The true cost of delaying CRM migration in life sciences

For more than a decade, legacy pharma CRM platforms were expected to provide reliable but basic utility. As long as they logged calls, tracked samples, and passed audits, these systems were considered “good enough.” The implicit assumption was that CRM was an infrastructure layer – something you set up, maintain, and only revisit if something major happened.

That long-term game is over. Structural shifts in the vendor landscape, which we’ve covered extensively in previous posts, are forcing organizations to rethink their CRM strategies. Every major life sciences company has already, or soon will, face a migration decision.

The real question now is when and where to migrate. And in today’s environment – where engagement models, compliance expectations, and AI capabilities are evolving rapidly – postponing the decision, or making a misaligned one, carries serious risks: missed strategic opportunities, mounting technical debt, fragmented data, and widening competitive gaps.

The hidden costs of waiting

Some organizations might think that delaying CRM migration is helping them minimize disruption, defer spending, and keep current systems running until a change is unavoidable. But their indecisiveness has a cost that compounds over time.

Technical debt

Every additional year spent on legacy systems makes it more difficult to move later. As the current platforms are either pivoting to new architectures or being phased out altogether, the innovation pipeline is already beginning to taper off.

What this creates for pharma companies is a form of technical debt at scale. The time they spend extending, patching, or customizing a legacy CRM to fill emerging gaps builds new layers of brittle code, bespoke workflows, and point-to-point integrations. These may keep the lights on temporarily, but they also make the eventual transition to a modern platform more costly, disruptive, and time-consuming.

By the time migration becomes unavoidable – whether because vendor support expires, compliance requirements shift, or competitive pressures make legacy untenable – companies might discover that their current environments are not only outdated but structurally fragile. The transition challenges then multiply: instead of porting over relatively clean data and workflows, organizations must unwind ad hoc customizations and reconcile inconsistent metadata across sprawling instances. This increases the likelihood of data loss, broken integrations, and compliance exposure during transition.

Fragmentation

Legacy CRMs often fragment an organization’s intelligence. Clinical records live in one platform, medical inquiries in another, and commercial engagement data in yet another. Each team ends up managing its own version of the truth, with no unified view of the HCP, the patient journey, or the regulatory trail. Cross-functional collaboration between commercial and medical affairs has become a baseline requirement, but legacy systems were never designed to meet it, and every year spent on them reinforces the silos.

Delaying migration can thus mean spreading more fragmentation – at the precise moment when the competitive landscape is shifting to exploit unified data as a strategic asset.

In other words, staying on legacy platforms means continuing to burn resources reconciling spreadsheets, duplicating records, and manually checking compliance – while rivals use unified, AI-ready data to orchestrate engagements at scale. The delay can widen the performance gap between companies still struggling with silos and those able to use data as real-time intelligence.

Falling behind in AI-driven engagement

One in four companies in the sector already has an enterprise roadmap for agentic AI – and adoption is accelerating. Early movers are embedding AI directly into commercialization, medical, and clinical workflows, enabled by structured, unified datasets. This is exactly why Salesforce Life Sciences Cloud – now rebranded as Agentforce Life Sciences – is gaining momentum.

Unlike legacy CRMs, it allows companies to leverage AI seamlessly to:

• Auto-generate compliant pre-call briefings for sales reps, complete with prescribing trends, formulary status, and consent preferences – replacing hours of manual preparation with a single prompt.
• Summarize scientific literature and trial data for medical affairs teams, enabling Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) to provide timely, precise, and compliant information to healthcare professionals and KOLs.
• Streamline clinical trial eConsent processes and accelerate site feasibility assessments, reducing one of the industry’s most persistent bottlenecks.
• Detect patient adherence risks in real time, empowering support teams to intervene before drop-off occurs and lowering costly attrition in both clinical and commercial settings.

Companies that remain tied to legacy CRMs are structurally incapable of competing at this level of speed, accuracy, and personalization. Legacy systems can log interactions, but they cannot orchestrate them in real time or ground AI outputs in unified, compliant data. As a result, organizations that delay migration are effectively ceding competitive ground.

Each month of postponement is another month in which leaders widen their advantage – not only in operational efficiency but also in stakeholder trust and scientific credibility. What starts as incremental productivity gains for early adopters compounds into market leadership, while laggards face a steeper, riskier climb to catch up.

Compliance

Where AI introduces risk, compliance is never far behind. Regulatory expectations in life sciences are rising: transparency mandates under the Inflation Reduction Act (U.S.) and expanding global requirements for real-world evidence are tightening the bar for governance and reporting. Legacy CRMs, reliant on manual oversight and bolt-on compliance modules, were never designed to withstand this level of scrutiny.

Salesforce has taken a different approach by embedding compliance into the foundation of Agentfoce Life Sciences:

• Zero data retention, ensuring sensitive HCP and patient information is never stored beyond its intended use.
• Toxicity detection, preventing unsafe or biased outputs.
• Grounding in validated sources, guaranteeing AI-generated insights are tied back to approved enterprise or regulatory datasets.

This design makes AI not a compliance risk but a compliance enabler – strengthening auditability and reducing human error instead of creating new vulnerabilities.

By contrast, delaying migration leaves companies dependent on legacy systems where compliance is manual, reactive, and increasingly brittle. In an environment where AI adoption itself is under regulatory scrutiny, that gap becomes a liability. Salesforce underscored this at the Agentforce Life Sciences product launch: compliance by design, not as an afterthought, is now the standard.

Missing the strategic shift

Too often, CRM modernization is framed as a technical project – a matter of migrating data, retraining users, and ensuring business continuity. But in reality, this is a once-in-a-decade strategic inflection point for life sciences companies. The move from legacy systems to Agentforce Life Sciences is a rare opportunity to rethink how customer engagement, compliance, and data strategy intersect across the enterprise.

CRM modernization is about far more than system performance. Salesforce’s platform enable companies to harmonize their data, processes, and operating models across geographies, connecting commercial, medical, and patient-facing teams within a single ecosystem. This unified architecture enables:

• Global consistency with local adaptability – shared data models and AI-ready infrastructure ensure every market operates from the same foundation while retaining flexibility to meet local regulatory needs.
• Cross-functional orchestration – commercial, medical, and patient teams gain access to the same 360-degree customer view, powered by Salesforce Data Cloud.
• Next-generation engagement – Agentforce allows companies to scale AI-driven interactions responsibly, ensuring each engagement is compliant, contextual, and evidence-based.

Therefore, delaying the migration risks missing the strategic shift underway across the industry. Salesforce’s launch of Agentforce Life Sciences represents a new alignment between data unification, AI-first engagement, and compliant automation. Companies that move early will not only de-risk their operations but also define the new standard of commercial excellence.

Future-proofing vs. falling behind

Being the pharma CRM system of the future, Agentforce Life Siences also has some additional, distinct features legacy CRMs lack.

Composability. Pharma CRMs must now be modular, extensible, and configurable without destabilizing the core. This flexibility is critical in life sciences, where requirements shift constantly. Cell and gene therapies demand specialized patient tracking, rare diseases require tailored engagement models, and regulatory frameworks vary across geographies. Legacy CRMs struggle here: adding features meant customizing rigid data models, creating brittle systems weighed down with technical debt. Salesforce’s CRM platform breaks that cycle, with an architecture that supports modular extensions, low-code/no-code configuration, and API-first integration. Organizations can add new capabilities quickly, without risking stability.

Ecosystem continuity. While companies have relied on branded CRMs, the underlying Salesforce platform has powered much of the industry’s CRM infrastructure for over a decade. The strategic fork today is clear: abandon that foundation, or stay within it and adopt the next-gen CRM – a platform that combines Salesforce’s enterprise reach with life sciences–specific data models and AI-native capabilities. Continuity brings a major advantage: Salesforce’s global ecosystem of system integrators, ISVs, and industry partners ensures interoperability and sustained access to innovation in analytics, integration, and compliance automation.

Takeaways from Dreamforce and the Agentforce Life Sciences launch

Everything outlined above was echoed – and decisively reinforced – at Dreamforce 2025, where Salesforce officially launched Agentforce Life Sciences. The key message was clear: this was not another incremental product release, but a structural shift in how the life sciences industry will engage patients, providers, and partners over the next decade.

AI as the enterprise foundation

Dreamforce 2025 revolved around AI. Salesforce framed its vision for the future as that of an AI-powered enterprise – where every workflow, every function, and every decision is infused with trusted intelligence. For life sciences, this meant one thing: the CRM should no longer be a database for recording interactions, but the central nervous system of intelligent engagement across the value chain.

A unified, AI-native ecosystem

Salesforce positioned Agentforce Life Sciences as the first unified, compliant, AI-native platform that spans the entire life sciences value chain – from clinical to medical to commercial to patient services. This end-to-end model replaces fragmented systems with a single intelligent ecosystem, allowing organizations to orchestrate engagement and decision-making across functions, not just within them.

AI that acts

Agentforce Life Sciences is effectively the world’s first large-scale agentic CRM platform -where AI operates autonomously across domains such as sales, medical, patient support, and content operations. Instead of serving as a passive assistant, these agents use real-world signals and unified data to recommend next-best actions, summarize scientific insights, or trigger compliant workflows in real time.

From silos to harmonization

The CRM consolidates that fragmentation through Salesforce Data Cloud, creating one harmonized data layer that supports consistent, compliant engagement across HCPs, patients, and institutions. It’s not just about efficiency; it’s about enabling truly global, cross-functional collaboration without losing local nuance.

Momentum and adoption

Over 80 life sciences organizations have already chosen Agentforce Life Sciences for their clinical and patient service operations and are now evaluating it for HCP engagement. Among them are major names like Fresenius Kabi, Pfizer, Takeda, Haleon, Tandem Diabetes Care, AbbVie, and Fidia – all of whom see CRM modernization as a strategic investment, not an IT project. Fresenius made its decision over a year ago.

The next horizon: Regulated Content Management (RCM)

Salesforce also announced Regulated Content Management (RCM) – launching next year as a foundational platform capability with modular apps like MLR built on top. This is especially significant for pharma companies navigating complex review and approval workflows. It signals Salesforce’s intent to make LSC not just a CRM replacement, but the central engagement and compliance platform for the industry.

The big takeaway

Dreamforce confirmed what analysts and early adopters already knew: delaying CRM migration is not merely a technical decision – it’s a missed strategic inflection point. The shift to LSC represents an industry-wide realignment around data unification, composability, and AI-native engagement. For the life sciences sector, adopting LSC isn’t a software choice. It’s the foundation for the next decade of intelligent, compliant, and connected commercialization.

To help organizations prepare for this shift, Avenga has launched a proprietary Migration Readiness Assessment technical accelerator. It offers a straightforward way to evaluate CRM complexity before migration begins – detecting hidden dependencies and mapping data structures. Contact us, and we’ll help you understand what it will take to transition smoothly into Salesforce’s AI-native future.