Key Takeaways
- Sanofi’s DriveDigital@Scale program, built with HEC Paris, trains over 2,000 executives across three cohorts from 2024 to 2026 on data and AI strategy.
- The program culminates in an “ExCom Shark Tank” where the top five projects from each cohort pitch to a jury, with the best two presenting directly to Sanofi’s Executive Committee.
- One winning project, Blockbuster Booster, uses AI to predict the company’s next blockbuster drug and has already been integrated into Sanofi’s R&D strategic planning.
- The initiative is part of Sanofi’s broader push to upskill over 16,000 employees and become the first biopharma company powered by data and AI at scale.
What Happened
Sanofi has built an internal Shark Tank for AI and data projects, giving employees across the company a direct path to pitch ideas to senior leadership and secure corporate funding. The initiative is part of DriveDigital@Scale, a custom executive education program co-created with HEC Paris Executive Education that launched in 2024 and runs through 2026. More than 2,000 executives are being trained in cohorts of up to 250, with each cohort culminating in a competitive pitch event modeled after the television show Shark Tank.
The program follows a structured format: six weeks of theory learning on data and AI topics, followed by three weeks of applied “Learning by Driving” that includes an ideation workshop, the ExCom Shark Tank pitch event, and a one-day face-to-face session held alternately in Boston and at HEC Paris in France.
Why It Matters
Most large pharmaceutical companies have adopted AI through top-down mandates — executive teams select vendors, deploy enterprise tools, and push adoption downward. Sanofi’s approach inverts that model. By training thousands of mid-level and senior leaders to identify AI opportunities within their own domains and then giving them a formal mechanism to pitch those ideas to the C-suite, the company is betting that bottom-up innovation will surface use cases that corporate strategy teams would miss.
This matters in the broader context of pharma’s AI adoption race. Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson has been vocal about the company’s AI ambitions, including partnering with OpenAI to accelerate drug development. The Shark Tank program complements those external partnerships by cultivating internal AI fluency and generating ideas from people who understand Sanofi’s operations firsthand.
Technical Details
The DriveDigital@Scale program is the second phase of Sanofi’s partnership with HEC Paris. The first phase, Drive Digital, launched in 2023 and trained Sanofi’s top 150 executives. The current program targets the next tier of leadership — over 2,000 executives across three annual cohorts in 2024, 2025, and 2026.
The Shark Tank process works as a funnel. During the three-week applied phase, participants form teams and develop AI or data-driven project proposals. The top five projects from each cohort present to an internal jury. The two highest-scoring teams then advance to pitch directly to Sanofi’s Executive Committee (ExCom), which has the authority to greenlight funding and resources.
One project that emerged from this process is Blockbuster Booster, an R&D initiative that uses AI to predict which drug candidates in Sanofi’s pipeline have the highest probability of becoming blockbuster products. After its ExCom pitch, Blockbuster Booster was integrated into Sanofi’s R&D strategic planning and received dedicated resources and investment. Joanne Beardsley, Sanofi’s Global Executive Development Program Director, said the program uses “data and AI in the learning program itself to help us to transform.”
Who’s Affected
The immediate impact falls on Sanofi’s executive ranks — over 2,000 leaders gaining hands-on experience with AI strategy and the opportunity to champion projects they believe in. For Sanofi’s 91,000-plus global workforce, the program signals that AI literacy is becoming a prerequisite for leadership roles, not an optional skill. The company has already upskilled over 16,000 employees across various digital transformation initiatives since 2021.
Other pharmaceutical companies are watching closely. If Sanofi’s Shark Tank model produces measurable results — faster drug development timelines, cost savings from operational AI, or new revenue streams — competitors will face pressure to create similar bottom-up innovation programs rather than relying solely on top-down AI deployment.
What’s Next
The third and final cohort of DriveDigital@Scale is scheduled for 2026, which will bring the total number of trained executives past the 2,000 mark. Sanofi has also committed $625 million to Sanofi Ventures, its corporate venture arm, to fund external biotech and digital health startups — suggesting that the company’s innovation funnel extends beyond internal pitches. Whether the ExCom Shark Tank format scales beyond executive training into broader employee participation remains an open question, but the early results with projects like Blockbuster Booster indicate the model is producing deployable AI initiatives rather than theoretical exercises.
