With 99% of CEOs ready for digital labor, agentic AI to reshape workforce design, oversight, and high-volume HCP engagement.
A new study shows CEOs expect digital labor to reshape their enterprises more profoundly than the internet or cloud computing—an inflection point few executives are willing to ignore. Research from IDC, commissioned by Salesforce, reports that 99% of CEOs feel prepared to bring digital labor into their organizations, and most are already looking to intelligent agents to re-architect their operating models entirely (IDC, Voice of the CEO on Digital Labor, 2025). Among more than 150 leaders surveyed across the U.S. and Canada, 67% said implementing agents is now essential to staying competitive, and 73% anticipate that digital labor will meaningfully alter their organizational structure.
Together, these findings reveal an industry moving beyond experimentation. AI is becoming an operational necessity.
Still, few true AI innovators were present at IMEX. Many attendees discussed “chat” as a novelty prompt tool for summarizing notes or writing copy. What most missed is that the same underlying technology can already manage full workflows — analyzing briefs, sourcing venues, tracking compliance and reconciling budgets. What looked like a novelty two years ago is now capable of doing the work entire teams once handled manually.
Those numbers take on particular weight inside life sciences, where meetings form the core mechanism for scientific exchange and commercial engagement. Advisory boards, speaker programs, investigator meetings, and day-to-day HCP touchpoints are not simply events—they are essential throughput for how therapies advance and how field teams build trust. Yet the operational scaffolding around these interactions remains heavy: identity validation, spend capture, reconciliation, compliance controls, documentation loops, approvals, and downstream audits. When multiplied across global teams and thousands of engagements, the strain becomes a defining feature of the work.
This is the backdrop against which CEOs are repositioning their expectations. The IDC study shows a clear shift: most leaders no longer view agentic AI as an incremental technology but as a structural capability. Eighty percent anticipate workforces where human talent and digital labor operate together across recurring workflows. For life sciences organizations managing large volumes of regulated meetings, this view is not theoretical—it aligns directly with the complexities their teams face every day.
HCP engagement is where the impact is felt most acutely. Field teams routinely lose hours each week to tasks that fall outside their purpose: sign-ins, corrections, follow-ups, after-the-fact verifications, spend reconciliation, and documentation gathering. Every hour reclaimed is an hour redirected toward the kinds of scientific and commercial conversations that actually move relationships—and revenue—forward. When agentic systems take responsibility for those administrative layers, field teams gain meaningful time back, and commercial leaders see sharper consistency across the organization.
The CEOs in IDC’s “most prepared” cohort understand this dynamic. They associate agentic AI not merely with efficiency but with expanded capability—new teams, new responsibilities, and increased revenue opportunities. Leaders who feel less prepared, in contrast, describe digital labor in cost-reduction terms. The divide reflects two different interpretations of what transformation looks like: one focused on minimizing expense, the other centered on strengthening capacity and enabling growth (IDC, 2025).
In the life sciences meeting ecosystem, these differences matter. Regulated workflows must be handled with precision. Global transparency requirements leave no room for inconsistent documentation or data gaps. Agentic AI can manage these highly structured tasks—verifying HCP identities in real time, enforcing caps across countries, generating audit-ready documentation, reconciling spend, routing exceptions, and ensuring every step of the engagement remains accountable from start to finish. Commercial teams feel the effects immediately: fewer delays, fewer errors, and more time dedicated to actual HCP relationships.
The IDC findings also highlight that CEOs who are most advanced in their preparation place higher emphasis on governance, ethics, and oversight—nearly twice as much as their less-prepared peers. This mirrors what we see across life sciences: organizations adopting digital labor responsibly build deeper trust with internal teams, regulators, and healthcare partners. They reduce the risk of inconsistencies and reinforce the integrity of their scientific and commercial engagements.
The meeting landscape in life sciences is too complex—and too essential—to be sustained by manual processes. Agentic AI offers a way out of that cycle. It strengthens compliance. It removes friction from high-volume workflows. It restores time to field teams. It sharpens visibility for commercial and compliance leaders. And it supports the scientific and commercial conversations that define the impact of every life sciences organization.
As the IDC research illustrates, CEOs are already planning for a world where these capabilities are embedded into the core of their operations. In life sciences, the need is even more pronounced. The organizations that embrace agentic systems early will be the ones able to support scale, uphold rigor, and unlock the full potential of their teams.
Sources:
IDC, Voice of the CEO on Digital Labor (2025), commissioned by Salesforce.
