When decisions are no longer made by humans, how will you create a humanoid sales force to engage with your future customers?

We are living through a huge shift in the way we live and work, from a human world to a "humanoid" world. In many ways this is completely unprecedented, the stuff of science fiction. In other ways, we’ve been here before.

Just over two hundred years ago, taking inspiration from the subversive legend of the weaver Ned Ludd, workers in textile mills across Lancashire rebelled and began destroying the technology that was disrupting their working world.[1] Their targets were stocking frames: machines that partially automated and accelerated the process of knitting together fabrics. The weavers had the first taste of the machine age and spat it out.

But today, as we head deeper into the machine learning age, we’re really starting to get the full flavour of what automation means. In 2025, people are still doing the larger share of the world's work - 47% of it, according to a World Economic Forum study.[2] But according to the same study, over one-fifth (22%) of tasks are now carried out by technology without human input (with the remainder done by a combination: humans plus tech).

This statistic suggests we've already moved a long way towards automating our world - but it's really only a snapshot of a trendline that's moving very rapidly. By 2030, the WEF projects that the balance will have tilted: machines and algorithms will be carrying out 34% of tasks alone, while the human share will have shrunk to 33%, the remaining third still shared, for the moment, between us and our technology.[3]

There's no special reason to expect this trend to stabilize in 2030. AI might still be struggling with its curious "hallucinations"[4], but it's no illusion that algorithms are outperforming humans in an ever-expanding range of tasks and specialisms. So, should the life sciences industry summon up the spirit of the Luddites and start smashing up the computers?

 As Dr. Eric Topol has suggested, there is a better way to look at the coming changes: “machines will progressively outperform humans for various narrow tasks. To take humans to the next level, we need to up our humanist qualities, that which will always differentiate us from machines.”[5] Dr. Topol writes that doctors should use AI to streamline their routine, functional work – so they can give more time, presence and attention to the challenge of building deeper, more human relationships with their patients.

Life sciences companies need to address the same challenge: the future of this industry is going to be all about relationships. Companies need to build better relationships with their customers – whether that’s individual patients, in the personalized longer term, or the physicians and payers who represent their major customers today.

Relationships today: sales reps and CRMs

The industry has traditionally managed its customer relationships via the expertise of sales representatives who are trained to share a small number of key messages and discuss a select few clinical trial papers with their time-poor audience of Health Care Professionals (HCPs). To access and engage this audience, reps have traditionally leveraged their own interpersonal skills and built relationships as best they can. In more recent years, this sales force has been increasingly augmented by medical science liaisons (MSLs), key account managers and other specialists. Customer relationships have further been enhanced by the rise of customer-relationship management (CRM) systems.

These systems unify sales, marketing and life sciences-specific medical detail in a single interface and offer diversified channels for sales forces to engage with HCPs. In the years since the life sciences industry adopted CRMs they have become increasingly integral to companies’ efforts to engage their customers, identify key territories and opportunities, optimize personnel allocation, track interactions, increase productivity, and measure the effectiveness of their field force.

Yet while the CRM is a huge technological advance on its earliest precursor in companies’ attempts to manage client relationships – the Rolodex[6] – the basic model for life sciences companies has remained fundamentally unchanged. It’s still grounded on sales reps trying to engage with HCPs. AI isn’t going to design a fancier Rolodex – it’s going to deliver a full revolution

Revolution in relationships: from managing customer relationships to making ecosystem connections

As AI and automation gather pace, they will certainly power up CRMs, and sales reps can expect smarter, faster insights engines turning data into usable leads, and generative AI-created scenario simulations and other training tools. But I think this use of AI to turbocharge the existing model is only a test flight. With the power of AI increasing with each rapid generation, the industry has the opportunity to fly far higher and open up whole new frontiers in CRM.

Rather than adding AI to the existing model, we should be thinking about how AI can unlock totally new approaches for the industry and its customers. This isn’t just about bombarding doctors with omnichannel content – doctors will not even hold the same exclusive decision-making power in the future. To become truly effective, companies need to use AI to shift from a narrow customer sales focus towards activating the whole of the increasingly diverse healthcare ecosystem.

Life sciences players will have to use AI to extend and deepen their own communications across that system, driving better, earlier interactions and cross-functional engagements with all their stakeholders – from physicians, hospitals and key opinion leaders, through payers and policy makers, to advocacy groups and patients themselves.

Medicine is always going to be about humans and the unmet human need for health and wellness. But as these needs become ever more specialised, life sciences companies will need to draw on the superhuman abilities of AI to diversify and enhance their connections with their customers.

Faced with an increasingly complex healthcare environment, companies need to find the connections, capabilities and customers that will enable them to create and communicate future value innovation. The weavers of the first industrial revolution smashed their machines to try to protect their jobs. In the fourth industrial revolution, the job for life sciences companies and their CRM collaborators will be to make themselves into the weavers of a new healthcare ecosystem, knitting together a new network – of partners, of personalised, preventive, predictive, and participatory care, and of unprecedented possibilities for human health.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

[1] The Luddites - Historic UK

[2] WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf

[3] WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf

[4] A.I. Hallucinations Are Getting Worse, Even as New Systems Become More Powerful - The New York Times

[5] Topol, Eric. Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (p. 290). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

[6] The Evolution of CRM: From Rolodex to Cloud-Based Solutions | by Sagar Wani | Medium