Veeva Systems Q1 2025 Earnings Call - Veeva Falcon Launches Agentic AI for Life Sciences

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan0: presentation, both of which are available on our website. With that, thank you for joining us, and I’ll turn the call over to Peter.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Thank you, Gunnar, and welcome everyone to the call. We had a strong start to the year, delivering results ahead of our guidance. Total revenue in the quarter was $883 million, with non-GAAP operating income of $395 million. Our execution continues strong across the business, and it’s an exciting time for Veeva and for life sciences overall as we execute against a clear vision for industry AI. We’ll now open up the call to your questions.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Joe Vruwink with Baird. Joe, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan4: Hi. Great. Thanks for taking my question this afternoon. I was hoping to go into a bit more detail on Veeva Falcon. This certainly seems more complex and consequential in scope. I think you call it disruptive in the remarks. Can you maybe expand on what this product is targeting and how you envision customers operating in drug development with maybe now this interplay between the Vault standard agents and Falcon?

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Hey, Joe. This is Peter. I’ll pick that one. Yeah, there’s a lot of things to unpack there. What you’re seeing is sort of the next chapter of Veeva in our industry cloud. We used to talk about applications, data, and consulting to make the industry more efficient and effective. Now we’re talking about software, AI, data, and consulting, right? Falcon specifically is at the agent layer, and that’s agentic labor. Fully replacing jobs that people used to do. People who used to do these jobs using our applications now will deliver the agentic labor to do that. It’s a big new area for Veeva. That is something we haven’t done before, and that’s why it’s disruptive. Those agents have to become users of our applications, which means our applications have to become very good in operating at a headless manner.

At the same time, we have agents inside of the Vault applications. That’s Vault AI inside of the applications. That’s where when people are actually using the application, because there’s definitely things that people still need to do in our applications, that’s where the AI agents can help them do it more efficiently. Much like you might use ChatGPT or Gemini at your work. Okay, that helps you do it more efficiently. For life sciences, because it’s kind of specific what they do and some of it is a bit standardized due to regulations and just efficiency concerns, some of those jobs or slices of people’s jobs, our agents will just do those for them. That’s never something that we set out to do when Veeva started. Why? Because there was not technology available. There was not probabilistic technology available to do this.

There was no AI that could do this. Now there is. That’s why you see Veeva leaning into this new market.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Brian, your line is now open.

Brian Peterson, Analyst, Raymond James: Hi, you guys. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe just to follow up on that. As we think about pharma appetite for AI applications more broadly, I’m curious what areas you think they’d lean into first, and how we should think about the transition from traditional SaaS applications to AI and pharma. Peter, I’d love to just get your perspective on that. Thanks, guys.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: I would say it’s not that they’re thinking mainly about transition from applications into AI applications. What they’re really leaning into is this new technical architecture, we call it the MAP architecture, of models, agents, and applications. The applications that they get from Veeva, they’re looking for them to be more efficient, to have AI in there and help the users. What they really want to get to be is an agentic biopharma, so that agents can do a lot of the work. The humans can do the more higher value work. Of course, to do that, they leverage models like Anthropic or Gemini.

To put it in perspective, I don’t know the exact number I should off the top of my head, but let’s just say there’s 100 million documents collected from clinical research sites around the world every year, having to do with clinical trials. They have to be checked for quality, and they have to be sorted into the right places. That’s work that agents can do. It’s difficult, specific work, but we can make agents that are very specific on that. Agents that take in a bunch of free text via email or other channels and have to sort it out to see, is this a product complaint? If so, how to handle that and categorize that. No, this is a adverse event. This is an issue with a medicine making somebody potentially ill. Okay, well, what is that illness? Is that a headache or a throbbing headache?

How serious is that? Is that involved in a clinical trial? What drug is that involved with? We will make agents to do that and to those very standard things, and this is an area where I’m enthused because Veeva can lead. This is where, just like for cloud applications, you get the very specific industry-specific cloud applications could add tremendous value if you went to the last mile and solved the thing. In industry-specific agents, agentic labor, we may be able to go the last mile and make specific agents that just do the thing for life sciences, because we’ll go to that last mile and make it work. We may make agents that are better safety case processors and more reliable than humans. That’s a heck of a lot of work, but we have a structural advantage to do that because we’re deep in life sciences.

We have the consulting in life sciences, and we have the applications that those agents can use. It’s the same reason why Claude is getting very good at Claude Code, because they have the agent, the coding agent, and they have the model, and they have two layers. We don’t have a model we use, but we have applications and the agents. That is a structural advantage, and I do want to emphasize again the consulting, because a lot of this is about change management.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer. Ken, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan5: Brian, I wanted to touch on the R&D business real quick. It looks like a really strong start to Q1, potentially kind of outpacing the full-year guide by a couple of points. Yet only raised the full year by $5 million. Can you provide some context into the rest of the year? Is that conservatism? Is there something that we’re not seeing around the corner there?

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Yeah. Hey, Ken. I think first off, we are really happy with the growth of R&D in Q1. It’s a healthy business overall in Dev Cloud and Quality Cloud. Very long way to go in that business. I think the main factor you’re seeing there is the same dynamic that we called out at the start of the year. Which is we’ve got a number of products that are very large, but are also early in their life cycle, eCOA, RTSM, EDC, Safety, LIMS. We’re seeing those products scale and grow, but they’re still early in their scaling, and you’re seeing that factor drive the full-year growth. Pleased with the progress that we’re making, with the momentum coming out of Q1 and what we see for the balance of the year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan. Alexei, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan: Thank you. Glad to hear you had another strong quarter for Crossix. What did you see in Crossix activity in the quarter in terms of demand and deal size, and maybe some verticals? How should we think about growth durability through the year? Specifically, what’s driving the share gains that you called out?

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan7: Yeah. Hey, Alexei, this is Paul. Really strong quarter with another continued strong quarter with Crossix. Just take a step back and think about the overall market. Digital is a very healthy end market. Pharma companies are spending more and more in the digital space because there’s more channels. They’re making more investments in those markets. That’s really good for Crossix over the long term. You’ll see fluctuations quarter by quarter, but it’s a really healthy market for us, and we are investing a lot in the product. I saw some of this at our summit. Where at our summit, we had announced a lot of new innovation with Crossix, measuring new channels like OpenEvidence, as an example, Meta. Those are things that we didn’t historically do.

We didn’t have to measure OpenEvidence before because it wasn’t a thing, and now it’s a thing, and Crossix is doing that. We’re innovating across the product in a really, really deep way, and that’s driving market share gains for us. Really pleased with the execution in Crossix and a lot of the progress we’re making, and I expect that to be a durable growth business for us over the long term.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with RBC. Rishi, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan9: Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my questions. Just wanted to drill a little bit more into Falcon. I think one thing that we’ve seen increasingly in this AI era versus the SaaS and cloud era is there’s more desire for customization, especially as a result of how flexible these tools have become. How do you think about the opportunity, not just to build your own custom Falcon agents to solve industry-specific problems, but also give your customers and your partners the ability to build heavily customized, heavily tailored solutions for the unique problems that they may have and kind of open up a little bit more of a platform story? Thanks so much.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Yeah, Rishi, this is Peter. For Falcon, the actual effort there is taking the path less traveled. That’s a platform for us to build and operate standard agents to actually solve the problem for the industry. It’s not really a platform for customers to develop their custom agents. For custom agents that live inside of our applications, of course, they can use Vault AI for that. For custom agents that are outside the applications, there are many agent-building tools, and they will dip into the Veeva applications operating in a headless manner. No, with Falcon, we’re not making AI tooling. We’re actually agentic labor to solve the problem. We are the believers in simplification and standardization of the industry, and that’s how the industry will grow, and Veeva will grow along with it.

I think, Rishi, the thing to parallel with is in 2012, for the first time, we laid out our first visions for Development Cloud. 2014, they got sharper. In 2016, it really became apparent what we were doing. We were trying to simplify and standardize and integrate the tech of the development area of the life sciences. That’s not anything that anybody asked us for, right? That’s a vision that we had, and that’s not anything that anybody’s tried to do before. Falcon is the same thing. It’s the same magnitude of disruptive innovation. It’s not giving tooling to people to design agents. This is to designing and operating the standard agents for the industry rather than the industry having to hire humans for those specific jobs. That way, humans can do the more important things, and the industry can produce more medicines at the end of the day.

If that’s how the industry grows, if they can get more of the right medicines to the right patients, because that doesn’t always happen today. If that can happen, that’s how the industry grows, and Veeva grows along with it. When we’re starting off something big like this, we always think we want to deliver $10 of value, and if we do that, it’s okay to take $5 for Veeva. If we’re delivering that much value. I think Falcon is just going to deliver value. It’s going to be great revenue for Veeva, but it’s going to deliver value far above and beyond that for the industry. That’s going to allow the industry to grow. It’s a disruptive thing. It’s not an incremental thing or a tool.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of David Windley with Jefferies. David, your line is now open.

David Windley, Analyst, Jefferies: Thanks. Good segue. Peter, thanks for taking my question. On Falcon, how are you pricing Falcon, and how are you deciding which labor roles to address or to attack with Falcon agents? Thanks.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Those are two great questions, I’ll take them in reverse order because the second one comes first. Which labor roles are we looking to do? I think the most ripe there ones are actually the simplest and the highest volume. Actually, when you look inside life sciences, those are the areas where they have a tendency, some of the companies, to do some outsourcing today already. That makes it also they’re used to outsourcing. Of course, they would outsource that to humans. In Falcon, the first ones we’re looking at are processing documentation involved with clinical trials, specifically the stuff that comes from clinical sites, the millions and millions, hundreds of millions, tens of millions of documents that come from research sites. They need to be collected, inspected for quality, categorized, the metadata pulled out of them, filed in the TMF the right way.

That’s one, the intake and control of documents. Another one is the safety cases that come in. The triage and the categorization and the collection of the safety cases. Those are the two main ones. We’ll also take on regulatory health authority correspondences because that’s another high-value one, and there’ll be more. In terms of how we’re going to charge for those, you can imagine, most likely, that Falcon will be charged by the document. Most likely. We haven’t fully decided that. You can imagine that safety will be most likely charged by the case. That’s how that is. First job I did as a very young kid outside the house picking strawberries in the field.

Bus would pick you up, you’d go out there, and they didn’t pay you by the hour, they paid you by the flat because that’s how that worked. If we had an agent picking strawberries, they’d be paid by the flat, right?

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew DiGasperi with BNP Paribas. Andrew, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas: Yeah. Thanks for this. I wanted to ask a clarifying point you mentioned earlier, just really on the Veeva Falcon, mentioning the displacement of potential roles at these larger firms. I’m just wondering, is there anything that you would consider timing-wise from an economics perspective? If, let’s say, these roles were to move in another direction, do you think it could potentially cannibalize some of the revenue that you get from those customers, or do you think it would be all accretive? Thanks.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Definitely all accretive because this is not a market we address today. We don’t play in that market today. This is not type of labor or work that we supply. It’s definitely going to be accretive. These agents, they need a system of record. You can’t operate them without a system of record. It definitely doesn’t cannibalize the systems of record. It’s an excellent question, but I actually hadn’t considered that. The future’s pretty difficult to predict, but as of now, I can’t see any potential for cannibalization.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Jailendra Singh with Truist Securities. Jailendra, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan2: Yeah, thank you, and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to better understand your comments about the guidance, assuming no significant changes in the macro environment. Clearly, Q1 results came in ahead of expectations. Did you see macro trends improving in Q1 versus when you gave guidance, and now you assume that guidance reflects trends remain at these levels? Just give us some flavor about in which areas you’re seeing pockets of strength. You called out cross-sales and areas where recovery is still ahead of us. Just give us a little bit of color about the macro development.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Hey, Jai Landry, this is Brian. I’ll take this one. I think overall what we see in the macro is an environment that is unchanged from when we gave guidance a few months ago. There are pockets that are always relatively stronger or weaker. Overall, the business is performing well, and our customers are performing really well. There are times of change that they go through, regulatory changes in their business and the patent profile of their portfolio, but that ebbs and flows, and they’re quite adept at navigating that change. We continue to see a strong and healthy end market that we’re selling into. We see that across the commercial as well as the Dev Cloud and Quality sides. We’re feeling good about that, and that’s all factored into our guidance for the balance of the year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of DJ Heine with Canaccord. DJ, your line is now open.

DJ Heine, Analyst, Canaccord: Hey, thank you. Paul, I’m curious if you’ve had any update on top 20 CRM migration decisions or discussions that you’re having. I guess related to that, I think at one point you had said, "Hey, we’re going to kind of pause on the commercial cross-sell opportunity and focus on migration first." When do you start leaning in on the cross-sell conversations with the customers that have made a decision to go with Vault?

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan7: Yeah. Hey, DJ. Yeah, I can give you an update. First, things are going really well, just broadly across Vault CRM. You probably just saw the last two weeks, we had a couple of big announcements with Teva and Merck KGaA. Those are significant wins. Obviously very proud they selected us globally. We’re going to make them very successful. Just maybe a clarifying point, we don’t actually count them in the top 20. We built a top 20 list about five years ago. We created it. We use it across all of our products. We haven’t changed it in the last five years. That list includes the largest 17 biopharmas, which generally don’t change year by year, then kind of the final three in the list, they change a little bit annually, we’ve kept our list the same.

Those final three are Astellas, Biogen, and Daiichi Sankyo. We won Merck KGaA and Teva, but we don’t count them in that top 20. The remaining four, there’s 10 wins for Veeva so far, six for Salesforce, there’s four decisions left. We expect to win the majority of those four remaining decisions. We’re very confident in that, and I’ll give you maybe one stat from this year. Overall, our win rate’s over 80%. We’re just executing really, really well in the Vault CRM space. I expect that win rate to continue, and that showed through with all of the innovation that we have. We have customers now, over 150 customers live on Vault CRM. We’ve done a lot of migrations. It’s over 40 migrations that we’ve done. We’re just executing well, and now we have customers turning on AI in Vault CRM.

A lot of the innovation that we talked about, it’s there, customers are using it. It’s just a lot of excitement. There’s a lot of energy and lots happening in the CRM space. We’re pleased where things are headed there.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Charles Rhyee with TD Cowen. Charles, your line is now open.

Charles Rhyee, Analyst, TD Cowen: Yeah, thanks. Paul, just want to follow up there because I think it was the last quarter or the quarter before, you guys had indicated that you kind of expected 14 of the top 20 to retain 13, 14. Listening to your comments now, it sounds like maybe you are stepping back from that. Is maybe 13 the right number to think about? Just maybe help us understand that part of it. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan7: Yeah, no, there’s only four decisions left. They’ll play out through the rest of the year. We think we’re going to win the majority of them. All the decisions are not made. You certainly don’t want to make a prediction on them before the decisions are final. We still feel really good, and that’s why I said the majority, we expect to win the majority. Again, they’ll play out through the remainder of the year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Garro with Stephens. Jeff, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan3: Yeah, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I want to ask about the strength in professional services revenue, both in the quarter and in the outlook. Curious what the drivers are there, whether it’s just overall demand, whether it’s insourcing versus outsourcing, or if it’s driven by AI or other products. On that last note, if professional services demand is at all a leading indicator of future monetization opportunities with some of these usage-based models in AI. Thanks.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Hey, Jeff, this is Brian. I’ll take this one. Really proud of the services quarter in Q1. It was a record quarter for our services team, and we saw strength really across services and across the entire breadth of our portfolio. The main drivers of the outperformance were strong project execution in R&D as well as in our business consulting team. I think the main thing here is that it was not just in implementations. A lot of that outperformance was in the consulting work and the work that happens outside of implementations, including things like digital events that are completely unrelated to deployments.

We also saw some of the expected uptick from Vault CRM migrations. It contributed to some of the increase year-over-year. It wasn’t the main driver of top-line outperformance, but a contributor to the year-over-year growth. All those factors, when you bunch them together, is why we generally caution against using services as a leading indicator of subscriptions. There are a lot of services that we provide, especially in business consulting, that really are not related to the underlying subscription implementations. I wouldn’t read those two together.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company. Ryan, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas0: Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the nice quarter here. Maybe one for Peter or Paul on this. Can you just provide a bit more color on the strategic rationale around the Ostro acquisition? Obviously, we’re seeing doctors increasingly using AI applications to do prescription medication, drug-to-drug interaction type questions, and so it seems to be a natural fit there. How do you drive visibility and awareness of Ostro within that population and maybe get docs out of something like an OpenEvidence or a DocsGPT? Then for Brian, as we think about the commercial subscription revenue guidance increase, how much of that was attributed to Ostro contribution? Thanks.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan7: Yeah, Ryan. Ostro is super exciting. The buyer of Ostro is a biopharma company. The user of Ostro is the healthcare professional or the patient. It’s a brand engagement platform for biopharma companies to help HCPs and patients ask questions and get answers instantaneously and do that in a compliant way. That’s very hard to do. It’s hard to do that at scale. It’s hard to do it in a compliant way, and that’s exactly what Ostro does. We’re selling to the biopharmas, and they’re driving the engagement and the traffic to the patients and the healthcare professionals that use that. Why did we do this? I talked a little bit earlier about how digital is increasing and we’re seeing new channels, and you mentioned OpenEvidence. OpenEvidence is important from a number of different perspectives.

One which I referenced earlier, from a measurement standpoint. Also as they turn to channels like OpenEvidence for information, that’s an entry point into going to a pharma company’s digital site and using Ostro on that site to get information really quickly. All these pieces, they all natively work together. This is a core part of our strategy. It unlocks better engagement with HCPs and patients. It also unlocks something that we talk a lot about at our, we introduced at our Commercial Summit called Commercial Evidence. You may have seen Peter refer to that in the prepared remarks, but this is groundbreaking.

This is about understanding what HCPs and patients are thinking about, what are they asking about, and getting it in an unfiltered way so that you can gain this Commercial Evidence, which can help you identify barriers to getting medicines to patients. It’s a really exciting area. It’s going to play a bigger and bigger role in Commercial Cloud over time, and we see it as a really significant acquisition and a potential long-term growth opportunity for us, generate a lot of excitement for us at our release event.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: On the second part of your question, this is Brian. We acquired Ostro late in Q1. We expect it to contribute about $10 million in the remaining three quarters of the year. It’s about two-thirds of the $15 million increase in commercial subs overall for the year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Tyler Radke with Citi. Tyler, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas3: Thank you. I was wondering if you could double-click on some of the wins on the R&D and Quality and Development Cloud. Were there a lot of top 20s included there? Can you just talk about the pipeline, particularly in Development Cloud? I think last quarter you did talk about maybe a bit of an air pocket. Just curious how the pipeline is shaping up for the rest of the year. Thank you.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: I’ll pick that one. Peter. Pipeline is good. The level of engagement is pretty comprehensive from all the way from Veeva Basics, small biotechs, we continue to win a lot of those that are going on Veeva Basics. By the way, those will be some of the first consumers of things like Talk and our other AI solutions, to we’re right now talking about some of the most strategic deals we’ve ever done. Because the aperture and Development Cloud is just getting so much broader with Falcon and Safety and Clinical Data Management and Clinical all working together and Vault AI in there as well. We’re getting more and more strategic. Actually, in the quarter, we didn’t have any particular large top 20 wins in Development Cloud in the quarter, and that happens sometimes.

Pipeline is strong. It happens sometimes where things don’t align on the quarter boundaries. We had a number of great enterprise wins in Safety, also in Quality. I know we had some in Clinical as well. Really happy with the progress there. There’s definitely growing momentum that I feel in the EDC area that’s as a result of our eSource initiative. Now, we have to prove that out first. If you look a step back, what are we doing in Development Cloud? We’re expanding its potential super broadly. I think our vision is now very clear to our customers. At our R&D summit recently in Copenhagen for Europe, it was the largest crowd we’ve ever had and the most excitement that we’ve ever had by far. Why is that?

They’re looking at Veeva doing an eSource initiative out to the clinical research sites to bring the data and documentation, data mainly, in without any intermediary steps, right into the pharmaceutical systems. That’s never been done before. They’re looking at Falcon. Wow, that’s never been done before. They’re looking at Vault AI, how productive that could make them. Plus, the growth in our application areas, the growth we’re getting in the RTSM area, the interest there. We signed our first top 20 last quarter on that for enterprise-wide ELA and our Veeva ePRO product in the clinical data management area. I think our vision is becoming clear, and it’s becoming very clear that we can execute on it and integrate it. Super exciting times. No particular large top 20 applications or wins to report in the quarter, but that’s just a timing thing.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Hannah Rudolph with Piper Sandler. Hannah, your line is now open.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan1: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question today. I wanted to ask another question on Falcon. On the development of that platform, just wondering what exactly is going into the next 5 plus months ahead of your early adopter launch, and what has been done today and what still needs to be done, and how closely you’re partnering with your customers ahead of that launch.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Oh, lots of things need to be done. Developing the platform layer, which we’re doing well. Assembling the team, assembling that in a hurry, really much in a hurry, right? This is disruptive technology. Falcon, for example, reports directly to me. This is our first step into digital labor. You have to operate that effectively. Back when we were the CRM company way back when, before we went public, Vault was this tiny little thing that reported directly to me. Falcon is like that. We have to build the platform, hire the team, get the early customers, sign the early agreements with the early customers to use their data and documents to quality control and basically train our agents, get the first customers live and happy. It’s great hard work to do, Hannah, but it’s something we’re very used to.

It’s what you do on any new product. Nothing particularly different there.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from-

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: I guess one small one is there’s a small part of it that goes a little faster than it used to, and that’s the actual coding of the platform, the deterministic parts. There is where we can lean in and leverage things like Claude Code to do that faster than we did before. Other than that, all parts of the cycle are actually the same.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Corey DeVito with Wells Fargo. Corey, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas4: Hey. This is Stan. I’m unmuting myself. There must have been some confusion when I dialed in. Brian, I wanted to ask you, for Q1 EBIT margin, I think it arrived at 45%. You’re guiding 44% for the year. Is there anything to call out on COGS or operating expenses as we think about the balance of the year? Is there any non-Ostro AI related revenue embedded within guidance? Thank you.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Hey, Stan. On the first part of your question around COGS and overall margins for the year, I think the main factor that you see that’s different this year is some of those services investments that we’re making, that we’ve talked about in the past and had been ramping up over the course of last year. You see that effect in the services gross margins if you look year-over-year. On the subscription side, year-over-year, it’s a little bit of a dip in the margins. That’s really more a function of last Q1’s outperformance. You recall we had the breakout quarter in Crossix audiences, which really flowed through to the bottom line, as well as certain expenses that shifted at that time out into Q2. Last Q1 was really an outlier, and subs is really on kind of a steady trajectory here.

We’re continuing to invest across the business. You see us making investments in our data network to support Data Cloud, in acquisitions like Ostro, in Falcon, and Vault AI. There are a lot of investments we continue to make to drive growth, but feeling good about the efficiency of the business and the guide that we’re posting for the balance of the year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: The second part of your question, Stan, I think I missed. You still there, Stan? All right. We’ll pick it up later.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Craig Hettenbach with Morgan Stanley. Craig, your line is now open.

Craig Hettenbach, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yes. Thank you. Peter, given you’re furthest along on AI and kind of the Vault CRM agents that launched back in December, curious what the initial uptake is there, if there’s anything you want to tie into the recent commercial summit. For Brian, just a question on just cost of compute and how you’re thinking about the puts and takes on gross margin as AI ramps.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: In terms of the commercial agents, actually the one where we were first out to marketplace was in the commercial content area, and we have more than 10 customers live, and it’s going really well in our quick check agents. We’re learning a lot there. At Commercial Summit, we had a number of customers live on some of our agents in CRM actually generating Commercial Evidence in these agentic call reports. Pretty happy with that. I think this is the year where we’ll scale that more. I would say, Craig, or Stan, early adopters live. Now we have to scale it in both of the commercial areas.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: This is Brian on the second part. Picking up Stan’s second question was around AI revenue, which I think for this year, our overall expectation had been for AI to be fairly immaterial outside of Ostro. We’re really focused on getting AI live in all of our customer areas, getting to product excellence, getting to customer success. It starts with that deep value creation for customers. On the margin side, you also don’t see a material impact, Craig, in Vault AI, where it’s usage-based on tokens. I think we have a pretty good understanding of what that dynamic looks like, and it’s factored into our guidance. I don’t expect there to be a material impact on margins driven by AI this year.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs. Adam, your line is now open.

Adam Hotchkiss, Analyst, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Peter, I wanted to ask another one on Ostro. I thought it was interesting in the prepared remarks that you characterized this as a startup within Veeva. Just curious what the innovation framework looks like in that type of environment and how it compares to how you’ve innovated historically. Brian, just on AI driving efficiencies within your operating expense base, maybe talk a little bit more about the progress in the R&D org and where else in the cost structure we might see some of that start to show up. Thanks so much.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Adam, in terms of operating as a startup, in the operating model for Veeva, we have a notion of the startup models and the core models. In the core models, we’re organized functionally, like central sales team, engineering team, things like that. In a startup model, it’s all fully contained under a CEO, and we use that either when the market’s very different or when the product really needs to evolve. Ostro is in a startup model. Everybody who works on Ostro is fully reporting to the CEO of Ostro. There’s guidance and help from other functional areas of Veeva. There’s certainly inroads like, okay, Ostro doesn’t have to use their own master subscription agreement anymore and all that type of stuff. It operates as a startup. It can retain its speed, but it has a really smooth ramp-up.

That’s been a key to our success. If you look at how does Veeva keep having good products all the way from manufacturing to drug safety to CRM to clinical operations and everything else in between, we have a good model for knowing when something needs to be a startup. We build great pieces of the puzzle, we know how the puzzle fits together. If you look at Ostro, partnership with OpenEvidence, doctors on OpenEvidence, hands over to Ostro, can’t answer that question, hands over to CRM to a human. Ostro knows they have the autonomy to function, but they’re part of a bigger picture, and they know where they need to function and where they don’t need to function so that we provide great value for the customer. That’s our structural advantage, right?

That’s why we’re confident we’re on track for our $6 billion of revenue and double that amount of value for our customers in 2030. We’re building a bigger picture that fits together. You have to be able to have a startup model to do that, and you have to be a very attractive place for startups of the right type to want to come to Veeva to create excellent value. We don’t do that many startups acquisitions. When we do, we figure out how to operate them. They succeed. We bought Crossix in 2019. Crossix is, I don’t know how many times bigger than it was since then. It spawned the whole Compass as well. That was the plan for how to operate Crossix inside of Veeva. That’s something I’m very proud of. Brian, over to you.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Yeah, on your second question around the use of AI internally, we use AI throughout the company. We’ve got general purpose tools and then also specific tools in major functional areas. Probably the most significant place we’re using it is around the product because that’s where we spend the most. You heard Peter mention earlier in product engineering, we use Claude Code, and it’s come a long way. We’re seeing great efficiency from that tool. I think in general, that means we’ll hire a little less than we would have and accomplish more than we would have and go a little bit faster. For us, it’s more about productivity and the combination of hiring a little less, accomplishing a little more, we think easily outweighs the token cost, and that’s all factored into our guidance.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: A reminder, if you’d like to ask a question or re-enter the queue, please press star one. Your next question comes from the line of David Larsen with BTIG. David, your line is now open.

David Larsen, Analyst, BTIG: Hey, congratulations on another great quarter. Can you talk a little bit about your ability to take share from the broader ecosystem? In particular, like for CROs, for example, it sounds like you’re expanding pretty deep and pretty fast into more R&D efforts. Are you taking some of the long sort of expensive labor efforts that the CROs would do in enabling your biopharma clients to do that in-house with your AI, and then also on the commercial side, what is your vision for what the AI could actually do? Could they make calls to doctors? Could they send text messages to doctors? Would you potentially take share from Doximity, for example, or others like Doximity, like LinkedIn? Just are you taking share from the ecosystem and enabling your clients to do that work internally? Thanks.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Yeah, I’ll take that one. In terms of where can agentic labor play and what can agents do, the best places to do are high volume, repetitive work, it actually gets outsourced. That type of work actually, it’s not so much the CROs, it’s other specialized labor providers that do that. I think this could actually be beneficial for the CROs because we can do that lower volume work, which is generally done by the pharma company or a specialized outsourcer. We can do that cheaper, faster, better. That’ll hopefully allow pharma companies to run more trials, and that’s where the higher margin work is for the CROs. In commercial, agentic labor there you’re going to have helper agents that help the field teams do things, but I don’t think you’re not going to replace a field person. That’s about managing relationships, things like that.

There may be some things in commercial. For example, there’s the medical legal regulatory process that is burdensome and expensive and occupies many parts of people’s times in life sciences. I think that can largely be automated 70% or more with the right agents over time. The actual field person, I think it’s going to augment them. Yes, the agent might help them draft an email. It might send a text reminder on their own behalf. In commercial, mainly though, it’s going to enable the field to be more productive and enable the pharma companies to do things they could never do before, which is have a conversation of a certain type with a healthcare provider at midnight when they wanted it. Ostro can do that, and they never had anything that could do that before. It’s not one size fits all with these agents.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Your next question comes from the line of Steven Valiquette with Mizuho Securities. Steven, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas2: Yeah, thanks. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Yeah, I think just for us, it’s good to see the positive Crossix results and outlook for the rest of this year, which is pretty consistent with what you communicated previously. I guess if you can just remind us maybe at a high level without giving any specific numbers, just on the current level of customer concentration within Crossix. Like for example, if one single biopharma customer were to pull back, would that theoretically change the full-year outlook, or are the Crossix revenue streams pretty diversified such that one customer is not really going to make a material difference in your outlook? Thanks.

Brian Cabana, Chief Financial Officer, Veeva Systems: Hey Steven, this is Brian. I’ll pick this one up. Overall, as Paul touched on earlier, I think really pleased with progress in Crossix and it’s selling into a really healthy and growing end market. For us, that means it’s now quite a diversified business and that comes in a couple different forms. One is between measurement and audiences, which are both very large businesses and growing well individually, as well as within each of those we have a number of clients. We don’t see that kind of major concentration risk that would impact the business over time. There’s some areas like GLP-1s that maybe are a little bit larger as a proportion of revenue just tied to overall industry spending patterns.

Even as that trend has shifted, for example, you haven’t seen that impact the trajectory of Crossix overall because there are so many customers across so many indications.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: Our last question comes from the line of Sean Dodge with BMO Capital Markets. Sean, your line is now open.

Andrew DiGasperi, Analyst, BNP Paribas1: Yeah, thanks for squeezing me in. Peter, earlier when you were talking about Veeva Basics, I think you mentioned those would be some of the first users of Falcon and I’m just curious why that would be. Why wouldn’t it be some of the more sophisticated kind of longer term Veeva users like large pharma that would be kind of positioned better to be initial Falcon adoptees?

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Well, Basics are smaller companies, very nimble. Also, they’re running not only our products, but they’re running our processes. They have an absolute standard configuration of Veeva where they’re running our processes. We don’t have to wonder how they have configured Vault or mapped Vault or done this Vault or with that Vault. Let’s say we have over 100 Basics customers in the clinical area, their configuration is exactly the same. How they’re using the product is exactly the same. We operate those systems in a way for the customers. If we have our agent working for one Basics customer, it’ll work for them all. With the enterprises, the larger companies, our agents have to be a little more adaptive. They have to first go through a phase of, okay, understanding how that customer is using that Vault, testing it out.

Okay, I’m going to classify these documents that they’ve previously classified. Do I get the same of what they got? If so, that’s good. If not, what happened there? Veeva Basics is just going to be smoother. Very, very smooth. It’s the next obvious step for Veeva Basics. Hey, we got the system and the processes from you. Okay, let’s just have it do the standard labor that goes along with that. I would hope that all of our customers in the clinical area, I would hope they’re all using Veeva Falcon three years from now. Now whether that’s going to be true or not, I don’t know, I can’t see why they wouldn’t.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Peter for closing remarks.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan8: Thank you everyone for joining the call today and thank you to our customers for your continued partnership and to the Veeva team for your outstanding work in the quarter. Thank you.

Alexei Gogolev, Analyst, JPMorgan6: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.