Salesforce Inc. has been at the forefront of the race to adopt agentic artificial intelligence over the past six months or so, with its Agentforce platform spearheading a push to accelerate automation across dozens of industries.

Now, the company is turning its attention to the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors with its new Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement platform, which aims to transform the way life sciences companies interact with healthcare professionals.

The platform provides life sciences companies with a dedicated suite of tools they can use to build specialized “AI agents” that can augment the work of humans. AI agents are all about automation, designed to handle many of the more time-consuming and mundane tasks traditionally performed by human workers, such as data entry, reviewing tickets, answering phone calls, drafting reports, responding to emails and so on.

Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement can automate business processes across sales, marketing, medical science liaison, screening investigators and reimbursement teams. Salesforce said the platform, which will become generally available in October, aims to bring together the full lifecycle of commercial, medical and market access teams with patient services and clinical trials.

It’s built on the company’s core agentic development platform, Agentforce, and aims to transform the way these people work through a more intuitive, conversational interface. Through this, it can enhance almost every work process with AI, with voice-activated account preparation, territory ratings, podcast-style meeting recaps and more, accessible over the web or mobile.

Streamlined engagement for healthcare pros

Salesforce said Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement aims to solve a critical problem in the life sciences and healthcare industries, citing a study by McKinsey Co. published earlier this year, which found that the average physician has 75% more information per drug to parse through than they did just a decade ago. A second study by Deloitte Touche Ltd. shows that more than a third of healthcare professionals believe they’re being spammed by pharmaceutical and medical device companies, making their lives even harder. By employing a digital labor force, healthcare companies can cut through this noise and find the most effective new drugs and treatments they need faster.

The conversational experience takes the shape of a now-familiar AI assistant, which allows life sciences and healthcare professionals to simply ask for information about new drugs and treatments, and access it in a single pane, rather than clicking and swiping their way through multiple pages and tabs.

Salesforce said healthcare professionals can use the platform to get faster responses to any medical inquiry, or request samples or training materials in real-time via any channel. The platform integrates with Slack and other messaging platforms and can search across thousands of medical diaries or internal documents to respond to a query about administration techniques, counterindications, efficacy, dosage and so on.

It also integrates with healthcare platforms such as athenahealth and Viz.ai, so physicians can notify patients at the point of care about recommended clinical trials and financial assistant programs.

AI assisted sales

The mobile-first nature of Life Sciences Cloud for Customer Engagement means sales representative can access it from any location at any moment, whether they’re in a hospital basement or remote clinic and quickly review their engagement histories, relevant news and related trends. For instance, they might ask it for a hands-free narrative of previously logged interactions specific to the client they’re dealing with, complete with recommended content and follow-up actions.

When a field rep takes a call, it automatically logs each call and creates a note that summarizes the conversation, and in the event that a healthcare professional cancels an appointment, it will reschedule and then dynamically route them to the nearest potential client.

It also provides access to instant insights. So if a rep is currently meeting with a healthcare professional, it will listen in and highlight the most impactful talking points and approved research. These insights will be delivered via integrated and interactive Tableau dashboards, with visibility provided across all channels. Should the platform identify a surgical inventory shortage or delays in manufacturing, it will automatically find the next-best alternative, if appropriate.

Meanwhile, reimbursement managers can use the platform to teach healthcare professionals about any copay changes or alterations in insurance coverage, which can help to boost patient adoption.

Automated compliance

As always with Salesforce, there’s a big focus on ensuring the platform is compliant, which is especially important in a sensitive industry like healthcare, and the company has gone all out to achieve it.

It inherits Salesforce’s foundational Trust Layer to protect sensitive data and ensure that any AI responses or insights are grounded in reliable information, while ensuring adherence to compliance mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and General Data Protection Regulation.

Not only is it compliant by design, but it also helps to validate this. This is enabled through an integrated, pre-validated engine with automated test evidence and “validation-as-a-service” module, which replaces the extensive paperwork traditionally associated with compliance checks. It catalogs audit trails to ensure they can easily be tracked and traced, with consent captured using 21 CFR Part 11-ready e-signatures to safeguard governance across in-person, virtual and hybrid visits.

Salesforce said a number of life sciences firms have tested the platform extensively ahead of its general availability. Fidia Pharma USA Inc. Chief Information Officer Emanuele Peron said the platform has dramatically improved access to treatments and enabled hundreds of patients to access life-saving or life-enhancing therapies faster than they previously could.

“By progressively unifying healthcare engagement and the quote-to-order cycle on a single complaint platform, we are building a scalable data foundation for omnichannel execution and AI-driven insights,” he said. “[It is] increasing the efficiency and agility of our commercial teams and strengthening relationships with healthcare professionals, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes.”

Images: Salesforce