Your Journey
Can you talk a bit about your career journey? Are there any key or unique experiences that helped shape the vantage point you have today?
As a double major, I faced a choice between sales/marketing and computer programming—two seemingly unrelated fields. Fortunately, my career evolved as these disciplines converged, with sales and marketing success now heavily dependent on technology expertise.
Having experience in both general management and technology roles gives me a unique perspective on how tech teams serve internal customers and how companies can reimagine customer interactions. This dual background allows me to bridge business strategy and technical execution in ways that specialists in either field alone cannot.
AI in Life Sciences Today
What areas do you see as having the greatest untapped potential for AI in life sciences? What is holding things back?
There are three areas with the most significant untapped AI potential in life sciences. First, drug discovery and design is increasingly a combinatorial problem where AI can accelerate the identification of novel molecules. Second, clinical trials, which represent our most expensive and time-consuming bottleneck, are essentially complex optimization problems that AI can streamline. Third, precise communication—delivering the right educational and promotional content to physicians through the proper digital channels at the right moment.
What typically holds us back is data fragmentation and the freedom to change long-standing incumbent processes in our highly regulated industry, where mistakes have life-or-death consequences.
Can you share examples of how your team is already embedding AI and emerging technology into core business functions to drive innovation and productivity? What use cases or functional areas seem most promising at BMS?
We are unlocking AI value through two complementary approaches. First, we responsibly democratize access to innovative AI tools across our workforce. We provide all employees with free access to the top four foundational LLM models—a $500-per-month value if purchased individually—enabling them to enhance personal productivity within their existing workflows.
Second, we are fundamentally rewiring our enterprise by taking an “AI-first” approach to complex business processes. Rather than retrofitting AI onto existing systems, we are using a clean-sheet methodology to reimagine how work gets done across core functions.
Our most promising use cases align with the three untapped potential areas I mentioned: AI-accelerated drug discovery, clinical trial optimization, and precision content delivery to healthcare providers. We are seeing early wins in regulatory document generation, clinical data analysis, and personalized physician engagement platforms.
For more info, please refer to: The NVIDIA AI Podcast: How Bristol Myers Squibb Is Accelerating Drug Development With AI
Cultural Transformation
How is BMS working to build a “digitally fluent” culture? What steps are you and your team taking to ensure your workforce is equipped to work with AI-powered technologies and to use data effectively?
We have so far offered several voluntary trainings and workshops, which we call “Raising your AIQ.” More than half of all employees have attended one or more of these trainings/workshops, and as a result, we are seeing more than one out of three employees using the Generative AI tools that we have given them on an almost daily basis.
For more info, please refer to: Fast Company: The rise of the CTO in the age of ‘business unusual’
Personal Learning and Staying Ahead of Emerging Trends
In a space evolving as rapidly as AI, how do you personally stay ahead of key trends? What do you read and listen to? Are there habits, sources, or perspectives that help you filter signals from noise?
Being able to keep up with the latest development while filtering out the signal from the noise might be the single hardest thing to do. Where in the Enterprise IT world, core technology has historically changed every five years or so, change is now happening almost weekly. I prefer Reddit and X for my headline news because they both have a crowdsourcing component that helps filter out a lot of noise. I also try to read several academic journals each month to see what is coming out of academia. Podcasts are also an excellent way to dig deeper in an area that seems interesting.
STAT: Why isn’t AI transforming biopharma as fast as we’d like?
Impact and Evaluation
How do you think about ROI when it comes to AI? What outcomes help you determine whether a digital initiative is truly delivering value?
AI differs from many other technologies in that you do not know if it will help with a given problem until you experiment with it, and because change is so rapid, the goalposts are in constant motion in terms of what these technologies can accomplish. Usually, we gain clarity on what problems to solve with AI by asking ourselves, “How would things be different if we could use AI to improve how we do X by 10X?” This pragmatic approach usually allows us to intuitively know what is worth experimenting on and what is a distraction.
Looking Ahead
What advice would you give to other leaders and CIOs trying to keep their organizations agile and future-ready in the AI era?
Move fast, get proof of concept as fast as you can, and be clear on what concept you are trying to prove. As I constantly tell my teams, one demo is worth 1,000 slides. Before you begin defining what precise success criteria will justify scaling AI projects, consider this: if you achieve the requirements, go big and scale. Otherwise, you end up in “prototype purgatory,” where a lot of AI pilots capture the imagination of people but fail to translate into compelling business results.
Bios:
Greg Meyers, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, BMS
Greg Meyers, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer, leads the company’s efforts to coalesce digital technology alongside the company’s transformational science to get more medicines to more patients faster and more impactfully.
In his role, Greg leads the company’s Business Insights and Technology function, along with its exploration and development of digital health tools that aim to enhance how patients are diagnosed, treated, and monitored in the clinic. At a time of accelerating evolution in the healthcare space, Greg’s teams put leading-edge digital technologies at the service of BMS scientists, researchers, and professionals to make the company stronger, nimbler, and more productive in discovering, developing, and bringing medicines and digital health solutions to patients everywhere, efficiently and effectively.
“Digital innovation, computer and data science are the disciplines that will create breakthroughs in our understanding of biology and transform the way the life sciences industry operates at a fundamental level,” Greg said. “The state of artificial intelligence and machine learning in life sciences is similar to where we were with personal computers in the 1980s — we are just getting started, and there is so much ahead to discover! Technology and digital capabilities will also catalyze our ways of working — from how we develop medicines, to how we improve patient experience, to how we run our core business operations. We are excited and ready to harness all of the possibilities that lie ahead.”
To lead this mission, Greg brings a deep and varied background as a successful P&L executive, champion for digital transformation, and change agent. Prior to joining BMS, Greg was group chief information and digital officer of Syngenta Group, a global leader in regenerative agriculture. Before that, he held business and technology management positions at Motorola Solutions, Biogen, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
A New Jersey native, Greg holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Rutgers University and a master of business administration from Temple University.
Partha Anbil is a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an alumnus of MIT Sloan. Besides being VP of Programs of the MIT Club of Delaware Valley, Partha is a long-time life sciences consulting industry veteran. He is a Senior Advisor to NextGen Invent Corporation (https://nextgeninvent.com/), an AI, Data Analytics, and digital transformation company. He has held senior leadership roles at IBM, Booz & Company (now PWC Strategy&), IMS Health Management Consulting Group (now IQVIA), and KPMG. He can be reached at partha.anbil@alum.mit.edu
Michael Wong is a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office and an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association. Michael is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and his ideas have been shared in the MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review.
