#119: “There will be a shockwave of innovation in the next 5 years” - Chris Moore, European President at Veeva Systems

0:00We have a chance now with a range of new technologies of which AI is the poster child to really transform the way that we do business.

0:14AI is transforming every corner of every business, but few sectors are seeing as profound of an impact as life sciences and especially the pharmaceutical industry. In this episode, I'm joined by Chris Moore, European President at Viva Systems, a company that's at the forefront of helping pharmaceutical companies especially streamline things like drug discovery, clinical trials, and physician engagement, ensuring treatments reach patients faster and more efficiently. We discuss the rise of AI in the pharmaceutical space and the practical ways it's improving R &D, accelerating drug launches, and automating processes that were once painfully manual.

1:00We also cover how the pandemic forced a rapid digital evolution in the sector and the emergence of the CIO and the chief digital officer roles in driving technology strategy across the industry. Chris also shares his perspective on the challenges AI presents, especially for SaaS providers. And we also hear Chris's advice for enterprise organizations for securing their data. And we also explore what excites Chris the most about the future of AI in the life sciences world and how these innovations will shape the industry and change millions of people's lives in the years ahead. This is a fascinating, insight-packed conversation with a leading voice in the world of life sciences and pharmaceutical technology.

1:47This is Chris Moore.

1:54Chris Moore, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I've been really keen to talk to you. We haven't had too many guests on from the life sciences world for quite a while. I'm particularly interested in talking to you guys in light of all of this innovation that's going on right now and some of the incredible work you guys are doing. I'm going to ask you to do an introduction shortly. But before we go there, Chris, what does good leadership mean to you? Before we do that even, Gareth, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me on today. I'm very honored to be part of your podcast and to join some of the incredible leaders that you've had so far.

2:31I think for me, what good leadership is all around is understanding that the purpose and the vision of the organization and then enabling the teams within it to do their best work, to be the best versions of themselves. that is both an environment where they feel free to take risks but also creating those sort of pressure points where you push them out of their comfort zone so again they can be the best version of themselves absolutely and also not just that but to play off each other i think you know i've been very fortunate over the years to work in organizations with brilliant teams and i think I've personally benefited and hopefully others have benefited around from just that insight, that knowledge that others bring that just make you better, that give you a different perspective and take you out of, oh, I thought I could do it this way, but there's a better way there.

3:30So Chris, in terms of your background, I understand your immediate background or for much of your career, you've worked in the advisory management consultancy world. But I also understand that your first gig out of university was in the pharmaceutical space, if I'm not mistaken. So can you tell us a little bit about the early part of your career and why you pursued the direction that you ultimately did? Yeah, no, absolutely. I ended up in the life sciences industry almost by chance. So I was sponsored through university by that great company that no longer exists, ICI. I'm from a town called Merthyr Tidville, actually, and they had a big site in Merthyr Tidville.

4:10You may be aware of that. Yeah, an entire industrial estate was named after that factory, the ICI factory. Oh, it's huge in that part of the world around Runcorn or around Blakely. It was an institution, ICI, and just a phenomenal company. And so when I came to the end of my degree, I was very lucky that I was offered different roles throughout the organization. and the bit that was seen the most exciting out of all of them was pharmaceuticals. As you rightly pointed out, I started out with a real job. I started out working for ICI Pharmaceuticals, which has gone on to become AstraZeneca. And what that gave me those first four and a half years of my career was an insight into how a pharmaceutical company runs.

4:59And in particular, I did a lot of work in the R &D function around regulatory affairs and clinical trials. And even though that is many moons ago now, that gave me a foundation to build off the rest of my career. Absolutely. Obviously, you then proceeded to have a fairly long spell with PricewaterhouseCoopers. So could you tell us a little bit about that time and then obviously, when you delved into the management consultancy world, how that shaped you as a leader? Interestingly, before that even, I worked for a tiny little startup. So in all my time at ICI and then Zeneca, I always seemed to be put on projects that were doing the new or the different things.

5:44And typically, there were consultants involved in it. After a while, you say to yourself, hold on a sec, all of the cool projects were with the consultant, maybe I should give it a go. but around then there was this tiny group called Kinesis in fact when I joined it there were 12 people but really interesting one of the guys in fact my boss there the CEO he'd helped invent the recordable recordable CD for Philips for music production great quirky group and I joined very quickly took over the life sciences part of that and we grew the business to the point where we were just shy of 100 people. Life sciences accounted for about 75 % of the revenue and 95 % of the profit.

6:32And we'd created a niche, which was looking at this emergent technology at the time, which was content management. And we did a lot of the work around a particular tool called Documentum in Europe for most of the pharmaceutical companies. And that attracted a lot of interest because here we were tiny company out of swindon of all places exotic swindon and yet we were working for all of these multinationals so a number of companies offered to buy us we loved working with coopers and lie brand there was a really good natural fit so we sold ourselves to coopers which actually gave us that ability to grow to the next level say documentum chris Documentum, yes.

7:22Was it part of OpenText? No, it was before they'd sold themselves out to OpenText. Right. So it was when Documentum was the hot new kid in town, about mid-90s, and it come along with a really good client-server technology to address content management. And we did a lot of the work applying that in life sciences. so as you rightly say what the kinesis time taught me was running a small business a small startup the immediacy that fast turnover if you don't run and operate you you don't exist there's no buffer for non-performance and it also gave us an immediacy of relationships with our customers we were doing some really critical work we were asking them to to trust us as a tiny business.

8:16And so it was a real crash course in how to build deep relationships. And that served me very well moving into the partnerships. As we were then able to scale that, we helped Coopers build out the capability into the US, across Europe, and also into Asia Pacific, specifically in Japan. As was the way of the time, Coopers and Libran merged with PW. And at that point, the Kinesis business had become quite sizable. It had become increasingly integrated with the rest of Coopers and then PwC. So we were rolled in as a core part of the business. And I became a partner in the core PwC practice. We continued to grow it out.

9:05We started building product with Documentum. We also did some work building product with Oracle and really bringing together the industry to try and challenge how things have been done with how they could be done, bringing together industry with technology to come up with different solutions. So were you preparing companies for the end of the world that was going to happen with the Y2K? Because it was around that time, wasn't it, you're talking there? You know what, Gareth, actually, I actually feel like I missed a whole shift there because in my world, yes, we did a little bit of Y2K work, but actually the nature of the tools we were using, that was probably the lower end of what I personally got involved in.

9:50So when friends of mine who were in different parts of tech were anxiously standing by their phones as Y2K ticked over, I was remarkably relaxed with a drink in my hand because we'd done that bit that we needed to do and that wasn't a concern. Yeah, the countdown, the new year countdown was slightly nervous for a lot of CEOs. Oh my gosh. The whole thing is so bizarre to me, but it was very real at that time, wasn't it? It was a beautiful anti-climax when it happened. It was, yes. Here we were expecting the lights to go out and shockingly, it was business as usual. Absolutely, absolutely. So opportunity came up, I believe, early 2000s to join IBM, yeah?

10:32So again, having started out in my little 12-person kinesis and ended up in big PwC. PwC, this was around the time of Enron, and PwC sold its consulting business to IBM. So we were on the border of becoming Monday. But actually, as a result of all the changes and the separation of duties, PwC sold its consulting business to IBM. Right. I didn't know that. Wow, that's a huge acquisition then. Yeah, so it was my journey from a 12-person company to a 380 ,000-person machine was complete at that point. So you didn't technically change, you changed jobs a couple of times, quite a few times, but you hadn't actually left the organization you joined.

11:21You just kept getting acquired, yeah? Gareth, I never had to change jobs because the business around me kept changing. It was wonderful. It gave me a whole career without ever actually having to move. Absolutely. So looking back now then from that period, it's a huge part of your career from 1994 right up until 2010, or sorry, 2013 when you ultimately left IBM. That chunk now, looking back now in your sort of armchair, what were the key milestones of that period, do you think, for you? What stands out as the most memorable moments of that segment of your career that have shaped you as an individual and as a leader?

11:59no it's a it's a great question gareth i think i divide it up into those blocks i think ici and zeneca gave me those great foundations about how to conduct yourself in business how to run projects i was fortunate with working with great people who gave a good foundation. Kinesis for me was the startup period, that immediacy of a startup, the highs, the lows, the impact you can have in a smaller organization just gave me that taste for the need to do things quickly, the need to act, personal responsibility. I think during the Coops and Lie brand PwC period, that was all about how do you scale this?

12:52How do you move something that you can do within one team locally across multiple teams globally? And learning the complexity of different cultures when you scale that up. And then my real takeaway from IBM was during that period, I had a chance to live and work in the States and to live and work in Switzerland. And the old anecdote of it's one thing to go and work in a country and then go home afterwards versus live there. That really gave me an appreciation for the true difference in cultures, even where, for example, with the US, you speak the same language, the way of doing business is different.

13:38So along the way, I've been fortunate to experience those differences and hopefully add to my kit bag. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that cultural business, cultural difference between maybe the US and Europe, let's say, or maybe the UK, the gap has closed a little bit as the internet has obviously made the world a smaller place? Do you see what I mean? Do you think from those IBM days to now, or do you still see a big cultural difference between the two territories? It's a brilliant question. I think superficially, that gap has closed. So we're more used to being on Zoom calls, Teams calls, speaking real time with people while looking at them.

14:24but I actually think underlying the way that people think the way that the cultural foundations actually haven't changed and I think as we go forward that importance which I think we're all starting to relearn again about face-to-face contact about spending time in person with people is as important now as it ever was. Yeah. And actually, I think it stops us from hoping beyond reality that we have all become homogenized and we think and act and behave in the same way because we're not. Yeah, no, absolutely. That's interesting. I'm going to talk about EY then. So you joined EY in the mid, early to mid 2010s.

15:10What I want to ask you about, Chris, is what were people talking about in the life sciences world around that time, in the early to mid-2010s. I'm assuming there was a big cloud. Everything was about cloud, I guess, around that time. What did you walk into with EY? What was going on in the world at that time from a technology standpoint? Yeah, so it was interesting because in my role in EY, I was very fortunate. Part of my job was to go around to talk to senior leaders, owners of pharmaceutical companies, members of the boards, and just talk about what was new and what was interesting. Now, one area that we discussed a lot was market access, pricing and reimbursement of drugs, which barely a day goes by without something being in the press about as society tries to balance the cost of healthcare and the benefits, having to make some difficult trade-offs there but i would say around that period there was a real focus on that about how to start to have that conversation so a lot of conversations on that believe it or not back then the that there was a pervasive digital digital what does digital mean and it was this notion of starting to move beyond technology to replace a task that was done with something that It would just automate like for like into transforming the way that we thought and we act using internet or intranet based technologies.

16:43Yeah. So that was very much a theme and everyone talked about it. But actually making it real, especially at those senior levels, was quite new. And so talked a lot about that. And then actually, what was weird at that time was I'd go around and senior leaders would start to ask about Viva, which is obviously where I am now. All of a sudden, here was something that was different. It was proper cloud-based software designed for the industry that was built from scratch. And so for the first time, people who never really taught detail of technology were starting to talk about that as well. So really, really those key areas.

17:27Absolutely. Now that makes sense. So can you just tell us about that time in your life then when the Viva opportunity came along? You obviously were familiar with them as they were in your world. The opportunity come along to join them. Why did you jump ship with EY and what attracted you to joining an organization like Viva? First off, I was very happy at EY. It's a great organization, great people. And I had a phone call one day from Peter Gassner, who's the founder of Viva. And I've met Peter multiple times over the years, along with his co-founder, Matt Wallach. Always liked them and obviously was becoming an increasing admirer of what they were achieving across the industry.

18:09And Peter called up one day and said, Chris, you know, we're thinking about how we can become more impactful in Europe. We're conscious that we're a US-based company that has been successful in Europe, but we want to be more European in Europe. Would you be interested? So I thought about this for about a second and said yes as quickly as I could before Peter changed his mind. because actually for the first time I could see a company that was doing properly a lot of what I'd been trying to do throughout the course of my career. So a lot of the work that I'd done before with client-centered server technologies, we would implement.

18:55And then 10 years, sometimes less, later, 5, 10 years later, we'd come back and we'd have to reimplement it because the software decayed over time, the integrations decayed, and you'd effectively have to rebuild it, but on the newer version of the platform. Viva with client-server challenged this, but was also thinking beyond each of the silos with more targeted capabilities. I'd seen a whole bunch of the people that I'd loved working with over the years end up at Viva. Everyone was talking about Viva, and I thought, you know what? I would definitely like to be a part of that journey. Fantastic.

19:36So you jumped in the deep end. Can you just lay it out at a very high level, obviously? What problem is Viva Systems trying to solve for enterprise customers in the life sciences space? So first of all, just a little bit about Viva. Viva is an organization which is dedicated to the life sciences industry. Our aim is to build the industry cloud for life sciences. The aim is to bring software, data, and consulting best in class, designed fit for purpose to elevate the industry, to make the industry more efficient and more effective so that it can do the valuable work that it does, helping people, helping improve their lives through better medicines and delivering those more efficiently.

20:22Peter called you up then to come on board. What was the sort of, what was the brief, what was the target? What was the vision? You know what I mean? What did you go in to achieve in your role? So it was, as I touched on, it was to make Viva Europe more European. So the challenge you have as a very successful US tech company is you come into Europe and it's natural to speak English. So coming into Viva, we had a collection of amazing people, real talent from across the industry but for example in France we were all too often trying to have conversations in English not in French or in Germany we didn't have full coverage so that we could have those important customer meetings in German if people wanted to have them in German same in Italy same in Spain so what we set about doing was really trying to localize the front end of the business whilst at the same time what really made Viva different and even to this day is still truly special is we're probably the most globally integrated globally thinking companies that I have ever worked with or for which gives us a great benefit in an industry like life sciences which is itself truly global yeah so if you can combine that magic of a company that thinks and acts globally but with the personal touch of a local language conversation and culture at the point of conversation, that's the sweet spot.

22:12And that's really the journey we've been on. Yeah, of course. So you allow pharmaceutical companies, your customers, and I know you work with some of the biggest life sciences firms in the world, like Bayer and Novartis and so on and so forth. But you enable them, so everything is integrated from ERP, CRM, all the products that a big organization like that would need to operate internally and externally as well. Is that how you would describe the suite of products? No, we're actually a little bit different. Probably a good way of thinking about it is SAP automates the back office. It does all the finances, supply chain, all of those pieces.

22:53We're focused on the front of house. So specifically, we help in R &D and by that we mean clinical safety regulatory so all the areas where you discover you discover and prove a new medicine and then you register it yeah we also support the quality parts of the organization so that you make sure that you're behaving in a compliant and consistent way and then we support the commercial end of the business so sales marketing medical where you take those medicines to market in a compliant and controlled way. Right, gotcha. So in terms of AI and data transforming the way many organizations, the way they take drugs from discovery to launch, how has that changed your product set in terms of implementing AI capability into various components and stuff like that?

23:53What have you developed within your product set over the last couple of years in relation to this explosion of innovation around AI and large language models especially? I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, Gareth, that when you actually look at larger language models, and it's easy to forget they've only been around a couple of years. Yeah. And so it's a level of excitement and buzz. And yet we're still only in the early days. The infancy of it. In my past, when I worked for IBM, for example, I worked on Watson for Life Sciences. And those early days of Watson, that was the transformative technology.

24:28So we've come a long way since then. What we're doing within Viva, though, on AI, we do think this is going to be transformational over the next few years. So the first products that we're releasing around AI will be coming out this year, predominantly in the commercial space. and we're covering a range of applications including support for our CRM users to plan meetings to make sure they've got the right content in a meeting to improve interactions with healthcare providers. We're looking at the power of voice to transform both how you interact with technology but also for example for a medic to record a meeting with a senior medical leader so that you can focus on the conversation, not on taking notes.

25:18Sure. And then other areas such as producing compliant content for use in medical interactions and helping support the laborious and challenging process of making sure that everything that you publish is compliant with what you're allowed to publish. But then through the course of next year, we're infusing AI into pretty much every single application we have. So looking at how we can support clinical, regulatory, safety, quality with specific AI use cases, again, compliant and specifically designed for the users of those systems. Yeah. This episode was brought to you by Be Digital. B-Digital support leadership teams to optimize cost and get more out of technology investments.

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26:53Have you rolled any of these AI features out yet? And if so, what's the feedback been from customers so far? So we've got the first use cases in use with some of our data products today that provide automated summaries. We have a tool called Link, which provides deep data about key opinion leaders or healthcare providers to improve the conversation with them. Now, at this stage, that's very much more creating summaries out of medical interactions or about individuals. And what's been very telling is that it's both exciting and people have just consumed it almost seamlessly. so I think as we get more and more used to AI based summaries coming into our day-to-day lives with the link products they've been seeing this with our other products and specifically around the CRM space we actually think that they are going to be a bit more transformative and already we're looking at how do we provide the support so that people don't just have these capabilities but never make the most of it and instead reimagine the art of the possible with this new expanded capability so become more effective to improve each interaction to build off of previous interactions so that you have a higher value conversation and the valuable time that physicians spend with pharmaceutical companies is enhanced.

28:33One thing I wanted to ask you about Chris was my understanding at least is of the life sciences space and especially pharmaceuticals is that it's obviously a very highly regulated space so innovation things like digital transformation for instance tends to be a little bit slower than some other industries for that reason and these other headwinds as well but ultimately the regulation part and rightly so is a huge headwind for digital innovation. And please correct me if I'm wrong. But what I'm keen to ask you about is COVID and the years around COVID. Because from what I was, conversations I've had on this podcast generally is that COVID, like in many other major organizations across all industries, sort of accelerated digital transformation, especially within life sciences, because it had to, it was by necessity.

29:23So what I'm keen to ask you, Chris, is how, in the years since COVID, how has and maybe let's I wanted to ask you this question more of an industry lens as opposed to a viva lens but in terms of the farmer landscape how much has it evolved since the COVID years and what's accelerated in your view in terms of digital innovation digital transformation since the COVID years to today this is very much still a talking point within the industry I think has been well reported the work that the industry did at a time when we really needed the industry more than ever before to let us get out of our houses and for the world to restart again.

30:06By developing drugs from scratch and then getting those through approvals and doing that in an environment where we were all locked down and staying at home. Really challenged the art of the possible. as you mentioned it's a compliant industry where there are accepted norms for how you do things for very good reason because they've been built up over time but COVID challenged that COVID challenged the notion that for example a rep had to go and meet with a physician in person because they couldn't a video call a phone call could start to take over it challenged the time it took for a regulator to approve a drug.

30:51The regulatory packages for COVID were put together in a fraction of the time. Testing, the way that drugs were tested, they still adhered to all the same rules and regulations, but were done in a compressed period by overlapping tasks. So that was a great learning for the industry. So going forward, I think it's given a lot of energy to those in the industry who were trying to transform it, those in the industry who wanted to bring new ways of working, new technologies, much greater distribution of teams, but more effective co-working between those teams. And actually, as a result of COVID, what happened there was that obviously the number of new drugs coming to market went down because people can operate in the same way.

31:46And between 25 and 2030, we're going to see a massive number of drugs come to market. And companies are once more, and it's an aftershock of COVID, are going to have to launch a vastly increased number of drugs, keeping headcount broadly the same in that catch up post-COVID. So I think that shockwave of innovation is going to have its next run in the next five-year period. So that compressed regulatory approval that happened in those COVID years, has that improved the timescales of approval indefinitely, would you say, Chris, then? Or has it gone back to pre-COVID levels now? Or is it roughly the same?