Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson is a healthcare company headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey (NYSE: JNJ), organized into two businesses: Innovative Medicine, its prescription-drug arm formerly known as Janssen, and MedTech, which makes surgical, cardiovascular, orthopaedic and vision devices. Its consumer health brands were separated as Kenvue in 2023, and in October 2025 the company announced plans to separate its DePuy Synthes orthopaedics business as well. It appears here not as an AI vendor but as a large pharmaceutical and medical-device AI adopter. It sells no AI models or standalone AI software; its AI reaches customers only as features inside its own devices.

Its defining AI pattern is two-track: on the drug side it partners with specialist AI labs, and on the device side it builds on NVIDIA's computing stack. The most prominent drug-discovery deal came in January 2026, when Isomorphic Labs announced a multi-target research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson spanning small molecules, antibodies, peptides and molecular glues, making it Isomorphic's third big-pharma partner after Eli Lilly and Novartis. Isomorphic contributes its AI drug design engine, while Johnson & Johnson brings target biology and carries programs through development. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The device track is older. In March 2024 MedTech agreed with NVIDIA to run AI on NVIDIA's edge-computing hardware and Holoscan software inside the operating room, feeding the company's Polyphonic digital surgery ecosystem. In June 2025 it launched the Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery with NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services, and in October 2025 named its first awardees, including Mayo Clinic for a computer-vision model that detects surgical site infections. That same October it described using NVIDIA Isaac, Omniverse digital twins and Cosmos synthetic data to develop its Monarch urology robot. In July 2026 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted De Novo authorization to Ottava, which the company calls the first soft-tissue surgical robot built into the operating table.

The honest framing: Johnson & Johnson's value rests on its drug franchises and its device portfolio, and AI is a lever on top of both. On the robots, it is worth being precise about what is machine learning. Ottava and Monarch are surgeon-controlled instruments, and Ottava's authorization announcement does not describe any AI in the robot itself. The machine learning sits around them: in simulation and synthetic data used during development, in software that turns surgical video into highlight reels for review, and in specific shipped features such as deep-learning heart mapping in the Carto 3 system. On the drug side, the Isomorphic collaboration has disclosed no clinical candidate, so it is an intention, not a result. Among pharma peers it sits closest to Gilead's partnership-first approach, unlike Eli Lilly's productized TuneLab models, Moderna's in-house model building, Merck & Co.'s single Google Cloud platform or Novo Nordisk's multi-vendor mix. Among device peers, GE HealthCare and Siemens Healthineers sell AI directly inside their imaging products and Medtronic ships an AI module for colonoscopy, while Johnson & Johnson's surgical AI is still mostly development tooling and data infrastructure.