Two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, a chemical manufacturer, and an auto giant have established internal artificial intelligence (AI) teams and opened centres to increase automation across their businesses, as the technology’s rapid pace continues to upend business operations worldwide.
Over the last 18 months, Swiss life sciences major Novartis International AG and Texas-based chemical manufacturer Celanese Corporation started AI councils to identify segments that can be automated. Indiana-based Eli Lilly and Co. and South Korean carmaker Hyundai Motor Co. have opened AI-dedicated centres and increased research and development on internal usage of automation.
"The rise of GenAI and agentic AI is leading to greater autonomy and flexibility by embedding new services into software,” said HFS executives Srini Vaddepalli and Achyuta Ghosh, in a report dated 4 February. [Internal] ER&D teams have been increasingly tapping this to engineer industrial data and develop new features with more specialized software.”
AI’s ripple effects on India’s GCC ecosystem
AI’s rapid adoption is upending the technology-heavy services provided by the $297-billion Indian information technology (IT) sector. GCCs, or back-end tech centres of global companies, however, escaped the initial disruption and continued to hire. But new AI tools that can automate finance, legal, HR, and software development-related tasks threaten the workforce in these centres.
India currently hosts over 1,760 GCCs, with Bengaluru and Hyderabad hosting 875 and 355 centres, according to IT industry body Nasscom. GCCs generate at least $64.6 billion in export revenue, and Nasscom estimates the number will rise to 2,200 by March 2030, with the market valued at $105 billion.
AI councils reshape operations
Last year, specialty chemical firm Celanese, which opened its Hyderabad GCC in 2024, formed an AI council to evaluate company segments where work can be automated, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
“This council is given full autonomy in finding AI-led use cases across the company. Decisions that were once made at headquarters are now made in GCCs wherever they are,” said one of the executives with knowledge of the matter.
Celanese, which reported $9.5 billion in revenue last year, is already using automation in several of its functions. In April last year, it launched Chemille, an AI tool that enables engineers to select the right polymers for chemical production via natural language prompts. It also developed a call tracking agent to track and log calls as part of its AI venture.
Novartis started a “Reimagining Work” initiative, calling it “a multi‑year effort focused on fundamentally redesigning how work gets done in an AI‑enabled world. It focuses on rethinking work at the activity and decision level, integrating AI and automation where they create value, and evolving operating models, capabilities, and governance.”
On 3 March, the company even incorporated a role for a Global AI Enterprise Transformation Head. According to the company’s website, this executive will be based out of New Jersey or Massachusetts and could earn up to $535,600 annually.
Both councils and internal bodies work independently of their tech centres and often comprise executives from the headquarters and their tech centres. They report to the company’s chief technology officers or CEOs, and have at least half a dozen members.
Queries emailed to Celanese and Novartis went unanswered.
Eli Lilly, Hyundai expand AI research
Eli Lilly, famous for its weight-loss drug Mounjaro, recently announced an AI innovation lab in collaboration with Nvidia. Both companies are expected to invest upwards of $1 billion on talent, infrastructure, and developing AI models over a five-year period.
“Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with top AI model builders and engineers from NVIDIA, allowing them to work side by side to generate large-scale data and build powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using NVIDIA BioNeMo™ as the critical platform,” read the company’s release dated 12 January.
Eli Lilly and Novartis ended last year with $65.2 billion and $54.5 billion in revenue, up 45% and 8% on a yearly basis, respectively. While Novartis started its Hyderabad operations in 2007, Eli Lilly is a recent entrant into the city’s GCC space, opening a back-end tech centre in August last year.
The tech services arm of Hyundai expanded its focus on automation in the country after it opened a research and development centre in Bengaluru, making it the second in the country in addition to its R&D headquarters in Hyderabad.
The two centres collectively employ at least 1,500 people who work on the car’s infotainment and software for detecting engine failures, road obstructions, and voice assistants. The car-maker’s Indian arm ended last year with ₹69,193 crore ($7.5 billion) in revenue, down 0.9% on a yearly basis.