When Gabriele Ricci became chief data and technology officer at Takeda Pharmaceutical, one of the biggest cultural changes he made was eliminating the term “information technology.”
“We don’t use the word IT anymore,” says Ricci, who was appointed to lead the data, digital, and technology function at the Japan-based pharmaceutical giant since 2022. “We truly believe our function is a business function.”
While that may seem mostly symbolic, Takeda, which develops treatments for oncology, rare diseases, and gastrointestinal and inflammation, has substantially reorganized the technology function under Ricci's leadership. Ricci reports directly to CEO Christophe Weber, giving the technology division a prime position within the C-suite. His predecessor had reported to the chief financial officer.
Three years ago, 80% of the company’s technology needs were performed by external contractors. Ricci disliked relying so heavily on third parties, and Takeda hired thousands of engineers, data scientists, and architects. He put them in three major innovation centers, called “digital factories” internally, in India, Mexico, and Slovakia to co-develop technology with various business functions.
This structure represents a more federated approach, Ricci says, adding “we have a scientific pipeline and a digital pipeline managed together in symbiosis."
Ricci has spent his entire technology career in the pharmaceutical industry, beginning at Bristol-Myers Squibb, then Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, and Shire. He joined Takeda after it acquired Shire for $62 billion in 2019.
In recent years, he says the environment for pharmaceutical companies has become more volatile. There are more macroeconomic tensions, greater pressure on costs, and higher expectations from customers. “If you are not investing now in digital and enabling a big transformation, we risk our existence,” warns Ricci.
Takeda has also gotten more aggressive about upskilling employees. More than half of the company’s workforce has taken virtual or in-person courses and training for new technologies, like AI. There are thousands of classes available in over 100 different languages.
The focus on upskilling has included new generative AI tools like a chatbot called “myAibou,”—aibou means "companion" in Japanese—that has been used by more than 24,000 Takeda employees for summarizing, content creation, and other repetitive tasks. Takeda says generative AI is being used across the company in functions ranging from R&D to supply chain to operations. All of Takeda's AI and generative AI tools are built to be auditable, monitored for bias and discrimination, and adhere to the company's ethical AI framework, Ricci says.
Takeda is both buying and building generative AI tools, using models from providers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon Web Services. In areas where Takeda wants to retain a more clear competitive advantage, like research, it will look to build more of its own models.
Ricci says the combination of multiple models is especially alluring. For writing about medical topics, as an example, one model may be very specialized in picking out scientific information, while another specializes in image processing, and yet another can interpret results from multiple data sets derived from research.
“There’s not a model that fits all,” says Ricci. “If you just rely on one, it will be less precise than actually orchestrating multiple models together.”
John Kell
Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.
Earlier this week, Fortune hosted its Fortune Global Forum conference in New York, where some of the sessions focused on the intersection of technology and business. In one, the CEOs of Honeywell and Lumen talked about the critical importance of AI and creating a corporate culture that will embrace it. You can catch up with all that happened at the conference through this archive of articles about the individual sessions and video replays.
By the way, if you'd like to join us for an upcoming conference, Fortune's Brainstorm AI, in San Francisco, from Dec. 9-10, you can find information and request an invitation here. It will feature top executives from across business and tech, including Rohit Prasad, Amazon's senior vice president and head scientist, artificial general intelligence; Liz Reid, Google’s vice president, search; Christopher Young, Microsoft’s executive vice president of business development, strategy, and ventures; and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has his own AI startup.
