Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly and Company is a publicly traded pharmaceutical company (NYSE: LLY) and, by market value, one of the largest in the world, propelled in recent years by its metabolic and obesity franchises. It appears here for two reasons. First, like Moderna, Lilly is a heavy AI adopter, applying machine learning across drug discovery, clinical development, and operations. Second — and more distinctively — Lilly has productized its internal AI: through TuneLab, it offers external biotech companies access to AI models (for small-molecule and antibody work) trained on Lilly's own proprietary, decades-deep datasets, delivered via privacy-preserving federated learning so partners benefit without Lilly exposing the underlying data.

Lilly is also one of the most active buyers of outside AI drug design. It has worked with Isomorphic Labs since 2024, signed a biologics discovery collaboration with Chai Discovery in January 2026 and expanded it through TuneLab in June, and in March 2026 took an exclusive worldwide license to preclinical oral drug candidates from Insilico Medicine for 115 million dollars upfront and about 2.75 billion dollars in total, plus royalties. It was also a cornerstone investor in Insilico's Hong Kong listing in December 2025. In October 2024 it gave insitro an option on its liver-delivery technology for two insitro drugs, and since September 2025 insitro has built TuneLab models, trained on Lilly data, that predict how a molecule is absorbed and cleared. In January 2026 Lilly joined AstraZeneca and Merck & Co. as a founding participant in Illumina's Billion Cell Atlas, a genome-wide gene-editing dataset built to train biology models.

That makes Lilly an unusual and instructive case: a pharma incumbent that turned an internal AI capability into an outward-facing platform (TuneLab has its own catalogued page). The honest investment framing is that Lilly's value rests overwhelmingly on its drug pipeline and commercial franchises, not on AI as a product line — AI is an efficiency and partnership lever layered on top. For learners, Lilly is the clearest example of the "productized adopter": a company that both uses AI internally at scale and, selectively, sells access to what it has built.