricity. By bringing together their sales, marketing, and medical organizations, life sciences companies will meet rising healthcare professional (HCP) expectations even while access continues to decline.

1. Europe’s largest gathering of biopharma commercial and medical leaders

More than 1,300 biopharma attendees and partners, representing 170+ companies and 37 countries, joined Veeva’s Commercial Summit in Madrid. Over two days, delegates attended 150+ sessions across four Zones: Vault CRM Suite, Vault PromoMats and Vault Medical, Link, and OpenData. Attendees heard best practices from industry experts and participated in local communities and networking.

2. AI is coming to Veeva Commercial Cloud

During the opening keynote, Veeva Vault’s General Manager Arno Sosna announced three innovations coming in 2025 that will introduce AI to Veeva Commercial Cloud.

Two new capabilities in Vault CRM will boost field team productivity. Vault CRM Bot is a GenAI assistant in Vault CRM and will embed a large language model (LLM) of your choice to support several context-specific field tasks (such as pre-call planning, next best actions, and recommended content). Second, users will soon benefit from a new interface with Vault CRM: AI-powered Voice Control. Voice Control will leverage Apple Intelligence to operate CRM hands-free via spoken commands.

Third, we announced a new AI application in Vault PromoMats, MLR Bot, which will perform quality checks before Medical, Legal, Regulatory (MLR) review and approval. Available in late 2025, MLR Bot will use a Veeva-hosted LLM to accelerate the time to review by performing brand guidelines, market, channel, and editorial checks. Automating routine tasks will speed up the delivery of compliant content to HCPs and patients.

3. Momentum builds behind Vault CRM

Now that Vault CRM is beyond parity with Veeva CRM, we shared that 30+ companies are live, and seven early adopters will have migrated by the end of 2024.

Boehringer Ingelheim became the latest top 20 biopharma to commit to Vault CRM, joining GSK, Bayer, and Novo Nordisk. During the opening keynote, Boehringer Ingelheim’s Head of Global Customer Experience Excellence and Business Steering, Uday Bose, joined me on stage to explain why the Vault platform is integral to the company’s future expansion as it prepares to launch 25 new treatments by 2030.

Kieron Scrutton, senior vice president for global medical affairs digital and technology, discussed GSK’s Vault CRM migration process: 19,000 users in 50 countries are expected to be live by late 2025. Raimond Jähn, BioNTech’s global head of digital and IT, discussed the benefits of bringing together R&D, medical, and commercial on the Vault platform.

Second Left to Right: Raimond Jähn (BioNTech), Uday Bose (Boehringer Ingelheim), and Kieron Scrutton (GSK) explain why their companies have chosen Vault CRM.

During this year’s closing keynote, Erica Taylor of Genentech and Kieron Scrutton of GSK continued the theme of high-value engagement by sharing practical steps for closer coordination between sales, marketing, and medical. We also heard from Marco Angelo Scatigna MD (of the Cardiologic Centre Monzino), who explained the positive impact of having medical at the heart of relationships with HCPs.

4. Shaping the future of commercial and medical

More than 50 customer speakers exchanged best practices with their peers on topics ranging from launch excellence and field planning to engaging medical and scientific experts and the new content supply chain. Highlights included:

Veeva’s vice president of commercial strategy, Philipp Luik, and Arno Sosna shared the vision and product innovation planned for Vault CRM Suite, which will unify sales, marketing, and medical for customer-centricity. Their key message was that coordinated engagement is only possible with a single customer database. Attendees were treated to a showcase of Vault Campaign Manager and Medical Interactions, and learned how having CRM and content on the same platform will support personalized content at scale.
Andreas Gerloff, global head of medical customer excellence, shared how Bayer AG uses Veeva Link to deepen engagement with KOLs. Having chosen Veeva Link at the beginning of 2024, it undertook one of the fastest-ever rollouts among all Veeva Link customers (particularly in the U.S. commercial and medical functions). Gerloff discussed the success factors supporting new user adoption (which doubled every 90 days in the first quarter of implementation) and use cases bringing value to commercial, medical, and clinical organizations.
Stefan Schmidt, group product manager, explained how Bayer AG transitioned from multiple local data providers to globally harmonized data with Veeva OpenData. As a result, 95% of updates are now proactive, while data change requests (DCRs) are processed within an average of five hours. Having significantly improved the user experience and received positive field force feedback, Bayer now intends to combine in-house and external data across all applications, which will provide a 360-degree customer view and identify any gaps.
Dr. Samin Saeed, vice president of early assets medical at GSK, shared her perspectives on the MLR transformation in the industry, how culture can be a catalyst for change — and emerging AI use cases for medical affairs. With over 17,000 assets to approve daily, innovations in medical and commercial content will meaningfully impact medical stakeholders. Dr. Saeed emphasized how important it is for her peers to understand and embrace these technology advancements.

5. Veeva Heroes: Celebrating extraordinary people with real impact

Each year, Veeva honors customers who, along with their teams, have advanced digital processes and capabilities in their organizations — and for our industry. We celebrated and thanked Veeva Heroes from AstraZeneca, Bayer AG, BioNTech SE, Eisai, Incyte Biosciences International Sàrl, ITM Isotope Technologies Munich SE, Novartis, and Takeda.

Watch content on demand Veeva Commercial Summit, Europe.