As someone who helps businesses in healthcare and life sciences understand the value of Salesforce, I’m really excited about how AI can transform and bring real benefits to the industry.
Across India’s top pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, hospitals, and health insurers, leaders are asking a critical question: We have powerful AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, but are we actually improving patient care, or speeding up sales, or making insurance claims smoother?
The core issue is the ‘AI productivity paradox’. Many AI tools excel at providing answers, but don’t help you act on them. This creates a ‘last mile’ problem where every AI-generated insight, like a patient discharge summary, triggers a new manual task such as a nurse having to manually record post-hospitalisation care actions. This gap between knowing and then doing things manually is where productivity is lost.
The solution: Agentic AI that gets work done
The next evolution in business AI isn’t about better answers; it’s about AI taking action autonomously. Agentforce, is an agentic AI layer built on the Salesforce unified platform that automatically performs tasks, connecting insights to action within existing systems. This helps organisations achieve real outcomes like smart selling, proactive care, and excellent patient service.
Here’s how Agentforce can potentially help Indian healthcare and life sciences companies go from being busy to being truly effective:
Value driver 1: Changing patient care for the better
In India, where the doctor-patient ratio is roughly 1:1263, hospitals are overwhelmed with the task of managing large volumes of discharged patients. This is a critical issue because a patient’s recovery is most vulnerable just after leaving the hospital. A study under the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojna (AB-PMJAY) scheme revealed that about one in twenty patients is readmitted within 30 days of discharge.
The challenge: Reactive post-discharge care leads to stressful patient experiences, preventable readmissions, and a strain on hospital resources..
Why current AI tools fall short: While generative AI can assist a nurse in drafting a discharge summary, it doesn’t solve the core problem. The nurse still has to manually create a follow-up care plan, send timely communications to the patient, and personally address any patient issues that arise. The AI provides information, but the human is still burdened with all the action.
The Agentforce solution: An Agentforce agent in Salesforce Health Cloud can be configured to ensure that every discharged heart patient receives timely and personalised follow-up care at home.
With real-time access to electronic health records (EHRs) and hospital data, the agent can automatically empower nurses with a unified patient summary. This includes discharge notes, medications, and next steps — all directly displayed within the nurse’s workspace.
The agent can then automate routine actions like scheduling check-ins, checking insurance coverage, and sending personalised WhatsApp or SMS reminders to the patient for medications and home visits.
If a patient misses a check-in, or reports a concerning health update through a portal or app, Agentforce can trigger an alert to the nurse. With the patient’s full record and recent interactions displayed on-screen, the nurse or clinician can easily review the case, and take timely action.
The benefit: By proactively engaging with patients, Agentforce helps reduce preventable readmissions, increase patient satisfaction scores (PSAT), and improve care plan adherence. More importantly, Agentforce frees up clinicians to spend more time on patient care. At Adobe Population Health, nurses using Agentforce now spend 75% less time manually summarising medical charts.
Value driver 2: Boosting pharma sales and growth
India is known as the ‘pharmacy of the world,’ for its highly competitive generics and branded medicines. In this fast-moving market, pharmaceutical companies rely on winning large contracts from public and private hospitals. Each contract is usually driven by a request for proposal (RFP).
The challenge: Responding to RFPs is a vital but painfully slow process. Sales teams often spend weeks manually pulling together technical data, pricing information, and regulatory documents. This leaves them with little time for strategic relationship-building and selling.
Why current AI tools fall short: A generative AI tool can summarise an RFP, or even draft a basic response. But it can’t connect to live, internal systems to get specific, real-time information for a deal. A sales rep still has to manually hunt for the latest pricing in one system, the right product details in another, and specific regulatory certificates in a secure database. These manual ‘fetch quests’ can cause critical delays.
The Agentforce solution: An Agentforce agent can be configured to help pharma sales reps respond to RFPs faster and more effectively. Instead of manually searching multiple systems, the agent can work within Salesforce Sales Cloud and Data Cloud to pull together relevant product, pricing, and regulatory information in real time.
With capabilities like document search and summarisation, Agentforce can assemble a comprehensive RFP response. Supporting files are automatically attached, and routed to the sales rep for a quick review and personalisation.
The agent can also update sales teams with live insights on contract status, competitive pricing trends, and renewal opportunities — all within the CRM.
Rather than replacing human judgment, Agentforce acts as a dependable team mate. It automates the heavy lifting in sales, so that humans can focus on higher-value work.
The benefit: Agentforce can significantly reduce RFP response time, and speed up deal closure. It also frees up sales teams to focus on strategy and client relationships, thereby increasing sales productivity.
Value driver 3: Automating insurance operations (claims)
Claims volumes can be massive in government programs like AB-PMJAY which provide health coverage to over 500 million Indians. The situation is similar with private health insurance companies. Manually handling numerous claims is unproductive and time-consuming.
The challenge: Insurance back-offices are buried in high-volume, document-heavy tasks. When cashless claims have to be approved manually, the process is slow, expensive, and error-prone. It often leads to payment delays for hospitals and a poor experience for members.
Why current AI tools fall short: AI can use optical character recognition (OCR) to read and summarise a claims document, extracting codes and billing details. However, a human adjuster must still manually switch to the core insurance system to verify policy details, and trigger claims payments.
The Agentforce solution: An Agentforce agent can be set up to accelerate claims processing while maintaining compliance and human oversight. When a claim arrives, the agent can automatically verify eligibility, check coverage, and flag missing documents. It can also route the claim to the right adjudicator along with all the context and information needed to make informed decisions. Human claims adjusters can still review and approve high-complexity cases, ensuring governance and accuracy.
The benefit: By reducing manual hand-offs, Agentforce can reduce the turnaround time (TAT) for cashless approvals. It can also deliver a better claims experience for both healthcare providers and policy members, building trust and loyalty.
The next chapter for healthcare: Action, not just knowledge
The new measure of AI’s value lies not in its ability to answer questions, but in its ability to get work done automatically. Agentforce, integrated with the Salesforce platform, is the bridge from knowledge to action. It helps create a ‘digital workforce’ to handle operational tasks, freeing up skilled employees to focus on high-value, human-centred interactions.
For leaders in India’s healthcare and life sciences sector, the choice is clear: you can either invest in tools that make your teams busier, or empower them with autonomous agents that make your organisation faster, smarter, and better for the people you serve. It’s time to go beyond asking AI questions, and actually start putting it to work.
Learn more on Agentforce for healthcare
