Inside Eli Lilly's Global CRM Partnership With Veeva

Eli Lilly's renewed global partnership with Veeva Systems’ Vault CRM System aims to leverage AI to deliver breakthrough medicines to more patients, more efficiently, while streamlining commercial operations at the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company. 

With the Vault CRM platform being rolled out across its global operations, the move extends an already established relationship between the pharma giant and the life sciences software provider, and signals growing industry confidence in AI-driven commercial platforms. 

“We are excited to expand our strategic work with Veeva by moving to Vault CRM,” says Giuseppe Firenze, Senior Vice President of Commercial Operations & HCP Engagement Hub at Eli Lilly. “Vault CRM will help Lilly bring our breakthrough medicines to more patients.”

From legacy system to AI-native model

Vault CRM is Veeva's next-generation CRM offering, positioned as the successor to the company's long-standing Veeva CRM product, which was built on Salesforce's infrastructure. 

The legacy system had powered pharmaceutical sales and field-engagement teams for more than a decade, but Veeva has been migrating its customer base toward Vault CRM since 2023 as the architecture for what it calls "agentic commercial" – an AI-native model for how life sciences companies plan, execute and measure interactions with healthcare providers. 

Writing on LinkedIn, Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva Systems, comments, “We’re honoured to work with Lilly as they create medicines that make life better for people around the world.”

He added that the two companies have worked together "over many years," framing the Vault CRM move as the next phase of a long-running relationship rather than a fresh procurement decision.

Industry-specific AI

The deal highlights how agentic AI has moved from frontier technology to established product fixture across life science enterprise software. 

Addressing this point, Peter also writes: “With 180+ customers live on Vault CRM in 100+ countries, it’s great to see how a deep product with the right industry-specific AI can deliver customer success.”

A key selling point of Veeva’s system is its Agentic Call Report, designed to automatically generate commercial evidence from field interactions and reduce time-consuming administrative tasks among commercial teams.

Instead of sales teams having to manually log call notes and follow-ups after every healthcare provider interaction, the tool is built to synthesise evidence automatically.

Eli Lilly’s continued tech push

The Veeva deal is just one piece of a much larger technology buildout at Eli Lilly. 

On the R&D side, the company has partnered with NVIDIA to build one of the industry's most powerful pharmaceutical-owned supercomputers, and deepened that alliance in January 2026 with a US$1bn, five-year AI co-innovation lab focused initially on drug discovery, with potential applications across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations.

Eli Lilly has also progressed its relationship with Insilico Medicine, moving from an initial 2023 software licensing deal to a 2026 agreement worth up to US$2.75bn for AI-discovered drug candidates.

More recently in June 2026, Eli Lilly took a strategic stake in Abridge, an AI clinical-documentation company also partnering with NVIDIA. 

The deals together highlight that the pharma giant is restructuring itself around AI infrastructure across clinical operations, manufacturing and commercial functions.