In the dimly lit boardroom, the pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into place. The sharp-eyed detective of the market knew the stakes—pharma was at a crossroads, facing an unprecedented shift. The clues were all there: Veeva’s bold move, the rise of inbound marketing, and the quiet hum of AI in the background. But the real question is an unsolved mystery: Who would crack the code first and seize the future? Veeva, which was using Salesforce’s platform to power its own CRM, has decided to split and migrate all existing clients by 2025, and it powers 47 out of 50 top pharma companies worldwide. Some major changes are happening. Pharma martech vendors are finally looking towards #PharmaINBOUND. For a long time, since pharma started in the 19th century, the sales representative was the CORE. They would go and work the fields, the doctors, and do what they do best—SELL. What happened? Because of modern regulations and #COVID, the modern pharma sales force, especially in the USA and Europe, has transitioned to the Key Opinion Leader model, where the role of sales is mostly to influence rather than just sell. It made sense, because 1) after COVID, you could not meet doctors in person, and in-person sales decreased, and 2) everyone was pushed to do remote calls, and pharma management in many companies saw that comparable results could be achieved remotely without the expensive commute. To remind you, the pharma sales force, along with R&D, is the most expensive part of the equation. After all, pharma also runs a business. So my prediction is that to align with the new buyer model and mentality (buyer is in charge more than ever), the pharma industry is leaning towards more content, more indirect persuasion, inbound-led outbound, where the goal of the KOL is just to be one of the light touches meant to influence the buyer (in this case, HCPs) to take one decision or another. This changes the role of salespeople from being a CORE pillar to being one of the parts that sell. Decrease the dependence on the expensive human factor and create an omnichannel experience. In marketing, we say, you need at least 7 touches to close a customer. One of them could be a personal 1-1 visit. That is one of the steps, one of the most expensive ones. It is much easier to scale a digital campaign, adjust it, use AI to craft a compelling sequence, and base your next best action on the data AI provides. AI will certainly win here, and companies that use #AI will be winners! No doubt about this. Understandably, pharma wants to do this. Although many pharma companies are afraid of omnichannel, they must learn how to do it. One of our webinar participants at Platforce, Philip Vyt, is the guy who does #Omnichannel from scratch, and something tells me that very soon, there will be a high demand for Omnichannel experts. It’s probably a question of when everyone will wake up.