Navigating Intersections: GSK's CDTO on Developing A Cohesive Technology Strategy | Technovation 792

It's good to be here with you, Peter.

Yeah, happy to. GSK is a global biopharma company headquartered in the UK, and our ambition is to create transformational medicines and vaccines that prevent and treat disease. Our plan is to positively impact the lives of 2.5 billion people by 2030. We're a really busy company focused on human health and well-being.

Yeah, absolutely. Our global health mission helps us reach so many patients in need that otherwise wouldn't be reached through a normal strategy. We're very excited and very committed to it.

We've defined the core purpose of our company as uniting science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. My role on the executive team is to catalyze, influence, and enable the integration of data and technology into our business, and then work with our talent to make it happen. I have oversight of technology functions focused on R&D and our pipeline, global supply chain, and commercial teams in the market. These teams are deeply embedded and co-creating value along with our core value chain. I also have oversight of enterprise-wide technology platforms and capabilities, and of course responsibility for cyber security for the entire enterprise.

There's only so many ways to set up tech organizations. We have three verticals focused on R&D, supply chain, and commercial, and then enterprise-wide horizontals running across technology platforms, cyber security, and risk management. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about structure. I'm a big fan of fluid organizations that come together around a common purpose to create value. What I do is make sure the structure allows us to set up very clear accountabilities. One of our core values is accountable for impact, so we know how to empower someone to achieve their goals. Once I have that clarity, my preference is to get the right people in the right roles, as Jim Collins would say, and then get teams to go beyond organizational boundaries to come together around our mission. That's much more essential in a modern digital world than in a traditional technology world with slower-moving projects. Breaking organizational structures and going beyond them is essential for digital impact and co-creating products and services for our patients and customers.

Happy to share. Strategy to me is about first having a very clear vision and communicating it, then creating focus for the organization. Our company's purpose is we unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. We don't think of our digital or technology strategy as a standalone strategy. We've developed it as a joint strategy with each line of business to help GSK thrive in a digital world. They're business strategies for a digital world. Our approach is focused on anchoring our tech strategy and investment simply following the company's business strategy. The tech strategy simply follows and dovetails with this joint strategy approach. It creates solidarity, common purpose, and clarity. And for me, I'm just too old to be building technology that nobody uses, so being able to create things that people will actually use and create value from has been quite powerful. I think of our strategy as having a healthy balance of two components: playing offense with data and technology, and playing defense. It takes decades and billions of dollars to bring a medicine to market, with a 10% probability of success. Our top priority is how to create disproportionate positive impact on R&D productivity through data and technology. We call it supercharging R&D with data, including AI and machine learning for target identification, transforming clinical trials, and enabling smooth technology transfer from clinical to commercial supply. Beyond R&D, our supply chain teams are committed to Smart Manufacturing 2030, driving automation, advanced analytics, and computer vision for measurable improvements. On customer engagement, we use advanced data and analytics for customer and patient-centric approaches, with meaningful evidence of improved field performance. We also focus on Future of Work reimagined for four personas: factory, lab, field, and office workers. For technology platforms, we're investing in our cloud strategy and multicloud journey, data platforms, and AI partnerships. If you want to drive fast cars, you need good brakes. We have a clear cyber security strategy focused on maturity, control effectiveness, and actually using the tools we put in place. That's how we bring it all together.

For us, data in general and AI in particular come into play first and foremost in science problems. Adoption of AI is not new for GSK. We've been investing in it for five-plus years in earnest with a very mature research-focused AI/ML capability in-house. We have incredible talent who are scientists in their own right but also deep experts in AI and machine learning, bringing the power of biology and technology together. There's more data generated in a quarter now than in our 300-year history. The combined power of biology and technology is quite profound and will shape how science is done fundamentally over the next decades. We're now using data to build models of who is likely to respond to treatment and increase the probability of success in clinical trials. Beyond R&D, we use machine learning to build digital twins in supply chain for measurable improvements and power customer engagement through algorithms. This will accelerate with generative AI. We recently presented to our board our playing offense strategy with generative AI. In the short term, it will lead to productivity and efficiencies, with use cases like writing buddies for content creation, reading buddies for summarization, and automation of repetitive tasks. We just launched our first GPT-based digital assistant. Long term, I'm confident this will lead to innovation, particularly with multimodal platforms integrating images of disease pathology, genetic information, text, and clinical trial data. We intend to be early adopters and pioneers, and work with AI-powered drug development companies coming up in this new way of doing science. We also have a strong commitment to responsible AI with a framework covering ethics, governance, and policies. We're in a regulated industry, so we have to be thoughtful about adopting AI while maintaining control environment and transparency with regulators. We also recognize generative AI is cost-intensive and climate-negative, so we want to be disciplined about our adoption.

It's a really important piece. There are two elements: culture and skills. The leaders who really embrace technology usually don't have technology as a core skill set. The people who create immense value with technology have things like curiosity, agility, the ability to take risk, and systems thinking. These are leadership skills that lend themselves to exploiting the value of technology. Our common company culture is being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact, and doing the right thing. We don't introduce micro-cultures. If you're really ambitious for patients, you wouldn't not embrace technology that helps drive medicine identification faster. On skills, we've invested in digital learning pathways for about five years, with programs integrated with future-relevant skills like software engineering, product management, cyber security, cloud, AI, and advanced analytics. We've also had an initiative called Be Digital, offering digital and data skills to all 70,000 employees. We launched an annual data conference that grew from 400 attendees to 4,000 to an expected 10,000 this year. We teach prompt engineering, governance, and responsible AI. We use it for defense, offense, small skills, big skills, and most importantly, inspiration. If you hire great people, inspire them, and give them the right tools, they're more likely to do the right thing. We also offer a Leading in a Digital World program for all VPs, and business-specific skills like digital marketing for commercial teams. That's how we cover the gamut of everybody, leaders, and business-specific learning.

I really believe AI will be transformative, mainly because it's here and everyone's talking about it. Money and talent are flowing towards it, so it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think progress on AI will be compounding rather than linear. People will overestimate what it can do in the short term and underestimate what will happen in the long term. I'm very curious and committed to going on that journey. I'm also curious about AR, VR, and mixed reality tech, and neurotechnologies and brain technologies, because there could be digital therapeutics coming into play. What's really exciting is how digital health is being shaped by technology and how the entire healthcare ecosystem is changing. Patients experience healthcare through a complex ecosystem of care, insurance, and product companies. I'm curious about how AI will shape personalized medicine, the role of technology in providing care, how it'll shift the current decision-making power structure around health outcomes, and what digital therapeutics will emerge. All of this has significant implications for our industry and the health and well-being of people at large. There'll be winners and losers, and the game's yet to play out.

I'm not one of those people who set out to be a CXO. It's an enormous privilege to be leading this agenda and this team that helps the lives of 2.5 billion people. Each of us have a patient in our lives. For me, it was my mother who I lost to cancer. These things become very personal very quickly. I've been lucky to always be in companies that had to innovate or die, working with amazing people who lifted me up. My career success is a product of serendipity, good people helping me, and some of my own traits. The difference makers for me have been: a focus on value and business impact, having deep understanding of the business and customers. Even as an engineering manager at Apple, I used to go out in the field and meet service providers ordering parts, which gave me firsthand understanding of what's easy or not easy. That customer empathy and business empathy has been very valuable. Also, hiring great people and helping them be successful is not just part of the job, it is the job. I'm an easy boss in some ways, but a really tough boss when it comes to hiring good people. Lastly, humility and self-awareness matter for leaders in the long run. Leaders who truly listen, care, and are willing to learn and grow will shape the next decade of success.

Thank you, Peter. It's a pleasure.