Veeva’s AI push shows how vertical SaaS is winning with agents

Veeva’s latest quarter offered a clear signal for anyone building software inside monday.com: vertical SaaS is now competing on agents that live inside real workflows, not on generic AI layers pasted on top. The life sciences company said fiscal first-quarter 2027 revenue reached $882.9 million, up 16% year over year, while subscription revenue rose 15% to $730.2 million. More telling than the top line was CEO Peter Gassner’s message that Veeva is moving from an industry-specific application company to an industry-specific application and AI agent company.

That framing matters because it shows where buyers are placing value. Veeva has spent years owning regulated, daily work in life sciences, and its AI push suggests customers still want domain rules, compliance context, and workflow depth before they want chat. For monday.com product teams, the read-through is direct: AI only gets durable if it helps people execute inside the process they already trust, especially in sectors where permissions, auditability, and role-based access are non-negotiable.

monday.com has been making that same shift in public. On May 6, it said it had become an AI Work Platform, calling the move the biggest change in the company’s history. Its native agents are built to draw on live data across departments while operating inside existing permissions, security, and governance. The company also added one-click connectors for Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, signaling that it wants to own the workflow layer even as customers bring their own model preferences.

The internal stakes are not abstract. monday.com said first-quarter 2026 revenue rose 24% to $351.3 million and that it posted record GAAP and non-GAAP operating income. It also said it had more than 250,000 customers worldwide, 4,547 customers with more than $50,000 in annual recurring revenue, and 3,211 employees as of March 31. Net dollar retention was 110%, and customers above $500,000 in ARR represented 6% of ARR, up from 5% a year earlier, according to Morningstar’s republished release. That is the kind of mix that rewards deeper platform adoption, not just lighter AI experimentation.

The regulatory angle is where the comparison gets sharper for monday.com sales and product teams. monday.com says it offers HIPAA-compliant plans for organizations handling protected health information, and its medical-device CRM page argues that many CRMs still lack the automation, workflow flexibility, and compliance support needed for highly regulated, non-linear processes. Ability Ops, monday.com’s 2025 North America Partner of the Year, says it specializes in healthcare, government, and regulated industries. Veeva’s quarter makes the market lesson explicit: in vertical software, the AI winners are the vendors that can make agents feel native to the work, not separate from it.