Dennis Hancock took over technology at Pfizer this year, after spending 31 years into his career at the pharma giant. His task: get AI into everything from drug discovery to the factory floor.
Two years ago he built Health Answers by Pfizer, an app that answers people's health questions in plain language. It won a Webby Award. But as Hancock expanded AI across 177-year-old Pfizer, he ran into what he calls “organizational inertia,” a reluctance to tear up processes that already worked. So he changed who's in charge. Instead of his central team deciding Pfizer's AI projects, each division now runs its own, the labs, the factories, the sales teams, while his group supplies the software and safety rules they all build on.
"We want to make Pfizer the most AI-forward company in our peer set," he says. It's the kind of ambition you'd expect from a CIO, delivered by a man who decompresses playing Led Zeppelin with the same four friends every week: "We can attack this, and we can kill it, and we will."