One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies just decided it doesn’t need ServiceNow to manage its IT anymore. Sanofi, the French drug giant, is pulling back from the popular IT management platform in favor of a custom AI agent built internally with help from Anthropic’s Claude and Elementum AI.

Inside Concierge, Sanofi’s AI agent

The system is called “Concierge,” and it launched in October 2024. Approximately 60,000 Sanofi employees, roughly 80% of the company’s workforce, are already using it. The goal is ambitious: have AI agents autonomously resolve up to 80% of all IT requests without a human ever touching them.

The projected payoff is concrete. Sanofi expects annual savings of 10 million euros from IT support costs alone. Additional savings from automated procurement and supply chain decisions could run into the tens of millions more.

Sanofi’s Chief Digital Officer Emmanuel Frenehard has built a broader architecture around a centralized data lake, partnering with Snowflake and Elementum AI to create what the company envisions as a fully agentic workflow system. Elementum AI handles the orchestration layer, while Snowflake’s AI data cloud provides the infrastructure backbone. Snowflake invested in Elementum in September 2025. Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare tools also plays a role in the stack, giving Sanofi access to specialized large language model capabilities tuned for its industry.

Why Sanofi walked away from the vendor buffet

Sanofi initially rejected broad licensing tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, concluding that the cost-to-value ratio simply didn’t justify the spend. This philosophy sets Sanofi apart from pharma peers like Novartis and AstraZeneca, which have generally embraced off-the-shelf AI tools from major vendors.