Merck & Co.

Merck & Co. is a publicly traded pharmaceutical company (NYSE: MRK) headquartered in Rahway, New Jersey, and known as MSD outside the United States and Canada. It is best known for the cancer immunotherapy Keytruda and the HPV vaccine Gardasil, and it also runs an animal health business. It is a different company from Germany's Merck KGaA, which shares the historic name: the American company began in 1891 as the US arm of the German firm and has been fully independent since 1917. It appears here not as an AI vendor but as a large pharma AI adopter, and it sells no AI product.

Merck's defining AI move is an enterprise platform bet. In April 2026 it announced a multiyear partnership with Google Cloud, valued at up to 1 billion dollars, to deploy an agentic AI platform across research and development, manufacturing, commercial operations and corporate functions, with Google Cloud engineers working alongside Merck teams and Gemini Enterprise rolled out across end-to-end R&D workflows. The stated aim is to turn Merck, with roughly 75,000 employees, into an AI-enabled enterprise.

Around that backbone sit targeted research deals. In February 2026 Merck and Mayo Clinic began a research collaboration that pairs Mayo's de-identified clinical and genomic datasets with Merck's AI-enabled virtual cell technologies, starting with inflammatory bowel disease, atopic dermatitis and multiple sclerosis; no financial terms were disclosed. In January 2026 Merck also joined AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly as a founding participant in Illumina's Billion Cell Atlas, a genome-wide gene-editing dataset built to train biology models. In March 2026 it signed a multi-year collaboration with Tempus AI for access to Tempus data and its Lens research software. In June 2026 Protillion Biosciences signed a multi-target discovery and license agreement worth up to 510 million dollars in milestones, built on a platform that generates the large training sets protein-design AI needs. Merck is also Moderna's partner on an individualized cancer vaccine whose targets are chosen by an algorithm, although Merck's own Phase 3 materials do not credit AI for the result.

Inside the company, a generative AI platform built by a team of more than 80 data scientists, technologists and medical experts drafts clinical study reports, the long documents submitted to regulators after a trial. Merck reported in 2025 that it cut the time to a fully human-reviewed first draft from about 180 hours to about 80, with plans to scale it across the late-phase pipeline.

The honest framing: Merck's value rests on Keytruda, its vaccines and its pipeline, with AI as an efficiency and discovery lever layered on top. For learners it is the clearest example of the enterprise-platform adopter: one large, company-wide commitment to a single cloud provider's AI stack, supplemented by targeted discovery partnerships. It contrasts with Gilead, which procures AI from a market of specialists, with Lilly, which productized its own models, and with Novo, which spread its bet across several frontier labs.