If you look at what we're doing in Healthcare and Life Sciences specifically, we are all in. Our boats have been burned.

It was never actually in doubt that Salesforce was indeed “all in” on cracking open the Life Sciences market, particularly following the ending of its long‑term alliance with Veeva Systems. As noted last year when the relationship moved from separation to divorce, the two are now out there competing for replacement deals right across the hugely lucrative Health and Life Sciences (HLS) sector – and it’s a battle royale that might well become increasingly bloody. Salesforce Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milana rattled the sabre post‑Dreamforce last year when he declared:

“For many years, we had this great partner that we basically partnered and capturing that opportunity. We were capturing the outside commercial side. They were very focused on the commercial side and the clinical side. And then 1.5 years ago, they decided to compete head‑to‑head with us, and we decided to build solutions to compete with them, and the results have been incredible…We are gaining market share from Veeva like there is no tomorrow. We've already – in addition to the Big 20 [HLS customers], there are still many in the air and they are reviewing. They all want the Salesforce platform…There’s more than 100 Life Sciences customers that have selected Life Science Cloud and are moving off Veeva, and we are just getting started.”

Or as his boss, CEO Marc Benioff, put it even more bluntly:

“We’re taking market share from Veeva. They even had to talk about it in their earnings call that they lost all these deals to us, but they have not seen the losses yet that are coming.”

Fight, fight, fight!

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OK, so it’s going to be a nasty fight, that much is clear, emphasised again by the opening remarks above from Salesforce’s EVP of Regulated Industries Mark Sullivan as the good and the great of the HLS sector gathered for JP Morgan’s annual Healthcare Conference. His argument:

“This is a $4.7 billion ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) business at Salesforce, which we think is simply extraordinary, and it continues to outgrow our industry businesses, outgrow the rest of Salesforce and we’ll continue to do so in my opinion…We’re very blessed to be working with six of the Top 10 pharmaceutical companies in this space, which we think is very important. We also believe that the Top 10 [itself] is sort of a disproportionate amount of the industry, so it’s very important to win the top of that stack and to shape our future and our road map for all of our products working with those companies intimately to make sure we understand where they’re going.”

As for the competition from you‑know‑who – or others – Salesforce rises above it it seems as Sullivan insists:

“We’re not interested necessarily in competing with other apps [as in] what app does a competitor have and what app do we have? We would like to transform this industry. We think technology is in a place right now where this is revolutionary – and I use that word very intentionally. It will change how we all work in a very meaningful way.

The analogy I’ve used repeatedly is if you showed up at work tomorrow and you didn’t know how to use a laptop and you had no idea how to use a cell phone, you’d be pretty compromised. I don’t think you’d do so well, right? If you show up at work pretty soon and you don’t understand how to harness AI in a safe way, it’s going to be as if you showed up without your cell phone. You better know what you’re doing and you better know how to do it in a really safe way, and we couldn’t be more committed to that transformational moment in this industry because we think it’s purposeful.”

Changes

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Salesforce can point to meeting the changes in the sector head‑on, he argues:

“If you look at where we are, we’ve been very focused on commercial and the growth that we’ve had in Life Sciences, but we really want to emphasize the entirety of the supply chain. We want to understand how drugs are found, how they’re manufactured, how they’re distributed. We want to make sure that every aspect of this is changed. We think we can go faster. We think we can be more efficient. We can get higher levels of adoption. We can get through trials more successfully. We can serve members and customers more effectively. There’s so much that can be done that frankly could not have been done in prior eras where we didn’t have this opportunity to use agentic AI.”

Now, yes, of course, it’s Salesforce in 2026 so all roads lead to Agentforce – and the HLS space is no exception where, argues Sullivan, it’s the firm’s agentic focus that is appealing to customers looking to upgrade their systems:

“Technology is something always that we’ve gone to. You log on to your app, figure out what’s deterministic in that app. Now there’s nondeterministic reasonable agents that can reason and take action for you. We think that has to reset how you think about this industry. We think that has to re‑set how you think about technology. And bluntly, in this industry, you might not be the best technicians in the world. There’s a lot of chemists, there’s a lot of doctors. You’re in the business of saving lives, which is critical. We want you to focus on that. We want to make sure that we’re thoughtful about how you handle the technology and how you handle this unique once‑in‑a‑lifetime innovation wave that you have to take advantage of or you’re going to fall behind.

People are choosing us for that, not because we have every feature that a competitor might have, but because we have those features and we’re taking you to an agentic future. That’s the difference, and understanding that this is a moment in time that is revolutionary from an agentic perspective. If you don’t think that way and you just want to place an application with an application, Salesforce probably isn’t for you. That’s not what we’re looking to do. We’d like to transform the industry using the technologies that are available.”

At last year’s JP Morgan conference, talk of agentic AI was very much in its infancy. Things have moved on rapidly according to Sullivan:

“When we sat here a year ago, I’m not sure everybody understood this very well. Just the basic computer science of it, they didn’t understand it very well. There’s been a lot of money spent. There’s been a lot of experimentation. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly associated with that, and we think we have an answer that’s very compelling, safe and trusted to drive some meaningful change in this industry.”

And there’s a wider societal angle here as well as a commercial one, he adds:

“Finding care providers is more difficult than ever, and we think this can solve that problem. We think any experience that you have, with any procedure you might have, the prep, the post, the follow‑up, we all depend on our spouses to do those things. That’s not necessarily the right way to do it. Why? Think of the old medicine where your doctor might call you before, make sure you did all the things that you need to do before your procedure and might follow up after to make sure you took the right medicine and didn’t find your way back to the emergency room. We think agents can do that. And we think we can do that better than anything that’s ever been rendered before. And we think that keeps people out of the emergency room. We think that changes the healthcare economy in a meaningful way.”

Life Sciences customers helping Salesforce shape its industry‑specific pitch here. Sullivan cites Fresenius and its re‑imagining of how reps show up to healthcare providers and changing how they sell:

“Imagine showing up and having an agent army with you. They can keep you deeply informed about your customer and their needs and helping execute against what you’re hearing. So we’re designing that with them. We’re very proud of it. They’ve got four disparate business units that we’re going to bring together. They’ll all operate on one platform now. So that takes a lot of confusion out of their business, makes it very clean and clear on how they operate and lets them show up very differently for their customers.”

What about the other team?

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Now, it might be noted in all of that that at no point has the V‑word passed Sullivan’s lips. That’s sound enough ‘art of war’ – why give your big rival the oxygen of publicity? And besides, Veeva was also present at the JP Morgan gig to pitch its own wares, with CFO Brian Van Wagener insisting that his firm had the upper hand:

“We are getting really good at migrating customers from Veeva CRM on Salesforce over to the Vault CRM product. We’ve got more than 115 customers live, including two Top 20s that collectively are live in every major region, which is really hard to do. These are very complex products, and they differ greatly by region. The CRM for Japan is different than the CRM for Europe, which is different than the CRM for North America. Even within the United States, it can be different state by state. So very complex products. It’s not a horizontal CRM with a Life Sciences sticker. It’s a very deep product set.”

The successes are mounting up, he argues:

“Overall, 10 of the top 20 bio‑pharmas have committed to Veeva and all of those commitments are global. One note there is that Novo and Roche, which had previously been Veeva customers only for their US CRM have now committed to Veeva globally, moving away from the OCE (Orchestrated Customer Engagement) platform onto Veeva’s Vault CRM product.”

There’s some tricky messaging that needs to be in play here as Veeva is keen to emphasise that CRM does not make up the majority of its business any longer, although it remains ‘our home state’, as Van Wagener puts it:

“Many people still think of us as the pharma CRM company because that’s where we started back in 2007. But when you think of Veeva 10 years ago, CRM was about 75 % of our business. It’s about 20 % of our revenue today. And in 2030, our expectation has been that it will be about 10 % of our business. And so we expect to remain the clear market leader in CRM.

On the commercial and CRM side, Salesforce is our pre‑dominant competitor. Within EDC (Electronic Data Capture) and some of our clinical areas, we pre‑dominantly compete against Medidata. But I think what’s a little bit unique about what we do is that the majority of companies we compete against are very small niche providers. They’re not industry‑cloud types of providers. They’re not competing with us on multiple products. So it’s a very large number of competitors that we see in the market and the competitive dynamics differ a little bit product area by product area.”

As for the increasingly tough struggle with Salesforce for hearts and minds, Van Wagener concludes with one last rattle of the Veeva sabre:

“We’re already hearing that Salesforce projects are running into difficulty, so we expect that some of the customers that have selected Salesforce will ultimately come back to Veeva over time. Our expectation is that about 14 of the top 20 would select Veeva initially and then more will select Veeva over time, with some of those win‑backs. So our focus right now is on getting customers live, happy innovating in the product bringing all the benefits of Veeva’s AI, which is live and generally available in CRM today and making customers really successful on Vault CRM.”

My take

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Bring it on!