From CRM to Intelligent Engagement: How Agentforce and AI Define Pharma’s Transformation

Traditionally, CRMs in pharma were little more than record-keeping systems. They helped companies log calls, track samples, and pass audits.  However, they offered little help to commercial teams in deciding which HCPs to prioritize, provided limited support to medical affairs in summarizing complex literature, and gave patient services no real-time guidance on adherence risks.

As Gartner emphasizes, life sciences engagement has expanded well beyond physicians to include payers, regulators, care teams, and patient advocacy groups. Commercialization is no longer a linear process; it has become a complex, multistakeholder ecosystem where every interaction must be compliant, personalized, and timely. Meanwhile, healthcare and life sciences generate nearly 30% of the world’s data — much of it fragmented, unstructured, and trapped in silos. No legacy CRM, however customized, can keep pace with such volume and complexity.

This is where AI fundamentally changes the equation.  No longer a bolt-on, it is becoming the operating logic of modern engagement platforms.

Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud (LSC) embodies this shift by embedding AI directly into the workflows of field reps, MSLs, and patient support staff. Instead of merely recording what happened, it drives what happens next: surfacing prescribing trends before an HCP call, drafting compliant responses to medical inquiries, or flagging adherence risks in patient support interactions. In short, it’s not a static ledger — it’s a system of action and intelligence.

I’ve already touched on the implications of LSC entering the pharma market in my recent HIT Consultant article. Here, I’ll zoom in closer on why its new capabilities represent a step change in the way life sciences organizations engage with stakeholders. 

The Significance of Data Cloud

AI isn’t magic; it’s mathematics applied to data. Consequently, it only works if the underlying data is clean, unified, and trustworthy.

Historically, pharma has struggled on this front: clinical records were kept in one silo, medical inquiries in another, and commercial call notes in yet another. The result was fragmented insight, duplicated effort, and compliance processes that relied heavily on manual intervention. Feeding AI with data scattered across formats, spanning years, and riddled with gaps produced little value – only wasted resources.

 LSC addresses this challenge directly by harmonizing data across clinical, medical, and commercial domains within Salesforce Data Cloud. This unified environment ingests both structured and unstructured information — from trial enrollment records to HCP engagement history — and normalizes it into a consistent model.

The outcome is a 360-degree view for each stakeholder, accessible across teams without breaching compliance boundaries.

Gartner highlights that cross-functional collaboration between commercial and medical affairs has become a baseline requirement. Data Cloud operationalizes this. With LSC, an MSL and a field sales rep can work from the same real-time profile that includes prescribing patterns, trial participation, past engagements, and consent preferences. No reconciliation spreadsheets, no fragmented records.

This data foundation is what makes Agentforce – Salesforce’s autonomous AI agent platform – so powerful within the CRM. The AI’s next-best-action recommendations, automated briefings, and compliance monitoring all draw from accurate, current, and secure data – so they are always on point. By grounding its AI in Data Cloud, LSC ensures that automation not only drives efficiency but also strengthens and simplifies compliance.

Agentforce in Action

AI Agents are not generic chatbots; they are task-specific digital teammates designed to work alongside humans in regulated environments, with compliance, security, and accuracy embedded at their core. Here’s how they transform key processes:

Commercial Engagement

For years, reps spent hours preparing for calls – digging through prescribing data in one system, cross-checking consent preferences in another, restoring history of previous engagements, and manually ensuring their talking points stayed within compliance. Agentforce collapses all of this into a single workflow.

With a single prompt, it can generate a pre-call briefing that includes prescribing patterns, formulary status, consent records, and engagement history. During the interaction, the AI Agent actively supports the rep through:

• Real-time compliance monitoring that flags non-compliant phrasing.
• Next-best-action recommendations that surface approved tactics or content based on context.
• Market access intelligence that highlights payer restrictions or opportunities that may affect prescribing.

After the call, the system generates a compliant summary, updates CRM records, and proposes follow-up steps. What once required hours of preparation and administrative work is now a seamless, guided workflow — freeing reps to focus on high-value relationship building.

Medical Affairs

Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) have traditionally spent significant time sifting through publications, trial data, and internal records before responding to HCP inquiries or preparing for key opinion leader (KOL) engagements. Agentforce transforms this dynamic by automating much of the research and response process.

Agents can summarize literature, draft scientifically accurate response templates, and surface trial data or investigator results within minutes. Beyond that, Agentforce supports MSLs with:

• Medical inquiry management — providing fast, compliant answers to complex questions.
• KOL identification and influence mapping — helping prioritize scientific leaders most relevant to a therapy area.
• Medical insights detection — scanning interaction records and external data for patterns that should be escalated to R&D or regulatory teams.
• Field coaching and knowledge-sharing — ensuring MSLs always work with current, validated content.

 Instead of relying on reactive, manual effort, medical affairs teams become proactive and knowledge-driven. They can engage KOLs with tailored evidence, strengthen relationships across the scientific community, and ensure every interaction is precise and compliant.

Clinical Operations

Clinical trials face well-documented bottlenecks: patient recruitment, site selection, and consent management. Here, Agentforce agents function as workflow accelerators. They can auto-match candidates to protocols by checking eligibility criteria, summarize site questionnaires for faster feasibility assessments, and streamline eConsent processes with real-time status tracking.

Post-enrollment, agents monitor adherence signals, detect dropout risks, and trigger early interventions. These capabilities don’t just save time; they also improve trial success rates by reducing manual errors and attrition — directly addressing one of the industry’s costliest challenges: trial delays.

The Compliance Core

All of this happens within the Einstein Trust Layer, Salesforce’s safeguard for responsible AI. Guardrails such as zero data retention, toxicity detection, and grounding in approved sources ensure that automation supports – rather than compromises – compliance. Human oversight remains central, but the workload shifts from repetitive data checks to higher-value decision-making.

Future-Proofing with LSC

As the era of legacy CRMs comes to a close, nearly every biopharmaceutical company that has relied on these platforms will need to migrate. However, transitioning to a platform with limited innovation or uncertain longevity risks forcing yet another disruptive move within a few years – a scenario few organizations can afford given the scale of change involved.

Migrations are not just about transferring data and content; they require rethinking workflows, integrations, and compliance frameworks end-to-end.

LSC offers a safer path. Backed by Salesforce’s global scale and history of continuous innovation, it provides a long runway of support and adaptability.  Rather than moving to a proprietary system with a narrower reach, companies choose a platform already trusted across the globe and industries — one deeply embedded in enterprise systems and supported by a robust partner network.

Composability and Modularity

 One of the clearest takeaways from Gartner’s comprehensive report is that future-ready CRMs must be composable. This means they can be configured, extended, and adapted without destabilizing the core system. APIs, modular components, and low-code/no-code tools must form the architectural baseline.

The reason is straightforward: life sciences are never static. Cell and gene therapies introduce entirely new patient service requirements. Rare disease programs demand highly specialized stakeholder tracking. Regulatory environments vary by market: what works in the U.S. may require reconfiguration for China, India, or the EU. Patient services teams often need bespoke workflows – from financial assistance eligibility checks to adherence monitoring – and they cannot wait for lengthy IT development cycles.

 Legacy CRMs often fell short in this area. Adding new features required customizing rigid data models, which created technical debt and made upgrades risky. Over time, companies became locked into brittle, siloed systems that resisted change.

LSC breaks that cycle. Its architecture supports modular extensions, enabling organizations to add niche capabilities – from advanced therapy management to region-specific consent handling – without rewriting their entire system. Low-code and no-code tools empower business teams to adapt workflows directly, reducing reliance on IT backlogs. MuleSoft integration and APIs ensure seamless connections to broader enterprise systems, from ERP platforms to compliance databases.

With LSC, engagement strategies can evolve as science, regulation, and patient expectations shift – without another “rip-and-replace” scenario.

Ecosystem Continuity, Not Disruption

While many pharma companies may not have used Salesforce-branded CRMs directly, most have relied on platforms built on the Salesforce foundation. In other words, Salesforce has been the primary underlying infrastructure of pharma CRM for over a decade, even when other vendors owned the application layer.

Now, companies face a strategic fork in the road. They can either leave the Salesforce ecosystem entirely or adopt LSC and continue operating on a platform they already depend on – now enhanced with life sciences–specific models and AI-first capabilities.

Salesforce is far more than a CRM vendor; it is a global enterprise platform spanning analytics, integration, and data unification. It is backed by a vast network of systems integrators, ISVs, and industry partners. By choosing LSC, pharma organizations stay aligned with this ecosystem, ensuring interoperability, ongoing innovation, and partner support. That continuity reduces risk, accelerates time-to-value, and positions organizations for long-term competitiveness.

Making the Transition: Preparation Matters

 The promise of AI-first CRM is immense, but the path to it comes with challenges. Migrating from legacy platforms to LSC is a high-stakes undertaking involving data, content, integrations, and compliance workflows. If done poorly, migrations can jeopardize business continuity: critical records may be lost, integrations may fail, and users may lose confidence in the new system before it delivers value. In a regulated industry where trust is paramount, that margin for error is one no organization can afford.

The complexity is twofold. First, life sciences companies rarely operate from a single CRM instance. Years of layering tools on top of legacy platforms have created sprawling environments, with duplicative custom objects, inconsistent metadata, and brittle point-to-point integrations.  Second, compliance requirements mean every migration decision must preserve not only data integrity but also the audit trail proving data was never mishandled. Transitioning to LSC is therefore a strategic re-platforming that demands deliberate planning.

This is where certified Salesforce partners such as Avenga play a critical role. With specialized migration frameworks and a proprietary technical accelerator, we provide companies with the visibility they need to make informed decisions before investing in execution.

Our methodology combines stakeholder discovery with deep technical analysis, giving a precise picture of migration requirements. Key outcomes include:

• Comprehensive system diagnostics to detect configured modules, custom logic, object relationships, and data volumes.
• Structured metadata and integration analysis to highlight what can be preserved, adapted, or retired.
• Tailored complexity estimates and business case inputs to help leaders scope budgets, timelines, and required resources.
• An actionable roadmap that aligns the future vision for HCP and patient engagement with the technical realities of transition.

For organizations still in early planning, our three-tier service model provides flexibility – from high-level scoping for leadership discussions, to in-depth technical and functional analysis, to a comprehensive readiness plan that supports full-scale migration programs.

The result is a de-risked foundation for migration. By knowing precisely what lies under the hood of their legacy CRM, pharma leaders can approach LSC with confidence – ensuring continuity, compliance, and speed-to-value.

Summing Up

In an industry where AI-driven engagement will define winners and laggards, preparation is not optional. The difference between a disruptive rollout and a transformative one often comes down to whether readiness was treated as an afterthought or as a strategic enabler. With Avenga’s accelerator-powered assessment, companies can turn a mandated shift into an opportunity to modernize, expand, and lead.

If you’d like to learn more about how Avenga assists organizations in evaluating migration complexity, take a look at our detailed guide here.