At Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve. This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.
Position Overview
For more than 140 years, Eli Lilly and Company has been committed to discovering and developing medicines that improve lives. Facing an accelerating pace of digital and AI transformation across healthcare, Lilly established Lilly Bengaluru India (LBI) as a strategic investment in future-ready capabilities: a globally connected, agile and innovation-driven organization, deeply attuned to the evolving needs of patients and healthcare systems. Within it, the Commercialization Capabilities organization enables Lilly's commercial teams worldwide across the end-to-end commercialization lifecycle, spanning five core focus areas: Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A), Global Operations Sales Organization (GOSO), Global Content Hub (GCH), Experience Activation (EXPA), and Commercial Learning Services (CLS).
Lilly's enterprise AI agenda is delivered through NOVA (Next-generation Organizational Value through AI), the program through which AI initiatives are submitted, shaped, governed and scaled across GCCI, Medical Capabilities, GOSO and IBU Central.
To further elevate LBI's strategic impact, we are seeking an accomplished AI leader to serve as Senior Director of Enterprise AI Scaling and Innovation. The role leads NOVA's global rollout and operational execution across these four organizations, working directly with their senior leaders to shape AI submissions into work that can credibly reach enterprise scale. Beyond NOVA, it drives Lilly's most critical cross-functional AI initiatives — including frontier programs such as SAGE, focused on agentification within brand launches — and maintains the enterprise's line of sight into a fast-moving external technology landscape.
This is a deep-domain senior technical leadership role. The incumbent brings independent judgment on AI architecture, feasibility and cost-to-scale, and is the person the enterprise relies on to distinguish an AI initiative that will scale from one that will not. Success depends on technical credibility and the willingness to redirect or stop well-sponsored work that cannot reach production.
This position reports to the Vice President and Global Head of LBI Commercialization Capabilities and operates with an enterprise mandate across the organizations NOVA serves.
Primary Responsibilities:
NOVA Rollout & Operational Execution (50%)
- Own NOVA's rollout and operational execution across the four organizations, establishing it as the route through which enterprise AI work is shaped, prioritized, built and scaled.
- Partner with senior leaders to shape AI submissions against the enterprise bar for scalability — value hypothesis, data readiness, architecture, cost-to-scale and path to production — reshaping what's unready and redirecting, consolidating or stopping what cannot clear it, so work reaches governed production rather than stalling as a proof of concept.
- Maintain the governance that makes speed safe (risk tiering, decision gates, responsible-AI standards, model and agent oversight), and raise the AI fluency of the leaders you advise so they sponsor AI work with realistic expectations of cost, risk and value.
- Own the value framework and KPIs that hold the NOVA portfolio accountable to realized impact, and help lead the organizational change, culture and talent development.
Drive Next-Generation Frontier & Cross-Functional Programs (40%)
- Lead the cross-functional AI initiatives that span organizational boundaries, have no natural single owner, and will not succeed without senior technical leadership.
- Drive frontier programs from concept to a defensible path to deployment: define the technical thesis, pressure-test feasibility, sequence milestones and secure cross-functional investment.
- Advance Lilly's agentic mission — multi-agent architectures, orchestration, tool use, evaluation and human-in-the-loop design — and resolve the architectural, data and operating-model dependencies that block scale, working across Tech@Lilly, legal, compliance and privacy.
Assess the External Environment and Accelerate External Innovation (10%)
- Maintain a rigorous, current read of the external AI landscape — models, agents, tooling and applied practice within and beyond life sciences — and route it back through NOVA in actionable form that shapes live submissions, architecture choices and investment sequencing.
- Maintain an active map of companies, including startups, that can accelerate Lilly's agentic mission, and partner with Procurement, Legal, Privacy and Information Security on a fast-track evaluation pathway — pre-negotiated terms, right-sized risk assessment, time-boxed evaluation — so promising partners aren't lost to a multi-month onboarding cycle.
Minimum Qualification Requirements
- A postgraduate qualification (MBA, MSc, M.Pharm or equivalent), or an equivalent depth of professional experience.
- 15+ years of progressive leadership across enterprise strategy, transformation and technology, in pharmaceutical, healthcare or life sciences, or other complex regulated global enterprises, including substantial experience leading AI initiatives.
- A track record of taking AI from concept to production at enterprise scale across multiple business functions — including the architectural, data and responsible-AI decisions required to deploy safely — with measured business impact, not strategy alone.
- Proven success as the senior technical voice on large, cross-functional initiatives within Global Capability Centers and/or Fortune-100 enterprises — including the standing to challenge and redirect executive-sponsored work, and a track record of influencing decisions across a matrixed, global organization.
- Deep, current expertise across the AI and generative-AI lifecycle — large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic and multi-agent systems, evaluation methodology and the data foundations they depend on — sufficient to independently assess feasibility, interrogate architecture and cost-to-scale, and hold your own with engineering and research leaders. This is not a hands-on engineering role, but it demands genuine technical depth; program and process-management capability alone will not suffice.
- Sound judgment on enterprise AI governance, operational risk and performance measurement, and on where to trade speed against trust and compliance.
- Exceptional executive presence and communication: the ability to influence executives, align diverse teams, explain complex technical and risk factors in clear business terms, lead through ambiguity, and develop others.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate emerging technology vendors and startups on technical merit and build co-innovation partnerships that convert into enterprise adoption, working with procurement, legal and security functions to compress evaluation and onboarding cycles without weakening enterprise risk standards.
Preferred Qualifications
- Fluency with recognized responsible-AI and governance frameworks (for example, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act).
- Experience elevating Global Capability Centers from delivery into innovation and value creation.
- Familiarity with Lilly's commercial model or other regulated, global operating environments.
- A background in digital product, platform or automation delivery.
- Recognized project or process-excellence credentials (PMP, Lean or Six Sigma) are a plus.
Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.
Lilly does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.
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