How next-generation CRM will reshape the life sciences commercial model

CRM systems have allowed life sciences companies to make significant advances in specific areas:

Yet the discussions with industry representatives suggest the industry’s CRM maturity remains low. “If you listen to the spiel from the top life sciences companies on where we’re at, when you look under the hood we’re not there,” one respondent told us. Respondents see their life sciences peers facing the same issues: “We’re all under similar limitations,” noted one, observing that if they want to identify CRM leading practices to emulate, “I look outside of the industry.” In particular, respondents noted these challenges:

1. Regulatory barriers

The tightly regulated nature of the life sciences sector is one commonly acknowledged constraint: “I've used CRM across many other industries; because of the regulated industry that healthcare is, we can't fully leverage the offerings of the majority of these platforms.”

2. Lack of confidence in tech implementation

Beyond regulatory restrictions, respondents highlight the industry's self-policing, safety-first focused approach to compliance. As one respondent observed, “There’s always some skepticism about any new technology — how it’s going to help us and whether one should rely on that instead of humans.”

3. Failure to form the right partnerships

Companies are prone to solving the problems internally, but as one respondent admitted, “We have to be more comfortable in using third parties to help.” External CRM providers emerge as critical partners for the industry.

Fixing these problems has been optional for the industry in the past; but multiple factors are now bringing the industry to a decision point.

Why are customer needs changing in 2025?

Pharma companies may have been slow to change their CRM model — but now their customers are changing regardless. As one physician reported, pharma rep “visits have noticeably declined in recent years.” This drop is a signal of key shifts in how decision-making in healthcare works, which have already made the traditional model less relevant.

Healthcare systems are evolving at different rates in different geographies, but certain patterns are evident, with increased productivity goals and increased time pressures, physicians have less time to engage with pharma, and little appetite to consume long-form content. Moreover, the restructuring of healthcare systems and processes — including developments such as the increased role of payers in reimbursement decisions, and the consolidation of smaller partner practices into larger provider networks — are reducing the emphasis on individual decision-makers.

With these changes, the industry needs different types of content and alternative approaches to engagement. To adapt to the realities of physician work practices, pharma needs to prioritize simple, focused content, delivered via whatever convenient combination of channels can offer an intuitive, accessible user experience for the physician. Messaging also needs to reach beyond the individual physician to address multiple decision-makers in a coordinated way.

This comprehensive reformatting of the commercial model may seem ambitious, but with the power of AI, the means to revolutionize existing practices are already available. Physicians are already taking matters into their own hands here, placing less emphasis on engagements with sales teams and turning directly to AI. As one clinician told us, “Unlike in the past, where physicians had to read and analyze research papers themselves, they can now access summarized findings and clear explanations through digital platforms and AI tools.”

AI’s vast potential — to integrate data, generate richer, predictive insights, and turn these into dynamic, personalized content to drive better clinician engagement — is still relatively untapped. The role of AI technologies will only grow in importance, and the industry needs to use these capabilities to redesign its CRM model and redefine its place in the healthcare ecosystem. AI will be the critical catalyst for CRM transformation, and a key enabler in allowing the industry to address these fast-evolving customer needs.

How will AI’s exponential acceleration disrupt CRM?

Though the idea of AI is at least 80 years old,¹ the technology is moving at unprecedented speed, and as it converges with digital customer platforms, it can push the trajectory of CRMs onto a different, accelerated pathway — replacing linear evolution with exponential revolution. The industry is aware this shift is coming: “I 100% believe that there will be a few actual humans and a lot more AI [in the future],” one pharma respondent told us. “The entire industry right now is trying to figure out how to harness AI.”

As AI and CRM converge to form the “AI-CRMs” of the future, four main areas of potential transformation emerge from our discussions:

Integration

Today companies still lack integration of existing data, solutions and platforms, working with “tech stacks and systems that aren’t talking to each other.” Now, as one respondent told us, the goal is “full circle connectivity.” Ultimately, AI promises enterprise-wide integration for companies, better alignment with their stakeholders, and better holistic understanding of health and disease. One clinician notes that providers want the industry’s help in using AI to drive clinical progress, “Pharmaceutical companies are already advancing personalized medicine, but there is an opportunity to go deeper, especially by integrating side effect profiles and considering both physical and mental health indicators.”

Insights

Integration can enable the industry to move from amassing data to creating “actionable insights that we can base business decisions on, in real time, on the fly,” one respondent said. Physicians are also excited that AI is helping them align with industry: “AI has the potential to significantly enhance collaboration,” noted one, ensuring “pharmaceutical companies can detect patterns earlier,” particularly around safety data, “analyzing early signals and generating preliminary insights; this would act as an early warning system, helping both parties identify emerging concerns and respond more proactively.”

Individualization

CRM technology is already helping companies to provide accessible content and tailored messaging, but respondents anticipate integrated insights offering deeper capabilities: “Understanding where our customers are, what they're seeing, building our marketing and sales perspective around them.” Clinicians too expect richer and more relevant future relationships with industry: “Future engagements with pharmaceutical representatives will likely focus less on general product overviews and more on in-depth discussions of specific cases,” with “collaborative and case-driven” interactions; something “particularly critical in complex areas, where treatment effects are highly individualized.”

Innovation

As it enlarges the industry’s understanding of its customers and patients and the real-world unmet needs and challenges they face, AI-CRM can drive innovation. Companies can “feed insights back into the way that manufacturers are talking to their customers and how we're able to innovate new medicines based on areas of unmet need; it brings us full circle in terms of what we can do.” Clinicians also see the potential for AI-CRM to close the loop and help them align with companies on solving unmet needs: “Addressing these gaps will require collaboration among healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies.”

AI can push CRM into new areas of the value chain, advancing it from a tactical tool for improving administration and other processes to a transformative strategic catalyst across the enterprise.

What strategy does the industry need today to shape the CRM of tomorrow?

Turbocharged by AI, CRM systems hold out the prospect of enabling all of these transformations and more for biopharma. At this critical point, the industry needs to keep its attention on the road ahead. For any biopharma company opting for one CRM platform or another is less critical than understanding the direction and speed of travel the technology will enable.

CRM technology will keep accelerating forward, and companies will need to keep adapting to their commercial strategies around the new possibilities it opens up. A little further into the future, AI-driven CRM platforms may need to be thought of less as GPS systems and more as autonomous self-driving cars. With agentic AI engines empowering physicians’ access to insights and content via self-service systems, the role of biopharma companies could shift away from direct engagement with physicians toward shaping the data and materials that help fuel the agentic engine.

With these transformative options ahead, the companies that manage to stay on the road will be those that can find the right partners, the right model and the right governance to succeed in this fast-moving landscape. In particular, biopharma companies need to consider:

1. The right partners

Biopharma companies cannot just “stay in their lane”. They need to reach outside the industry’s traditional areas of knowledge to find the right tech and data companies and other partners and solutions providers to secure their place into the fast lane of CRM transformation.

2. The right model

Biopharma companies will need to keep evolving their model of who their customer is today, individual clinicians already have a reduced role, as a network of payers, regulators and formularies become increasingly involved in decision-making; in the future, patients too will have increased input, and companies need CRM strategies that can adapt to this wider understanding of the customer.

3. The right regulation

Biopharma companies need to reframe how they work with the regulatory layer of the industry to help cocreate a governance model that can support the greater use of data and AI to deliver better outcomes; the industry needs to focus on regulation not as a constraint, but a driver of change.

Today, CRM is already providing biopharma with tools that, used intelligently, can transform the legacy commercial model for the better. While some of the more dramatic potential changes and challenges that CRM transformation will bring for the biopharma industry lie further ahead, companies need to take this opportunity to rethink their customer strategy and plot their course toward the future.

James Evans, EY Global Life Sciences Lead Analyst and Tanushree Jain, EY Global Life Sciences Senior Analyst, EY Insights, contributed to this article.

Summary

Pharmaceutical companies need to update their CRM strategies. Key areas for change include integrating AI, navigating new regulations, connecting with a broader network of stakeholders, partnering with tech innovators, and adopting a forward-looking mindset. AI will play a central role, but human input remains essential. The future will involve a more interconnected healthcare ecosystem, driven by data and AI, which can lead to better patient outcomes and innovation. Companies must act now to prepare for these changes and achieve future growth.