As treatments become more specialised, healthcare professionals often hear from sales reps, medical teams and marketers across different meetings, emails and websites. But these interactions do not always connect. Important insights from one conversation can be lost, leaving healthcare professionals to need to repeat questions or search through lengthy documents for answers. In the article, Chris Moore, President, Europe, Veeva Systems explores how an emerging approach known as Agentic Commercial could change this.
Commercial engagement in biopharma used to centre largely on direct conversations between sales reps and physicians, or pharmacists. As therapeutic areas have grown more specialised, more teams have become involved in engaging with healthcare professionals (HCPs), including key account managers, medical science liaisons, brand marketers and service teams. But these functions often work separately, leaving HCPs with disjointed experiences rather than interactions that build on one another and widen their understanding.
Biopharma companies are also engaging with a much broader network of HCPs, patients, health systems and administrators. Many of these stakeholders are limiting their contact with the industry and are increasingly using AI to inform their decisions. As clinical complexity grows and access to HCPs becomes more restricted, companies need commercial models that are more responsive to customers’ needs.
To respond to these expectations, biopharmas are turning to Agentic Commercial, connecting AI with field teams, digital channels and approved content to create more consistent, personalised HCP experiences. Built into industry-specific applications, agentic capabilities help teams capture real-world insights, uncover treatment barriers, provide trusted answers and deliver relevant content across human and AI-led interactions. This leads to more meaningful engagement, better-informed HCPs and faster access to the right medicines for patients.
Field operations that turn conversations into real-time insight
An Agentic Commercial model transforms sales teams from promotional distribution channels into strategic sources of customer intelligence, evolving CRM from a system of record into a system of guidance.
Reps conduct nuanced HCP conversations every day, but traditional reporting systems restrict insights capture to rigid picklists and drop-down menus. Critical qualitative context – the ‘why’ behind a physician’s decision or the localised barrier to access – goes unrecorded.
Agentic call reporting uses agentic voice and free-text capabilities, with built-in compliance checks, to help reps capture richer details from HCP conversations. These interactions generate Commercial Evidence – actionable, real-world insights that reveal intent, content gaps and treatment barriers facing physicians and patients.
Commercial leaders gain immediate visibility into real-world friction points. Early implementations show that 65% of Agentic Call Reports identify actionable treatment barriers, enabling field teams and medical specialists to address clinical concerns with precision.
Digital experiences built around immediate answers
Field teams build trusted human relationships, but they cannot be everywhere at once. Digital channels such as brand websites and email should extend the dialogue and enable more timely responses to questions, yet too often, physicians and patients must navigate websites or lengthy documents to find what they need.
Conversational AI transforms static digital experiences into real-time conversations. Using only medical, legal and regulatory (MLR)-approved content, agents provide trusted, compliant answers to natural language questions in real-time.
These interactions also generate valuable Commercial Evidence. Instead of showing only what users clicked, AI reveals what they asked, where they struggled and the information they could not find. Commercial teams can identify content gaps, uncover emerging treatment barriers and trigger timely follow-up from the field. Trusted by eight of the top 10 biopharmas, conversational AI drives a 7x lift in high-value actions.
Approved content that gives reviewers more time for higher-value work
Continuous engagement depends on a steady stream of timely, compliant content. Yet, with global pharma content expenditure reaching US$30 billion annually and 29% more assets created year-over-year, content volume is outpacing human review capacity.
In an Agentic Commercial model, accelerating content speed to market is essential. Agentic MLR acts as an end-to-end expert reviewer – understanding document context, mapping specific regulations and executing targeted agent reviews against approved labels, claim libraries and brand SOPs. This shifts human reviewers from line-by-line proofreading to high-impact work.
By accelerating content review while maintaining compliance, commercial teams can respond faster to customer questions across field and digital channels. This delivers a more cost-effective approval process, with content leaders anticipating 38% of the MLR process to be AI-driven by 2028 and targeting a 70%+ reduction in manual review labour.
Combining AI capabilities with human expertise
Agentic Commercial brings AI and commercial teams together within the same applications, following shared processes, governance and compliance requirements. By taking on repetitive tasks and analysing large volumes of data, agents give people more time to apply their scientific expertise and judgement, shape strategy and build trusted relationships.
Bringing field teams, digital engagement, approved content and AI together allows biopharmas to create a more connected and personalised experience across channels. As therapies become more complex and access to HCPs more limited, Agentic Commercial can help teams engage customers with greater precision, support better-informed decisions and ultimately help patients access the right medicines sooner.
