Merck & Co. and Google Cloud have announced a multi-year partnership, worth up to $1 billion, to enhance Merck’s digital backbone in artificial intelligence (AI) by deploying an agentic AI platform across Merck’s research & development (R&D), manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions. 

The partnership includes Google Cloud engineers working alongside Merck teams to deploy Google Cloud’s AI capabilities, including Gemini Enterprise, an intranet search, AI assistant, and agentic platform. Agentic AI is an advanced form of AI focused on autonomous decision-making and action. Unlike traditional or generative AI, which primarily responds to commands or analyzes data, agentic AI can set goals, plan, and execute tasks with minimal human intervention, according to information from Google Cloud. It is an emerging technology that has the potential to enhance automating complex processes and optimizing workflows. 

Under the partnership, Merck will build advanced AI solutions on Google Cloud technology, which includes deploying Gemini Enterprise across end-to-end R&D workflows, optimizing manufacturing through predictive analytics and intelligent automation, enhancing commercial and patient engagement with data-driven personalization, and applying AI automation in corporate functions. The partnership brings together Merck’s scientific and data expertise with Google Cloud’s AI and cloud platforms to digitize data for productivity for Merck’s 75,000 employees worldwide. 

Last June (June 2025), in the area of drug development, Merck reported that it had implemented a new internal generative-AI-powered platform to reduce the time needed to produce clinical study documents. The company applied large language models to expedite the creation of first drafts of clinical study reports from two to three weeks to three to four days. Merck reported at that time that it was in process of scaling this platform across its late-phase pipeline. 

Merck is the latest large bio/pharmaceutical company to announce an AI partnership with a leading technology provider. Earlier this month (April 2026), Novo Nordisk announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the multi-billion dollar AI research and deployment company that developed the GPT family of large language models for generative AI, to integrate OpenAI’s AI capabilities across the company globally from drug discovery to commercial operations. Pilot programs will launch across R&D, manufacturing, and commercial operations, with full integration by the end of 2026. 

Earlier this year (January 2026), Eli Lilly and Company and Nvidia,  the high-tech giant and producer of graphics processing units, systems on chips, and application programming interfaces for data science, high-performance/accelerated computing, and AI, announced an AI co-innovation lab, in a deal worth up to $1 billion. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and computing over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab, which will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that will initially co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia. The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This initiative expands on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer as well as the AI factory Lilly announced last fall (fall 2025). 

Source: Merck & Co.