Veeva R&D and Quality Summit 2025
AI, Costless Compliance, and the Future of Embedded Quality
September 12, 2025
The 2025 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit brought together more than 3,000 industry leaders in Boston to discuss the future of quality, compliance, and digital transformation. With over 875 participants in the Quality Zone alone, this year’s event underscored the growing role of quality in driving operational
excellence across life sciences manufacturing. LNS Research extends its thanks to Veeva for the opportunity to participate again in this gathering.
CEO Message
Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner, in his opening remarks, shared a much-anticipated entry into AI for Veeva. His announcement reflected a natural progression of the company’s long-term strategy: embedding agentic AI into the Vault Platform to handle repetitive tasks, connect processes across functions, and boost productivity.
Equally important, Gassner reinforced Veeva’s commitment to simplification and standardization across applications like Veeva QualityDocs and Veeva QMS. This isn’t just about efficiency — it is the foundation of what LNS Research calls “costless compliance:” designing processes and systems so that compliance happens automatically, as an outcome of standardized best practices rather than as an added layer of overhead. By aligning AI with industry standardization, Veeva is taking steps to make compliance seamless, embedded, and value-creating for quality leaders.
Attendance and Major Announcements
Attendance grew significantly, with the Quality track alone surpassing last year’s record. Veeva spotlighted major product advancements across Veeva QualityDocs, QMS, Training, Validation Management, LIMS, and Batch Release. It also provided a clear roadmap for AI-enabled quality agents that will begin with automated narrative summaries, document translation, and deviation insights.
A particularly notable announcement was Veeva Basics, a lighter-weight offering designed for emerging and mid-size companies. By reducing implementation complexity and service costs, Basics provides a streamlined entry point into Veeva’s ecosystem for organizations earlier in their digital quality journey. For labs and manufacturers with limited resources, this creates a faster path to value — without sacrificing scalability as their operations mature.
Updates we want to see more about at this event
Proactive Quality: A recurring theme throughout the Summit was the aspiration to move quality from reactive oversight to proactive quality assurance. Veeva’s early AI agents — focused on summarization, translation, and complaint management — are valuable first steps. Still, the real opportunity lies in building capabilities that anticipate risks and prevent issues before they occur. This evolution aligns with LNS Research’s Delivered Quality concept, delivering consistent customer outcomes.
Frictionless Work Execution: Equally important is Veeva’s investment in making work frictionless. The document viewer alone sees over 300,000 daily users, many of them operators and shop floor staff whose experience is shaped by how easily they can access SOPs and records. Reducing friction for these high-volume users — through persona-based interfaces, simplified workflows, and AI-driven guidance — represents a major opportunity to improve both compliance and productivity. Future developments here will be crucial in turning “costless compliance” into a daily reality for those closest to the work.
Session Details
• Quality Keynote: Quality Cloud President Mike Jovanis opened the Quality keynote by reflecting on the growth of the Quality Zone: from a small breakout of 25 attendees nine years ago to more than 875 this year, supported by over 600 Veeva Quality customers. He described the evolution of Veeva Quality Cloud, which now includes more than 9 products spanning QA, QC, and training — all designed to unify previously siloed processes and deliver outcomes such as faster change control, improved inspection readiness, streamlined batch disposition, and paperless lab operations. Jovanis then provided product updates across several key areas:
⮚ QualityDocs: Now enhanced with a streamlined document viewer, improved action homepages, and automated content association via process navigator.
⮚ QMS: Ongoing investments in change control, quality event suggestions, regulatory integration, and Audit Room for cloud-enabled inspection collaboration.
⮚ Training: Seat-time reductions through dynamic refresher training, microlearning, and AI-enabled translation of training content.
He closed by emphasizing Veeva’s continued reinvestment in mature products while driving innovation in newer areas like LIMS, Validation Management, Batch Release, and AI.
Other session highlights
• QMS Roadmap: Showcased new features, such as Annual Product Quality Review (APQR) automation, complaint-to-safety connectivity, and AI-driven narrative generation for deviations and investigations.
• Batch Release Roadmap: Introduced automated genealogy checks, regulatory disposition checks, and supplier qualification checks, positioning Veeva as uniquely able to tie manufacturing and regulatory insights together.
Where should Veeva go next?
Veeva’s AI roadmap highlights important early use cases such as summarization, translation, and complaint management. These natural starting points deliver immediate value while laying the groundwork for more advanced capabilities. How quickly these AI foundations will expand into proactive and predictive quality remains to be seen — areas like real-time shop floor insights, predictive risk monitoring, and cross-industry intelligence sharing. Governance and adoption considerations will also be key as the industry evaluates how to best embed AI into regulated environments at scale.
Another opportunity is the integration of data aggregated across Quality applications. Without insights from Quality application data, Veeva risks ceding ground to other major players, positioning Quality Data Architectures as the backbone of predictive and proactive quality. If Veeva were to combine its unique industry datasets with Agentic AI, it could present a compelling alternative to solutions from established QDA vendors — and potentially leapfrog competitors by embedding predictive intelligence directly into everyday quality workflows.
Recommendations for Veeva
1. Move from Reactive to Predictive Quality
Veeva’s initial AI roadmap centers on summarization, translation, and complaint handling — all valuable but primarily rear-facing. The next leap will come from using Agentic AI in combination with the wealth of quality-related data from more than 600 customers to enable predictive quality: detecting early risk signals in manufacturing, anticipating deviations, and guiding proactive interventions before issues surface. This would position Veeva not only as an enabler of compliance but as a driver of quality as intelligence.
Why this matters: Life Sciences is under pressure to speed therapies to market, ease regulatory processes, accelerate batch release, and improve right-first-time performance. Predictive quality capabilities would allow manufacturers to shift from costly firefighting to data-driven prevention, reducing compliance risk and operational waste.
2. Create a Backbone for a Quality Data Architecture
The industry is looking for alternatives to Quality Data Architectures promoted by larger platform vendors. By integrating quality and manufacturing data from across its Quality applications, such as QMS, Batch Release, and LIMS, Veeva could create a differentiated, embedded quality backbone that connects product, process, and data seamlessly across the value chain. This would require Veeva’s customers to be on board with using data across Quality applications for shared insights that can help the industry.
Why this matters: Competing vendors are positioning integrated data platforms as the foundation for digital transformation. Veeva has a unique opportunity to leap ahead by embedding regulatory and quality data into daily processes, ensuring decisions are both compliant and predictive. This would strengthen Veeva’s position as an application provider and as the platform for quality data intelligence.
3. Accelerate Simplification and Standardization with AI to Achieve Costless Compliance
The concept of costless compliance — where compliance happens automatically as part of well-designed processes — will only be realized if Veeva continues to simplify and standardize across its product suite. Embedding AI into these standardized workflows can automate routine tasks, guide decision-making in real time, and eliminate variation across sites. This combination of simplification, standardization, and AI enablement directly aligns with LNS Research’s Embedded Quality vision, where compliance is not an add-on but an integrated, value-creating outcome.
Why this matters: Compliance activities have traditionally been resource-intensive, consuming time without always adding business value. By embedding AI into standardized processes, Veeva can transform compliance from a manual obligation into an intelligent system that ensures accuracy, consistency, and real-time risk awareness. This shift makes compliance less costly and more strategic — turning it into a driver of continuous improvement and innovation.
For organizations evaluating Veeva, the message from this Summit is clear: the company is steadily expanding beyond compliance management into a future where AI and standardization converge to deliver costless compliance and embedded quality. What differentiates Veeva is the way it listens to and incorporates customer feedback like no other software vendor. This commitment positions Veeva as a long-term partner for manufacturers seeking to meet regulatory requirements and transform quality into a strategic advantage.