Elanco also used Google Cloud to develop its own private and secure generative AI framework, on top of which the team built Elanco.ai. A multi-model and multimodal framework that uses Gemini Flash and Gemini Pro, Elanco.ai ingests Elanco data from a wide range of sources, helping to provide the specific business context needed to generate consistent, accurate results. The company built Elanco.ai in just a few weeks, initially costing less than $300 per month to operate. 

Available to all employees and contractors across the business, Elanco.ai started with just 100 users and rapidly grew to an average of 1,500 logins per day within its first year. Elanco.ai has helped the company reduce time spent on routine tasks by an estimated 70% and has generated an estimated $2.3M in efficiencies in its first year. Elanco.ai was recently recognized at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards 2024 in the category of "Best Achievement in deployment of AI in the Enterprise."

"We believe the speed to value, agility, and flexibility achieved by embracing modern technologies such as Gemini to build Elanco.ai is a key differentiator for our business and gives us a clear competitive advantage," says Matthew Bull, Chief Technology and Information Security Officer at Elanco.

An example of this efficiency is the way Elanco.ai has helped the company handle cases of pharmacovigilance (PV), which relates to the detection, assessment, and prevention of adverse drug reactions. As a global leader in animal health, Elanco takes the safety of its treatments very seriously, processing the tens of thousands of PV cases it receives each year as quickly and accurately as possible. 

However, Elanco's previous SaaS solution could only process cases in English, meaning employees had to document and translate the relevant information themselves. This slowed their response time and increased the risk of translation inaccuracies. 

Now, with Gemini, Translation Hub, and Elanco.ai, PV case documentation is generated automatically and translated when required. This improves the speed and accuracy of the customer response and frees up employees to focus on more challenging tasks, with an expected cost saving of $750,000 once fully adopted.

Elanco.ai is also helping the company increase efficiency in other business processes, such as gaining insights from its SAP platform, which is hosted on Google Cloud. SAP is the company's most business-critical system, but employees struggled to gain fast, relevant insights from the platform as it required specific access and expertise to do so. For example, Elanco sales representatives contacted the company's service centers 17,000 times in 2023 asking for information on customer orders, which the company estimates cost $250,000 in wasted time. 

Leveraging Google Cloud Cortex Framework, Gemini, and the scalable data warehousing capabilities of BigQuery, Elanco gained the ability to analyze and interact with vast amounts of order data from their SAP platform in real time. Now employees can interact with their enterprise data by asking Elanco.ai simple questions and get a relevant answer in around 10 seconds — no specialist required. They can ask follow-up questions to expand their insights, revealing further opportunities while creating a more enjoyable customer experience. Elanco is now implementing Elanco.ai into other processes such as purchase-order management and B2B orders to save additional time and resources. 

As Elanco continues to embed Google Cloud AI and data analytics into its business processes, it predicts it will save up to 15% a year by streamlining tasks and optimizing its use of resources, while improving efficiencies up to 50% through time and cost savings. All of this frees up time and resources to drive innovations in drug development and further position Elanco as a leader in the animal health industry. 

"With Elanco's modern IT ecosystem and progressive mindset coupled with Google Cloud advancements in data analytics and AI, we are uniquely positioned to lead the technological revolution in the animal health industry," says Calum Bell, Enterprise Architect - AI & Platforms, Elanco. "This will allow us to deliver new value through innovative digital products, services, and insights for our millions of customers around the world."