Cognizant and Gilead extend partnership

Cognizant has announced an expansion of its relationship with Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD). Gilead is a leading biopharmaceutical company advancing innovative medicines to prevent and treat life-threatening diseases. Under the agreement, Cognizant will manage Gilead's global IT infrastructure, platforms, applications and advanced analytics, and lead initiatives designed to accelerate its digital transformation. The agreement includes renewal and expansion of Cognizant services for a total expected value of $800 million over the next five years. This collaboration is aimed at enabling Gilead to streamline various parts of its business with the goal of faster time to market of various medicines for life-threatening diseases, including HIV, viral hepatitis, and cancer.

Cognizant anticipates leveraging the power of Generative AI to help enhance Gilead's customer service experience.

The pharmaceutical industry has traditionally been slower to adopt digital transformation journeys compared with other industries. Gilead is an industry leader in embracing digital transformation in its business, having partnered with Cognizant for more than three years to adopt cutting-edge technologies designed to drive better business outcomes. This includes supporting enabling technologies for running business operations, new product launches and improving IT processes for efficient research, manufacturing, and commercialisation of its products.

"Over the past three years, Cognizant has demonstrated quality delivery, adaptability and dedication to Gilead's success," said Marc Berson, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Gilead Sciences. "Through this collaboration, Cognizant has provided critical expertise to progress our digital transformation journey while enabling stable, secure operations. This has allowed us to advance research and commercialisation of transformative treatments for some of the world's most challenging diseases. We look forward to expanding this partnership to advance to the next phases of our capability roadmap."

Building on the company's collaboration, Cognizant will continue to support Gilead in the following:

Enhance the internal and external client experience: BioPharma customers often need special and time-sensitive assistance to support their projects. With IT infrastructure, IT security and IT platform services, Cognizant expects to enable Gilead to provide a more consistent and seamless experience to over 18,000 internal users across 40+ countries globally.

Expand cloud operations: Cognizant will continue to support Gilead's shift to cloud-computing environments as appropriate in collaboration with the hyperscalers. In addition, Cognizant will also help Gilead continue to modernise the business applications on such Cloud Platforms.

Digitally transform the business: Cognizant anticipates leveraging the power of Generative AI (GenAI) and AI automation to help enhance Gilead's customer service experience and assist it in driving greater manufacturing efficiencies. The GenAI advances should enable Gilead to provide greater visibility and transparency about the company's treatments to patients and internal employees globally. The company will leverage Cognizant's Neuro IT service for AI automation innovation, which should help the company to bring products to market more efficiently. In addition, Cognizant will build applications and operate services that introduce new or enhanced technologies enabling efficient and differentiated business capabilities.

Data and Analytics Services: Cognizant will continue to provide support for all enterprise data and analytics platforms across all business functions, including the introduction of the latest and most relevant technologies to support differentiated business outcomes.

"We're excited about this expanded partnership with Gilead, one of the pharmaceutical industry leaders in adapting advanced technologies to better deliver transformative treatments for patients world-wide," said Surya Gummadi, Executive Vice President and President, Cognizant Americas. "Working together our teams will be leveraging the latest technologies from automation to cloud computing, and Generative AI to help Gilead bring its products to market faster, more efficiently, and with higher customer satisfaction."