Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson takes inspiration from ‘Fight Club’ to get his team hooked on AI
Good Morning. Ryan Hogg here in Europe,filling in for Diane Brady.
I took a trip to Paris last week, a thriving AI hub boasting some of Europe’s top young talent and most exciting tech startups like Mistral and Holistic AI.
But I came to see the 51-year-old pharma giant Sanofi. I sat in on the company’s inaugural hackathon at its headquarters beside l’Arc de Triomphe, as hundreds of employees across the globe worked in teams using its plai app to find AI powered-solutions to produce and distribute its drugs.
The objective? “Shamelessly, to steal good ideas,” Paul Hudson, Sanofi’s CEO, told me.
More than that, though, it’s an opportunity to boast about how Sanofi has managed to get its employees hooked on AI assistants as part of a major overhaul since Hudson’s arrival as CEO in 2019.
Sanofi announced last year that it was going “all in on AI.” For Hudson, that means integrating AI across Sanofi’s value chain.
The plai app, powered by German startup Aily Labs, gives a holistic overview of Sanofi’s supply chain and its R&D pipeline, using LLMs to understand which drugs to prioritize. Sanofi reallocated $800 million worth of funds based on advice from its AI agent last year.
Prior to the hackathon, Hudson took around 15 employees “with no AI expertise” to what he described as a “dodgy hotel” in Barcelona, where the only room they could book was the basement nightclub. There, they experimented with the plai app.
He told me many CEOs were scared of AI, comparing it to The Terminator’s John Connor traveling back in time to stop the rise of the machines.
“Most CEOs, I think, look at it as a cyber issue, and it’s an opportunity.”
Rather than The Terminator, though, Hudson leaned on the Fight Club mantra to inspire AI rollout beyond these 15 upstart employees. Namely: “The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.”
He says that “exclusivity” drive, which made employees curious, quickly helped increase uptake of the app from 15,000 to 18,000.
“It became a little bit more organic, which I think is the new way for big corporations,” Hudson explained, “because if what you’re rolling out is worthy, it makes it, and if it doesn’t, there was something wrong with it.”
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Ryan Hogg
ryan.hogg@fortune.com
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