Inside look: Novo Nordisk’s Seth Freund on gen AI and the next wave of transformation

For more than 20 years, Novo Nordisk’s North American Data, Digital & IT (DD & IT) division has led the regional transformation of sales and marketing for this Danish multinational pharmaceutical powerhouse. What began with a focus on the company’s healthcare provider (HCP) data ecosystem has evolved to more sophisticated use of data and AI aimed at enabling the company’s growth goals.

Seth Freund now leads the North American DD & IT division, reporting through the CIO’s management team and the North American CFO’s organization.

He recently took time to sit down with ZS to share some perspective on how his organization is embracing generative AI, and how the interest in it is driving the company’s next phase of transformation.

ZS: What’s so exciting about your work right now, what should people take away?

Seth Freund: I don’t think there’s a better place to be than in data and digital today. People can now relate to the work we’re doing in ways they just couldn’t before because they’ve experienced gen AI firsthand. Everyone has used it—even my mom’s used ChatGPT. They might not understand the technical details, but they see the potential, and that’s what’s so exciting right now.

ZS: You’ve been building capabilities for a while at Novo Nordisk. Can you share a bit about that journey?

Seth Freund: Our journey started in 2015 when we wanted to get our data house in order before moving our CRM to the cloud, so we went through a massive effort to organize our data to get a high-quality master data set to build our connected HCP data ecosystem. From there, we implemented our CRM system with Veeva. We made a lot of progress in the cloud data and analytics space through 2022. And then when I took on the role for North American Operations, we started to prepare for the opportunities we could see coming.

ZS: What happened to your digital strategy as the interest in gen AI started peaking?

Seth Freund: We had a digital strategy that’s guided us for a while, but our senior leadership’s interest in gen AI gave us new opportunities to tell the story about where we are and how we see more opportunity. So, we took our story to them, and we shaped our next chapter around three pillars.

The first pillar is around next-generation customer engagement. The second is focused on improving patient outcomes, and the third is focused on driving agile and efficient operations. The first two are external-facing and the third pillar enables the others, so efforts under the third can be internal or external.

ZS: What did you see as the opportunity for the first pillar, customer engagement?

Seth Freund: When we looked at customer engagement from an HCP perspective, we really thought that we could supercharge that journey with AI.

We initially planned how we could go from a call-planned CRM environment to one where we’re taking advantage of AI to drive next best actions. And then we asked: How can we do that at scale? How can we do that across many channels, and perhaps with an ambition to have a fully orchestrated customer environment that is AI-driven across all our promotional channels? So, we’re focused on accelerating this path.

ZS: And how about patient outcomes?

Seth Freund: The opportunity that we see is thinking about patient services from the perspective of data and then applying AI to that data. We asked, what if we could bring all our existing programs together under one interconnected patient data ecosystem? We’d be able to provide better services. We’d be able to hyper-personalize and hyper-localize the different offerings or capabilities that we might have.

So, we’re doing that. We’re applying what we know from creating a connected HCP data ecosystem to our patient-facing capabilities.

We expect a holistic patient services transformation with one foundational data layer and one foundational tech stack from which we’ll build different patient services and brand-new patient programs as we go forward. Consent to use patient data is very different here, too, as is privacy and security, and we’re anticipating a regulatory landscape that’s going to continually evolve, so we’re building for that from the start.

ZS: Earlier you mentioned an operational efficiency link to the work in patient services, can you share more?

Seth Freund: We have an opportunity in the obesity space to directly serve millions of patients, so we’re expecting patient services to grow. But as that patient volume grows, we can’t have the cost for our patient contact centers grow at the same rate. So, we’re looking at ways to use digitalization in combination with AI to break that cost curve and flatten it a bit. For us, it’s more about dealing with growth than directly reducing costs, it’s an inflection point in the cost curve as we serve more patients.

ZS: When you talk about agile and efficient operations with data and AI, it’s not just doing the same thing faster, right?

Seth Freund: Right. If it was just about taking a process today and making it a little more efficient, that’s probably not a super compelling reason to invest in making a change. In many cases, these are decades-old processes that have worked well in various ways.

But when you think about the operational need relative to the other new things we’re trying to do as we grow, the need for change becomes more compelling.

For example, a big part of customer orchestration is providing hyper-personalized and hyper-localized content. Five years from now, we could be in a world where we potentially produce 30 times the volume of content than we do today. So that growth will require an overhaul of our review processes—medical, legal, regulatory and beyond. The need isn’t limited to our existing areas but expands to other newer areas for us, including cardiovascular and renal disease and in rare disease spaces—all of these will require hyper-personalized experiences.

ZS: Where else are you prioritizing efficient operations with AI?

We’re looking at a lot of our meatier processes, too, including forecasting and contracting and how these processes will need to change with our growth. And while each of these has had several iterations of process reengineering over the years, we see more opportunities for rethinking them in the world of AI and gen AI.

Many thanks to Seth Freund, Head of Data, Digital & IT in North America at Novo Nordisk for sharing his insights with ZS.