Regeneron’s CIO on Pursuing Cloud and AI Innovation While Managing the IT Basics

Technology can be a powerful force for change. But the challenge for businesses can be finding the right technology to drive that transformation.

For Regeneron, it was the shift to the cloud. Now, armed with a more capable foundation, the biotech giant is quickly finding new ways for technology to improve operations – all while maintaining strict regulatory control over the underlying data assets. Now, that mentality is helping to fuel a broader transformation within Regeneron, one where more employees increasingly have unfettered access to data and AI to do their jobs better.

“We focused around building out essentially a whole new set of infrastructure and services around this idea of everything in the cloud. And by doing that, it allowed us … to go really fast,” Chief Information Officer Bob McCowan told the “CIO Leadership Live” podcast. “What that created was an environment where people were hungry to explore new ideas, new ways of working.”

To ensure IT investments and outcomes are aligned, Bob and team start with the business problem and then figure out the right technology to solve it. Regeneron also maintains a central IT group that’s responsible for day-to-day upkeep, as well as teams embedded within the research and clinical operations that “support them and also try and drive how they can do things better,” according to Bob.

“Doing it for the sake of technology makes no sense. The driver has got to be what's the business process,” he said.

The deeper partnership between IT and the business has led to some exciting innovations, like “Ask for Jan,” its own AI model that now has 14,000 internal users. But despite all the promising innovation ahead and the rapidly changing demands on CIOs, Bob remains focused on the fundamentals of the job.

“A lot of organizations, at times, get caught up with the latest greatest technology and race off to see what's possible,” he said. “And I'm a strong believer, and my team are strong believers, that you’ve got to keep the basics in place.”

Below are key pieces of advice Bob shared during the interview to help other CIOs manage their own technology transformations — whether that’s moving to the cloud, or deploying new AI agents.

• Be realistic about the role of CIO: “You get caught up in the myth of the CIO, which is driving transformation and always doing something fantastically new that causes these organizations to accelerate and grow. And I think the reality is that can happen, but in more cases, it's really just about partnering, understanding the context of where you are today and what's needed for today and driving it forward.” ‍
• IT has to earn the right to be an innovator: “There's a lot of things we didn't do well … a lot of it was building the basic ability to run the operations without problems, which then was the stepping stone to say: ‘Well, if you can do the basics, then what else can you help us with?’” ‍
• For CIOs, it’s all about business-saviness: “You need to understand the technology and what the opportunities are, as well as the risks. But I find more-and-more, we’re not talking about which piece of technology is going to help us, but what’s the problem we’re trying to solve. The dialogue and engagement has absolutely changed. Because of that you’re seeing a different, more diverse group of CIOs that have come up through the business, not necessarily the technical ranks.”
• ‍Find those that can make deep tech accessible: “If you're trying to solve a problem for an individual but you can't really understand what it is they're trying to solve for or even how they think about it. It becomes very difficult. So having some of those key individuals, we often call them translators here, meaning that we know the hardcore science and our core technical architecture and building the engineering and provide that translation to make sure that we get the results right.”‍
• Software developers remain fundamental: “We had a lot of great people, but they were supporting standard apps, and they had maybe not fully appreciated the need to also understand how to build, architect and code. It's finding the right balance. But everything's full circle. We're back to: you need software developers … I've heard more about searches for data engineers and software developers over the last two to three, even five years than ever before.”

Be sure to check out the full conversation here.