When I stepped into the role of Digital Transformation Officer (DTO) at Novo Nordisk three years ago, I had a clear mandate to transform our business by harnessing emerging technologies — without letting costs explode.
Our guiding principle is simple: “patients are waiting.” We use data and technologies to create groundbreaking science and to get it to people as quickly as possible. Every day we shave off the timeline is a day closer to helping someone manage diabetes, obesity, or a rare blood disease.
AI has massive potential to accelerate that mission. But in a hyper-regulated environment, speed alone isn’t enough; we have to be certain our agents are operating exactly as designed.
Finding the “heat loss” in drug development
In the world of pharma, our work is incredibly complex and often manual. Developing new drugs is a tightly governed, decade-long journey where “time-on-patent” dictates a company’s ability to reinvest in future R&D.
Having spent 30 years in this industry, I’ve seen first-hand how even the slightest hiccup in trial operations can delay the launch of innovative medicines to patients and compromise competitive advantage.
One of the fundamental challenges is fragmentation. Most people involved are domain experts focused on a microscopic fraction of the lifecycle and their operational data is not connected. This creates “heat loss” — invisible silos where processes stall, handoffs fail, and data sits idle which slows down our speed to market. We needed a way to see the invisible.
Pioneering new technologies
To move faster than the market, we invested in high-impact, cutting-edge technologies early – whether it’s adopting technologies like large language models (LLMs), RAG, agents, or automation. We applied that same mindset by injecting Process Intelligence into the core of our business: drug development. (You can read our full story here). This was an industry first.
We started by targeting protocol deviations and issue management and then quickly moved to the clinical trial application process —the regulatory submission and review procedure used to obtain legal authorization to test an investigational drug on human subjects. It acts as a vital “green light” to transition a drug from preclinical development to clinical trials.
And Celonis delivered. Creating a digital twin of our end-to-end processes — enriched with our unique business context — the platform gave us critical insights to understand exactly where to intervene. I call it the “digital brain” behind our operations, coordinating optimization across all layers of expertise. We can align every function to move at the same pace, ensuring that fixing one process area doesn’t just push the bottleneck further down the line.
Read on to learn all the details.