Cognizant, an IT consulting firm, announced it is expanding its existing relationship with biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to deliver better cost leadership and productivity enhancement for Gilead, while extracting greater value from the existing relationship. 

Harnessing the power of machine learning and generative AI within an agentic framework, the work deals with multiple use cases across customer service, employee interactions and business value management. 

Gilead is expected to boost its efficiency through leveraging Cognizant's expertise in AI and advanced technology applications. 

In a statement, Cognizant said that by deploying these technologies across the value chain, it aims to help Gilead achieve notable benefits via a newly optimized financial framework.

Over the last ten years, Cognizant helped back Gilead's global IT infrastructure, platforms, applications and advanced analytics designed to accelerate its digital transformation. 

The extension of the partnership is aimed at creating capacity allowing Gilead to resume its focus and mission of discovering and supplying critical medicines for cancer, HIV and other diseases. 

Additionally, expanding on the company's partnership, Cognizant intends to leverage its Neuro AI generative AI platform to assist Gilead in accelerating value creation, enhancing IT and business processes, and improving operational efficiencies. 

In addition, Cognizant expects to transform the user experience of IT services with custom-built Gen AI solutions that permit Gilead to benefit from greater efficiency and user experience. 

"Cognizant continues to provide critical expertise as we advance our technology journey," Joydeep Ganguly, senior vice president and head, corporate operations and Interim CIO at Gilead, said in a statement. 

"The expansion of this partnership is pivotal in accelerating our capabilities roadmap while driving a new level of cost leadership across our technology programs. This collaboration aims to bring innovative changes to Gilead's business, exploring new possibilities and enhancing our operations in novel ways."

Surya Gummadi, executive vice president and president of Cognizant Americas, said his company is excited to expand its partnership in a new dimension with Cognizant with the aim of delivering transformative treatments globally.

"Our teams will work together to transform user engagement, and boost productivity and cost savings for Gilead to focus on the critical work they do around preventing and treating life-threatening illnesses," Gummadi said in a statement. 

THE LARGER TREND

Also this month, Cognizant and CrowdStrike announced a strategic partnership to drive enterprise security transformation by delivering cybersecurity services, powered by the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity platform. 

Cognizant will work to enable organizations to streamline security operations and threat mitigation, consolidate fragmented legacy point products, reduce the complexity of managing cybersecurity programs, and strengthen cybersecurity posture, leveraging Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Falcon Cloud Security.

Last year saw a worldwide IT outage after a misconfigured CrowdStrike Falcon update was pushed to Windows, causing millions of computers to show the infamous "blue screen of death." The outage disrupted care delivery at hospitals, health systems and medical practices in the U.S., U.K., Israel, Germany and other countries. 

Clinicians were forced to work manually to provide patient care in the absence of access to electronic health records and other mission-critical IT systems. 

Earlier this month, Gilead Sciences and LEO Pharma announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the development and commercialization of LEO Pharma’s small molecule oral STAT6 (signal transducer and activator of transcription 6) programs for the potential treatment of patients with inflammatory diseases.

Under the partnership, Gilead will acquire LEO Pharma’s comprehensive preclinical oral STAT6 small molecule inhibitors and targeted protein degraders. Gilead will lead further development efforts for the oral programs, while LEO Pharma will lead development for potential topical formulations of STAT6 inhibitors.