Merck & Co.

With ~75,000 employees and drug development timelines exceeding 10 years, Merck's researchers spent significant time on manual cognitive tasks such as drafting regulatory documents, summarizing clinical data, and composing communications. The rapid emergence of generative AI (ChatGPT) created a productivity opportunity, but allowing freeform use of external AI models posed unacceptable risks of exposing confidential research data, proprietary chemical structures, and patient information to third-party providers.

Merck developed GPTeal, a proprietary enterprise platform that provides employees with secure, gated access to multiple leading LLMs including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude. All queries are mediated through Merck's servers, with sensitive context scrubbed or encrypted before reaching external AI providers. The rollout was paired with mandatory training — digital self-service courses, monthly webcasts, and developer bootcamps — to ensure responsible and effective usage across the organization.

By early 2025, over 50,000 of Merck's ~75,000 employees (roughly two-thirds) were actively using GPTeal monthly for tasks including drafting emails, regulatory documents, memos, and research summaries. In June 2025, Merck formally announced expansion of its generative AI solutions, confirming first AI-assisted clinical study reports had been submitted to regulators and that the platform was scaling across the full late-phase pipeline. The initiative has since catalyzed further AI partnerships, including a December 2025 NVIDIA collaboration for drug discovery (KERMT model) and a February 2026 collaboration with Mayo Clinic for AI-enabled precision medicine.

• Building a secure, gated enterprise AI platform allows large pharma companies to capture generative AI productivity gains while fully maintaining data confidentiality and regulatory compliance
• Pairing platform deployment with structured training programs (courses, webcasts, bootcamps) is critical for broad adoption — Merck achieved ~67% workforce adoption by coupling access with education
• Starting with lower-stakes use cases (email drafting, document summarization) before tackling high-stakes regulatory applications builds organizational trust and governance frameworks incrementally