Merck is using AI agents to cut drug discovery cycles by a third and ship compliant marketing materials up to 80% faster — but VP of Digital Platforms Sean Finnerty says the only reason it’s working is because they built the infrastructure first.And the pharmaceutical manufacturer is seeing promising early results: AI is generating marketing drafts that are “99% right” when it comes to compliance, shrinking review cycles from months to days and accelerating delivery by 70% to 80%. In the company’s medical research, meanwhile, one AI-assisted discovery cycle was reduced by 33%.Still, agentic AI only works if companies first build the underlying “plumbing,” Finnerty said of digital platforms and services at a recent AI Impact Series event. “If we do one-offs, we’re gonna end up with thousands and thousands of things that are ultimately just gonna be debt that we’ll have to deal with later,” he said. “And that’s gonna be a drag on any further innovation.” Starting with the plumbingMerck’s plumbing-first strategy comes from lessons learned during the early days of cloud in the 2010s “when nobody knew what the heck was going on,” Finnerty said. Getting the cloud right meant building from the ground up; at Merck, that infrastructure now supports 2,500 AWS accounts, numerous Microsoft Azure subscriptions, and new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) integrations. “AI is gonna be the same exact thing,” Finnerty said. “We’re going to have thousands and thousands of agents.” The questions then pile up: How do you register them? How do you secure them? How do you ensure they’re connected to the rig …
