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- Sanofi's CEO said the pharma firm uses AI to help decide to move a drug to the next developmental phase.
- He said it's a "sobering" process because AI agents have no careers at stake.
- "The agent isn't wedded to the project for 10 years," Paul Hudson said at Davos.
Paul Hudson, CEO of the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi, has an argument for letting AI make top-level decisions in medicine: It has no attachments.
Speaking at a panel in Davos on Tuesday, Hudson said Sanofi uses AI to recommend whether drugs should "pass through a tollgate," or essentially get approval to move to the next phase of development.
He said that when Sanofi's senior decision-makers convene to discuss a drug, they start with an AI's recommendation for their choice.
"And we do that because it's very sobering, because the agent doesn't have a career at stake," Hudson said. "The agent isn't wedded to the project for the last 10 years. The agent is dispassionately saying: 'Don't go forward or go forward faster, or go forward and remember these things.'"
"And we're not used to having somebody without a career at stake in the room at a senior level," he continued.
Hudson also said that Sanofi typically takes about 12 to 15 years to fully develop a drug and bring it to market and that it's been practically using AI for about three years.
By his estimate, that means AI has been around at Sanofi for about a third of the "discovery" process for some drugs. That process is when manufacturers figure out what compounds should qualify as candidates for new medicines.
The pharmaceutical company, which makes drugs like Lantus insulin jabs and Plavix blood thinners, spends about three billion euros, or $3.1 billion, on discovery within that timeframe, Hudson said.
He and four other senior-level speakers, including Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman and Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, spoke positively about AI at the panel, saying people shouldn't be so worried that they might lose their jobs.
"The jobs that are at risk are the jobs where the human isn't interested in AI. AI doesn't beat human plus AI," Hudson said.
Sanofi's press team did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.
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