Paul Hudson has a blunt view of peers who hand off the execution of their artificial intelligence strategy to their chief digital officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIdiots,\u201d Sanofi\u2019s chief executive scoffs.<\/p>\n
He hastens to add that he has a great CDO, but says people in such roles get bogged down by the technical aspects when told to lead a company\u2019s AI strategy. \u201cFive years go by, nothing happens,\u201d he says. The lesson for CEOs? \u201cYou don\u2019t delegate the revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hudson, who became the drugmaker\u2019s CEO in 2019 after leadership roles at Novartis and AstraZeneca, is on a mission to turn \u201ca French dinosaur\u201d which had \u201cno R&D focus\u201d into a research and development-driven leader in immunology. Creating an AI-powered innovation culture is central to his plans, but his reluctance to delegate does not stem from mastery of the technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no interest in AI and I don\u2019t understand it,\u201d he says, \u201cbut what I discovered a few years ago was that the AI was better at telling me what would happen next than our own people.\u201d The bots could just synthesize insights from many more smart people, he notes.<\/p>\n
Sanofi has partnerships with the likes of OpenAI, but instead of spending heavily on a centrally directed AI rollout, Hudson is counting on what he calls his \u201cAI Fight Club.\u201d<\/p>\n
Driving ROAI from employees disrupting themselves<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just picked one person who didn\u2019t know anything about AI from each major function and put them in a room together and said, \u2018OK, disrupt yourselves,\u2019\u201d Hudson explains. Rather than checking on their progress frequently or giving them detailed directions, he just told them they would gather once or twice a year.<\/p>\n
Hudson is a believer in \u201cevent-driven leadership,\u201d he says, explaining that this means giving people a fixed goal, but plenty of freedom about how to reach it.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou tell them, \u2018We\u2019ll meet in Berlin in September and you\u2019ll share your updates with each other.\u2019 No more instructions, no questions asked between now and then. It becomes incredibly empowering and motivating for people to fill in the gap,\u201d he says, because nobody wants to show up with no progress to report.<\/p>\n
Fight Club\u2019s members share their findings with their teams, and with each other, allowing Sanofi to prevent its AI skills from developing in silos. This cross-fertilizing approach has delivered \u201cwins we never thought were possible,\u201d he says, and focused him on the notion of ROAI \u2014 return on artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Beating corporate lethargy with radical transparency<\/p>\n
Hudson has raised Sanofi\u2019s R&D budget from \u20ac5 billion a year to \u20ac8.5 billion. He also reduced headcount, but he knows that he cannot drive returns on that investment just from cutting costs. \u201cI can\u2019t fire enough people to generate enough cost saving[s] to discover new medicines fast enough,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I can do is weaponize the people to use AI to think bigger than they\u2019ve ever thought, to discover new medicines faster.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hudson now starts drug development committee meetings with an AI agent\u2019s assessment of whether a drug should advance to the next phase of trials or not. The agent will not just give its answer to that question, but weigh the drug\u2019s prospects against others in Sanofi\u2019s pipeline \u2014 and against alternative potential uses of Sanofi\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n
It gives its view dispassionately, whether executives like it or not, Hudson notes, \u201cbecause the agent doesn\u2019t have a career at stake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most big companies get lethargic and resist change, Hudson believes, but AI \u201cblows fresh air through everywhere.\u201d Employees who don\u2019t want AI agents judging them harshly are raising their games, he says, making the technology\u2019s \u201cradical transparency\u201d a \u201cmultiplier\u201d of his change agenda.<\/p>\n
Ties, pizza, and the purposeful symbolism of culture change<\/p>\n
Hudson is a Manchester-born economics graduate who saw Oasis in his hometown when the band was still playing in small venues and describes the Mancunians\u2019 current tour as \u201clife changing.\u201d He worked for what was then Sanofi-Synth\u00e9labo in the mid-1990s, so he knew the company years before becoming its CEO, but he has brought an iconoclastic approach to its Paris headquarters since returning.<\/p>\n
The company seemed \u201clost in time\u201d when he returned, he says. His assistant wanted to call him Monsieur Directeur G\u00e9n\u00e9ral, his chairman gulped at hearing that Hudson would not be wearing a tie, and he couldn\u2019t get daily sales reports. At lunchtime, executives enjoyed a dining room on the building\u2019s roof, while staff were stuck in a windowless basement canteen with a dated menu of coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon.<\/p>\n
Hudson moved into new premises with no executive dining room, gave staff a view of the Paris rooftops, and turned the cafeteria into a pizzeria. They were symbolic gestures, but his intention was to be \u201cpurposeful in the symbols, helping people understand that the sands are shifting and it would not go back to how it was.\u201d The risks from shaking things up were much lower than the risk of staying the same, he concluded, \u201cso we were able to get on with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
How to avoid spreading resources \u2018like Nutella\u2019<\/p>\n
Pizza and open-neck shirts would not deliver the breakthrough innovations Hudson needed, however, and he declared in 2023 that he was focusing Sanofi on becoming the world\u2019s leading immunology company. It already had Dupixent, a medication for conditions including eczema, which he says could become one of the five best-selling drugs of all time, so this looked like a category where it could win.<\/p>\n
But big companies hate prioritizing, Hudson says. Instead, \u201cthey spread resources like Nutella.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reason is that focusing on one team\u2019s work means starving others of resources. That was a lesson he learned at a previous company, when \u201cfive guys blocked me from leaving the bathroom\u201d after he said in a meeting that he would not prioritize the medicines they were working on. He talked his way out of the bathroom, returned to the meeting, and said, \u201cI\u2019ve got my first five names for the people who don\u2019t want to participate in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Talent management and resource allocation are at the core of the CEO\u2019s role, Hudson notes. \u201cIf I put the best people on the right opportunity with the right resources, we can win.\u201d But too many staff doubted that Sanofi could win in R&D \u2014 so he needed to bring in outsiders who \u201cknow what success looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hudson recruited such people from around the world to work on Dupixent, telling them \u201cthey could take risks on the diseases that they could go after with this drug\u201d and counting on AI to help point them to which risks were most likely to pay off. \u201cWe needed to be able to tell people that we were serious about doing R&D. If we got it right, we\u2019d be this amazing growth story,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd if we got it wrong, we\u2019d be about where we started.\u201d<\/p>\n
How a vaccine leader navigates the politics of vaccine sceptics<\/p>\n
Sanofi\u2019s status as one of the world\u2019s largest vaccine makers places it at odds with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump\u2019s health secretary, who has repeatedly voiced doubts<\/a> about the safety of vaccines. Yet Hudson has been among the foreign CEOs pledging large US investments since Trump\u2019s inauguration, promising to invest at least $20 billion in the country by 2030.<\/p>\n The decision was a calculated one, he implies. \u201cPharma\u2019s been outside of tariffs, and there was a lot of talk of whether that would stay the same. We took the opportunity to declare our investment so the president could see that we were serious about it.\u201d<\/p>\n