Novo Nordisk + Celonis

For Novo Nordisk, every day of delay in clinical development is a day too long. By enabling AI with Celonis Process Intelligence, they’re aiming to strip a year out of the clinical development cycle. Such a shift could get life-changing treatments to patients faster, while also generating tens of millions in revenue for further research and development.

In an industry defined by hyper-competition, drug development remains stuck in the slow lane. For over a decade, the time it takes to go from candidate nomination (when molecules progress to being tested in humans for the first time) to launch has remained stubbornly at roughly 12 years.

But the status quo is meant to be challenged, and Novo Nordisk are built for the fight. For over 100 years, the pharma giant has been on a relentless mission to defeat chronic disease. They’ve become a global force of 69,000 people, producing 50% of the world's insulin. And they’re pioneering research into transporting and storing drugs without refrigeration to make medication more accessible to all.

Today, Novo Nordisk are transforming into an agentic enterprise. They’re powering a fleet of over 100 AI agents with Celonis to revolutionize clinical development. The ambition: shaving 12 months or more off drug development time to get medications into the hands of patients faster.

Injecting intelligence into the core

A driving force behind this AI initiative is Stephanie Bova. Novo Nordisk’s Corporate VP and Digital Transformation Officer, Research and Development has spent 25 years in the industry. She knows why efforts to transform clinical development often feel like an uphill battle. “What we do is complex,” says Bova. “Very few careers span multiple domains, meaning there’s little understanding of the end-to-end value chain.”

The barrier to speeding up time-to market, she says, is a maze of domains and processes, all tangled up in constantly-changing regulations. The result: end-to-end visibility into the clinical development process is impossible and life-changing innovation struggles to make it through.

That lack of visibility changed the moment Novo Nordisk saw their operations through a digital twin built in Celonis. “The experts in the room got very excited,” Bova recalls. “We realized we could possibly cut 12 months or more from our time-to-market by using our operational data strategically.”

The team worked with Celonis to create a roadmap for speeding up clinical development, starting with clinical operations – where newly developed drugs are tested on humans. As a first step, they created a digital twin of the clinical trials application process. No mean feat given clinical trials run over many years, often involving tens of thousands of patients, across thousands of sites, in multiple countries, all with distinct regulations.

The digital twin provided the granular clarity Novo Nordisk was missing. Bova’s team can now understand overall cycle times and dive into the hidden variables that drive trial success.

Starting with this highly complex domain has given Novo Nordisk the confidence to scale Celonis. The team is now looking to embed Process Intelligence across the entire drug lifecycle — including regulatory affairs, patient safety, R&D quality, CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, Controls), and commercial launch.

Orchestrating 100+ AI agents with clinical precision

Novo Nordisk’s digital twin — enriched with their unique business rules, KPIs, and benchmarks — is the foundation for a larger play: Enterprise AI at scale. The team is now orchestrating a fleet of 100+ Celonis-powered AI agents that leverage this operational context to automate heavily regulated workflows with clinical precision.

By fueling AI with Process Intelligence, Novo Nordisk are gaining a triple shot of efficiency.
They can:

• Reduce compliance risk, driving consistency across trials through common understanding of complex procedures, classification of cases, and allocation of SMEs.
• Resolve critical bottlenecks faster, ensuring smoother drug development flows.
• Refocus experts on their core mission, reclaiming thousands of hours that the team can spend optimizing therapies and advancing patient care.

In an industry where patents are finite, going to market a week faster can mean tens, if not hundreds of millions in peak revenue. As Bova explains: “Time-on-patent is the lifeblood of next-generation R&D — it’s the revenue that funds our future discovery.”

A prescription for digital transformation

While the success in clinical development is a major milestone, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. For Bova and her team, the work with Celonis is part of an enterprise-wide IT modernization. In a landscape where new and legacy technologies collide, Novo Nordisk uses the platform to distinguish between a failing technology and a broken process.

One example: When Bova’s team recently introduced a new software to overhaul how clinical trial data enters their central database, they used Celonis to validate KPIs, keep the implementation on track, and pinpoint exactly where additional value could be found.

By powering their IT modernization with Celonis, Novo Nordisk are ensuring all current and future tech investments have a direct line to reality. “We’re still defining the enterprise stack,” says Bova, “but Process Intelligence remains at the core. It connects all our systems regardless of the provider — and brings in the business context we need.”