Good morning. AstraZeneca’s AI strategy has moved well past the exploration phase as upskilling employees became a priority.
The biopharmaceutical giant has now certified more than 17,000 of its employees in AI competencies, Aradhana Sarin, CFO of AstraZeneca, told me. The program mandates that all staff above a certain grade reach at least a silver-level certification across a Bronze-Silver-Gold framework. Sarin described initial hesitancy giving way to genuine enthusiasm as employees saw the executive team’s commitment reflected in real investment. “I think people are really embracing AI and learning and developing their own skills,” Sarin said.
Where Sarin sees finance playing an immediate and critical role is in prioritization. With approximately 1,000 active AI pilots running across the company, “the value capture happens when you convert those pilots into production and really embed that in the workflow,” she said. Finance can help determine which pilots will have the biggest impact and merit the resources to become scalable. “You need to figure out which ones will truly move the needle,” she said.
AstraZeneca is actively exploring both generative and agentic AI applications as it works to build the operating infrastructure capable of supporting a company that, if its targets hold, will be nearly twice the size it was just a few years ago.
AstraZeneca’s $80 billion road map
AstraZeneca set its $80 billion revenue target for 2030 at an investor event in May 2024, when the consensus analyst estimate for that year sat around $67 billion. Few believed it, Sarin said, describing it as “a very stretch goal at the time.” But leadership could see enough pipeline assets to justify the ambition if those bets paid off.
She frames progress toward that goal around three building blocks. The first is existing products in approved indications, grown across the company’s presence in more than 80 markets.
The second is existing products expanding into new indications—her example was Imfinzi, which generated positive Phase 3 data this quarter in early-stage liver cancer, a setting where the drug is not yet approved. The third block is entirely new molecular entities, of which AstraZeneca expects 20 to reach the market by 2030. So far, the company has nine. It is awaiting FDA decisions on approvals of two more new medicines to add to this total in Q2 2026: camizestrant in breast cancer and baxdrostat in hypertension.
For its Q1, AstraZeneca reported on Wednesday revenue of $15.29 billion, topping Wall Street expectations by roughly $545 million, while operating profit grew 12%—outpacing revenue growth even as the company continued to pour money into research and development. Sarin credited broad-based product momentum for the revenue outperformance. Farxiga, the blockbuster cardiovascular and renal drug, contributed meaningfully to the quarter but will not repeat that performance going forward. The drug lost U.S. patent exclusivity on April 1 and entered China’s volume-based procurement program—both of which will weigh on the cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic portfolio through the rest of the year. AstraZeneca is targeting 25 blockbuster drugs—defined as products generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue—by 2030. It currently has 16.
When asked how she manages macroeconomic and geopolitical volatility—tariffs, presidential executive actions on drug pricing, shifting trade policy—Sarin’s answer was, “With a lot of ice in the stomach.” She described the past few years as a sustained test of corporate resilience: Rather than dwelling on problems, the focus is on identifying solutions and participating constructively in the broader policy ecosystem. The underlying assumption is that uncertainty is permanent—what changes is how prepared a company is to move through it.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com