Pharmaceutical company Novartis evaporated ambitious AI project

Zurich, Frankfurt The Novartis management around CEO Vas Narasimhan had apparently lost patience with the in-house IT experts: The management team of the Basel pharmaceutical giant decided to radically streamline a project launched at the end of 2019 under the name “Data42” for the use of artificial intelligence in researching new drugs . The Handelsblatt learned this from several people familiar with the project.

The decision was made in the course of a savings round in which seven percent of the workforce was laid off in mid-2022 – and after Novartis had already put more than 100 million dollars into the project. A person familiar with the project told Handelsblatt it was “tipped just before it officially went live, most people were laid off, and it was integrated into Novartis as a small division.”