How Novo Nordisk Built a Clinical AI Platform in 9 Months with Databricks

Novo Nordisk is a century-old pharmaceutical company headquartered in Denmark, on a mission to defeat serious chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity. With a global development organization running clinical trials across dozens of countries, its guiding question is the one Christian Sørensen, Head of Automation and Digital Innovation, articulates directly: “Patients are waiting—how do we go faster?”

The obstacle was fragmentation. Clinical trial data lived across dozens of isolated systems, with no shared governance and no way for teams to see what others were doing. “Not a single person has knowledge of all datasets,” said Christian. The legacy environment was what he called “a patchwork spiderweb”—enterprise solutions that weren’t widely adopted, individual storage solutions multiplying across the organization, and context lost every time data had to be passed manually between teams. Less than 1% of the development organization was actively using clinical data.

Novo Nordisk chose Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to consolidate everything into a unified lakehouse. Unity Catalog provides end-to-end data lineage and access governance—critical in a GCP-regulated clinical environment. Databricks Agent Bricks powers the Co-Scientist system, where AI agents that specialize in specific clinical domains work together to analyze trial data and consult external medical literature simultaneously. Databricks AI/BI Genie enables any team member, regardless of technical background, to query patient data in natural language and surface trial insights that previously required weeks of manual work. The full platform runs across 60+ workspaces and 8 cloud regions using a hybrid Data Mesh architecture.

The first Co-Scientist agent launched in mid-June 2025. Within months, 1,000 users were actively engaging with FounData—the platform built on Databricks for secondary use of clinical trial data—with over 80 live collaborations underway. The development organization’s active clinical data usage jumped from roughly 1% to over 20%. “In just 9 months, we moved from concept to MVP,” said Christian. “This is one of the fastest digital projects we’ve ever completed.” Over five years, the platform is expected to generate more than $157M in net new value and $14M in operational efficiency gains from better-designed trials.

The broader effect is that Databricks is now Novo Nordisk’s enterprise-wide standard for clinical data—officially endorsed and backing every major digital initiative in the development portfolio. Teams in Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls now share data that previously lived in silos. The Co-Scientist doesn’t just retrieve data; it helps colleagues explore what’s possible. “We’re democratizing the insights, not just the data,” said Christian. “That’s what makes the Co-Scientist so powerful.”