Mike Doustdar has a message for anyone worried that OpenAI will steal scientists' jobs at Novo Nordisk: don't be. The company's new AI partner is here to make researchers faster, not replace them. Six months ago, Doustdar cut 9,000 jobs.
The timing is not a coincidence. Novo Nordisk announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI on Tuesday, deploying the AI company's technology across drug discovery, manufacturing, supply chains, and corporate operations, according to a press release from Novo Nordisk. The goal, Doustdar said, is to lift productivity and reduce the need to grow headcount going forward. The 9,000 people he cut in September are not coming back, Reuters reported.
"This is not about replacing our scientists," Doustdar said in an interview with Reuters. "It's about supercharging them."
The partnership puts Novo Nordisk alongside a growing list of pharmaceutical companies dabbling in AI, but the depth of the commitment is what stands out. The company already had a separate AI research partnership with Nvidia, announced in June 2025, focused on building single-cell models to predict how drug candidates interact with cells, according to Nvidia's investor press release. The OpenAI deal is broader, covering enterprise-wide deployment across every function. How the two partnerships coexist, or whether one eventually supersedes the other, is a question Novo Nordisk has not yet answered.
The move comes as Novo Nordisk is fighting for its position in the weight-loss drug market it essentially created. Eli Lilly won approval for its oral GLP-1 obesity pill, sold as Foundayo, in early April 2026, STAT News reported. Novo Nordisk launched its own oral weight-loss drug, oral Wegovy, in January 2026, beating Lilly to what it called the first FDA-approved oral version of the class. The competition is not slowing down. Analysts expect annual revenue from the drugs to exceed $100 billion in the next decade.
For Doustdar, the OpenAI deal is also a financial calculation. Restructuring a company the size of Novo Nordisk is not cheap in the short term, but the savings flow upward into whatever the company decides to fund next. The layoffs in September were described as a restructuring, not a retreat. The reinvestment into AI is the other half of that sentence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the partnership a way to "redefine the future of patient care," according to the Novo Nordisk press release. Pilot programmes will begin across research and development, manufacturing, and commercial operations, with full integration planned by the end of 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The deal is the latest sign that pharmaceutical companies are treating AI not as a novelty add-on but as infrastructure. The industry has spent years experimenting with AI for clinical trial design, regulatory filings, and manufacturing logistics. Novo Nordisk's willingness to put its entire operation into the deal, not just the R&D arm, suggests the company believes the technology is mature enough to deploy at scale.
Whether that belief is well-founded is another question. AI has yet to produce a major new drug molecule entirely through machine learning, and executives across the industry acknowledge the technology has not yet delivered on its hardest promises. But in a market this competitive, being early matters. If Lilly is running the same playbook, the question is not whether AI will matter to weight-loss drugs, but who figures out how to use it fastest.
