Dimitrije Jankovic: Inside Sanofi's AI engine

From 2 people to 150 in two years: the story of building one of pharma's most ambitious AI teams in Canada's largest tech hub.

In his final year at McMaster University, the research-intensive institution in Hamilton, Ontario, Dimitrije Jankovic built something that won a hardware design award – and said something about who he was. The BatCap was a wearable device using sensors and vibrating motors to help visually impaired people navigate obstacles in real time. It was an early statement of intent: that the most meaningful application of engineering is improving the quality of people's lives.

That conviction has shaped every career decision Dimitrije has made since.

After graduating in 2017, he spent four-and-a-half years at PwC Canada working on data and AI strategy across industries – municipalities, energy companies, hospitals, and Crown Corporations. It gave him breadth. What it didn't give him was a north star.

"Applying engineering skill sets to having people click on more adverts is inspiring," he says. "But is it my raison d'être?"

The answer was clearly no. What drew him to Sanofi in late 2021 was a company already making structural bets on artificial intelligence in healthcare, well before ChatGPT made that kind of ambition mainstream. "We began our journey before it was cool," he grins. "To me, that's very powerful."

Toronto: A deliberate choice

When Sanofi established its AI Center of Excellence, the choice of Toronto was anything but accidental. The city has an unusual concentration of AI expertise – many of the field's foundational researchers, including Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever, have strong ties to universities in the greater Toronto area, and the Vector Institute is one of the world's leading AI research organizations. When Sanofi set up the hub, no other healthcare company had a global digital presence there.

"Most people who wanted to work in AI and healthcare ended up going to a startup, a consultancy, or moving," says Dimitrije. "Sanofi offered a different kind of mission."

Toronto's multicultural character also reflects something important about Sanofi itself. "When you look at the people that represent our office, they kind of represent a lot of what Sanofi is about," he adds. It's a team drawn from across disciplines and backgrounds – engineers, data scientists, strategists, and product builders – united by a shared belief that technology's highest purpose is human impact.

From two people to 150: Building the engine

Dimitrije joined Sanofi as employee number two at the Toronto AI Center of Excellence, with a mandate that reflected an explicit corporate ambition: to become the first biopharma company truly powered by AI. He stepped in as Global Director with responsibility for determining what data capabilities the organization needed across its entire value chain. Within a year he was promoted to Global VP and Head of Data and AI Strategy. Since December 2023, he has served as Global Head of Digital Strategy and Operations – a Global SVP role overseeing a team of around 80 people worldwide, covering everything from long-range AI strategy to the day-to-day operations that keep an 83,000-person company running.

The Toronto hub itself has grown to 150 people in roughly two years. But the more significant shift has been structural. The early mandate was to move away from country-by-country, site-by-site project work, and toward AI products that could scale across the whole organization.

"We wanted to shift from building projects to building products," Dimitrije explains. That required changing how the team partnered with the business as much as it required hiring the right people.

A connected digital ecosystem

While Toronto serves as Sanofi's AI headquarters, the CoE doesn't operate in isolation. It works in close partnership with Sanofi's Digital Leadership and the Digital Accelerators – Sanofi's in-house startups based in Paris and Lyon, France. This distributed model allows the Toronto team to focus on core AI infrastructure and scalable products, while collaborating with accelerator teams who are building

breakthrough digital solutions for specific therapeutic areas and business challenges.

"The beauty of this setup is that we can leverage Toronto's AI talent pool while staying connected to the innovation happening across our global digital ecosystem," Dimitrije explains. "It's not just about building AI in isolation – it's about how AI integrates with everything else we're creating."

For professionals joining the Toronto team, this means working at the intersection of deep technical AI development and a broader global digital network – contributing to products that are shaped in Canada and deployed across the world, in partnership with startup-minded teams in Paris and digital leaders across every function.

Concierge: AI for every employee

The team's most visible product is Concierge, Sanofi's internal AI platform, which has been used by more than 50,000 employees since its launch around 18 months ago. But Concierge is far more than a chatbot.

"We like to think of it as an assistant to everything we do," Dimitrije says. "Its whole skill set is knowing how to orchestrate you to the right agent to execute your task." It can submit support tickets, assist with purchasing, analyze digital portfolios, and draft presentations. Every two weeks it gains new capabilities. A voice channel is coming shortly – extending AI assistance to employees on the move and making it genuinely frictionless for the first time.

None of this works without AI literacy, and Dimitrije is direct about why that matters. "Any time a big technology has impacted the world, it has impacted it over generations. The speed of evolution here is different, and keeping people up to par with that – not having it be something you fear but something you embrace – is extremely important." The goal is to remove the knowledge burden of navigating a complex global organization, so that scientists can focus on science.

Three layers of AI transformation

Working alongside Digital Leadership and the Paris-based Digital Accelerators, the Toronto team's work spans three distinct layers across Sanofi's operations:

• Snackable AI provides always-on intelligence that improves daily decision-making, largely invisibly – raising the baseline for every employee, every day.
• Expert AI applies specialized tools to narrow, high-stakes problems: drug candidate identification, clinical trial site selection, yield optimization in manufacturing.
• Generative AI handles the knowledge-intensive work that previously consumed hours – from synthesizing research to seeding content that once required external agencies.

Behind all of it sits a principal Dimitrije considers non-negotiable: RAISE – Responsible AI at Sanofi for Everyone – which brings legal, privacy, cyber, and risk disciplines together with technical teams to assess every AI application before it goes live. "It's better to do that upfront," he says, "so people start thinking about their applications of AI in that way – understanding both the risks and how to mitigate them."

The work that matters most

The application that motivates Dimitrije most is where AI meets population-level patient data.

"The most interesting component is how we can use AI to look at medical records at scale and identify, for any given person, their likelihood of having a condition they don't yet know about," he says. "Take Type 1 diabetes: if we can identify that someone's profile puts them in a group where one in ten people who get screened are actually diagnosed, we can intervene earlier, put preventative measures in place, and change the trajectory of that disease before it progresses. Things like that are honestly why I wake up in the morning."

The urgency, for Dimitrije, always comes back to patients. "How quickly can we actually generate a miracle of science and get that to a patient? Patients are the ultimate decision makers, and they're the people we're serving."

Why technical professionals are choosing this path

For engineers and data scientists weighing a move into healthcare, Dimitrije's pitch is unambiguous – and grounded in his own experience of choosing mission over optimization metrics.

"If you really want to show where technology can have the biggest impact, it would be in identifying, finding, developing, manufacturing, and getting therapies to patients. The aspiration of helping humanity – I would encourage people to look after that."

What the Toronto CoE offers is rare: the technical depth and scale of a global AI organization, the collaborative energy of a connected digital ecosystem spanning Toronto, Paris, and Lyon, and the kind of mission that makes the work matter beyond the work itself. Colleagues rotate across functions, take on global projects, and are given the space to build things that don't yet exist.

"It's allowed me so many different opportunities to pivot, adjust, and gain global experiences," Dimitrije says of Sanofi's culture. That culture – built around the mission to chase the miracles of science to improve people's lives – is the organizing principle behind difficult decisions, not a line on a website.

Nine years after building a device to help people navigate their world more safely, Dimitrije Jankovic is still working on the same problem – just at a different scale, with 150 people beside him, and 83,000 more whose working lives they're quietly transforming.