In the early days of the generative artificial intelligence boom, Sanofi’s chief digital officer, Emmanuel Frenehard, wasn’t particularly impressed with the AI tools that were being pitched.
The French pharmaceutical giant eschewed licensing an enterprise version of the AI chatbot ChatGPT for internal use. Frenehard also didn’t make Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, widely available for employees after conducting a small pilot.
“We looked at it, and said, ‘This is lame,’” says Frenehard. “This is just going to be a massive cost, but the value will be limited, compared to what you can do with a public ChatGPT. What difference is it, apart from your data is secured?”
Instead, Frenehard said he took inspiration from the hospitality industry, where experts at the front desk know all the best restaurant recommendations and local travel tips. This led to the launch of an internally developed and hosted generative AI companion called Concierge, which debuted in October 2024 and is now used by 60,000 employees globally, about 80% of Sanofi’s total workforce. Frenehard said that most of the employees who don’t use Concierge work in manufacturing and spend very little time in front of a computer.
Concierge has access to data from vendors including cloud-based software provider ServiceNow and business software giant Workday, Sanofi’s own internal policies and organizational charts, and connects external, agentic systems between the drugmaker and German enterprise software vendor SAP.
More recently, Frenehard’s focus has been on deploying agentic AI to more dramatically change workflows across IT, procurement, and sales. And, for the most part, he’s resisting the agentic capabilities that are being pitched by vendors. “I don’t want to have Salesforce agents, speaking to ServiceNow agents, going to speak to SAP agents,” explains Frenehard.
Instead, his vision is to run those workflows directly on Sanofi’s centralized data lake and lean on his partnerships with cloud-software company Snowflake and Elementum AI, the latter a startup that helps automate IT support, supply chain management, and other tasks, through an agentic AI workflow orchestration platform that has been built inside Snowflake’s AI data cloud. Snowflake’s venture capital arm disclosed an investment stake in Elementum AI in September 2025.
“In the last six months, more and more CIOs have discovered the importance of controlling their data,” says Nader Mikhail, CEO of Elementum AI. “The strategy of not forcing the customer to use our own database—they use their own, not ours—has been super powerful.”
For IT, Frenehard’s goal is for AI agents to autonomously resolve as much as 80% of employee requests, which he said could generate 10 million euros ($11.6 million USD) in annual savings. He also predicted that tens of millions in bottom-line savings would be achieved by automating procurement purchasing decisions.
For the top line, Sanofi is beginning to deploy Concierge to the sales team, rolling out the AI capabilities to 60 representatives earlier this month. The tool can help these employees prepare for meetings with doctors, including pulling relevant patient history, marketing data, and guiding what worked—or didn’t work—during prior conversations with medical professionals. Frenehard estimates that AI can save one day a week for each sales representative who uses AI in this manner.
His long term vision with this strategy to remake IT, procurement, and sales is to no longer rely on what software-as-a-service vendors are pitching when it comes to their own agentic capabilities. “I’m convinced that we are moving toward a world where software is becoming far more individual to the company,” says Frenehard, who asserts the software and AI experiences in Sanofi shouldn’t closely mirror rivals Novartis or AstraZeneca, even if they all operate in the same sector.
That said, Sanofi hasn’t shied away from partnering with the largest AI hyperscalers. The company’s external partnerships include utilizing sector-specific AI tools from Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare, as well as a collaboration with OpenAI and Formation Bio to build AI-powered software to speed up drug discovery.
Sanofi’s resistance to embracing agentic AI services sold by SaaS companies comes amid Wall Street’s bearish view on the software-as-a-service sector. While many SaaS vendors have made AI a central part of their product offerings, the proliferation of agentic AI has led companies like Sanofi to chart a different course, which could threaten SaaS vendors and their standard per-user fee structure.
In April, Frenehard says Sanofi held a “digital month,” which encompassed AI training focused on how to properly use Concierge. And despite all of his bullishness on AI, Frenehard acknowledges workflow transformation hasn’t been a linear experience, even for his own team, which manages the IT support function.
As AI-related job displacement becomes more prevalent across the tech industry, banking, insurance, and other sectors, fear has escalated that workers will be replaced by technology.
Sanofi’s cost savings tied to agentic AI use cases within IT and procurement will come from cuts to external vendors, Frenehard stressed. “If you start using AI and say, ‘I’m going to remove some employees because of AI,’ then you are going to create more friction,” says Frenehard.
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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