Where pharma talent goes as AI companies expand: the case for pharma tech

The AI companies I expect to hire most from pharma are the ones building products to sell back to it.

Jessica Davis Pluess interviewed me for SWI swissinfo.ch about where pharma talent will go as AI companies expand.

Her piece today also profiles Nives Rombini, who left Bristol Myers Squibb to co-found Navis Bio, and my former colleague David Vanni, who moved from Novartis to lead global sales for CHOIR.

I don’t expect OpenAI and Anthropic to become the main destinations. I see them accelerating pharma’s work. Taking drugs through clinical development means a different business model and timelines measured in years.

Maurice Thornton of headcount AG also points to senior pharma people taking board and advisory roles at AI companies. I expect more movement into AI-native drug discovery companies eventually building their own pipelines, such as Isomorphic, and then a newly evolving category I'd call "pharma tech" enabling pharma with services across the value chain.

Banks went through this fifteen years ago. The people who left Goldman and UBS mostly did not go to Google. They founded companies that sold back to banks, and that category got a name. I think "pharma tech" will follow the same path, and the mention of Switzerland is no coincidence. The country already produced fintech out of its banking talent. It has the same raw material for pharma tech.