Inside the C-Suite — Pharma Leaders Share Their Vision for AI
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“The question is not how do we improve a cumbersome process, it’s do we need to do the process at all?” – David Reese, CTO at Amgen
Over the past six months, our team conducted extensive research with our close C-suite partners across Big Pharma, Big Tech, and enterprise healthcare to understand how AI is being applied across the value chain. Participants included:
- Executives from 16 of the top 20 pharma companies, as well as several emerging pharma, including Amgen, Genentech, Recursion
- Commercial and ecosystem executives from Big Tech companies including Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, and Oracle Health & Life Sciences
- Executives from scaled, venture-backed pharma tech companies including Tempus AI and Datavant
- Two-thirds are C-suite leaders, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Data Officers, and Chief AI Officers
We found that pharma's AI adoption has reached a pivotal moment. What began as pilot experimentation is now evolving into enterprise-scale strategy, driven by mounting pressure to boost productivity, accelerate speed to market, and extract value from a surge of multimodal data.
It's clear that pharma’s AI future will be defined in the next 12 to 24 months with leaders embedding AI into core workflows to drive speed, efficiency, and real ROI. But it's also clear that internal teams can’t do it alone. This moment is a generational opportunity for startups that are ready to scale, integrate seamlessly, and speak pharma’s language.
This report provides rare visibility into how these leaders are actually deploying AI and how that transformation is unfolding — offering actionable insights for both founders building in the space and executives leading change within large organizations.
Whether you're a founder building for the pharma enterprise or an executive looking to modernize it, we’d love to connect and learn how we can help bring real-world innovation to market. Please get in touch by emailing Chuka Esiobu, chuka@definevc.com
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