Walid Mehanna on Carrying the World’s Oldest Pharma Giant Into the A.I. Era

When ChatGPT set off a global corporate scramble in late 2022, Walid Mehanna was already deep into rebuilding the digital backbone at the world’s oldest pharmaceutical company. As group data officer at Germany’s Merck KGaA (also known as Merck Group in the U.S. and unrelated to the American pharmaceutical firm Merck) at the time, Mehanna had spent two years overhauling the company’s data and analytics systems for its 62,000 employees. About eight months into the GPT era, his title was elevated to chief data and A.I. officer. The creation of that role, he said, “was an evolution by design, not a reaction to a development, hype or trend.”

Merck KGaA’s roots stretch back to the 17th century, when pharmacist Friedrich Jacob Merck laid the foundation for the family business in Darmstadt, Germany. Today, its business spans pharmaceuticals, medical equipment manufacturing and electronics. Leading an A.I. strategy inside a 350-year-old company is a unique kind of challenge. Mehanna, who was born in Egypt, compares it to building a pyramid.

At the base are everyday A.I. tools that improve personal productivity across the workforce. The goal is to build digital fluency, save time and reinvest those gains into growth. The middle layer—where the company is today—focuses on embedding A.I. into core workflows, such as research and development, supply chains, and commercial operations over the next several years. At the top of the “pyramid” is product A.I., where machine learning becomes part of what the company sells, helping speed up drug discovery and innovation.

“Philosophically, A.I. at scale is not a technology challenge,” Mehanna said. “You still have to do your homework on the technology side, but the real transformation is about leadership. It happens when strategy, culture and ambition come together with a clear commitment.”

Choosing a local startup partner

Merck KGaA moved early into generative A.I. by rolling out an internal platform called MyGPT to its employees in June 2023. Initially built in-house, the tool gave staff a safe space to experiment. But Mehanna soon saw the limits of relying on a single setup.

Within a year, Merck KGaA replaced its original setup by partnering with LangDock, a then-fledgling Berlin-based startup. At the time of their initial conversations, LangDock had four customers and roughly $50,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Choosing a young European company might seem political in today’s A.I. landscape. Mehanna says it wasn’t.

“The thinking behind the collaboration was about optionality, speed and sovereignty, not the sentimentality of working with a German startup,” he said. “LangDock gave us the ability to build something fully GDPR-compliant that we could host in our own environment. We were able to work with the company to achieve enterprise-grade security while retaining the agility of a startup.”

The setup adds a buffer between employees and major A.I. providers, giving Merck flexibility as models evolve. “It was important for us to establish a flexible, model-agnostic user layer that gave us access to the world’s best models, regardless of who made them, without creating vendor lock-in,” Mehanna said.

Building A.I. guardrails like a Mercedes brake

Deploying A.I. across a global workforce of Merck KGaA’s size requires navigating strict regulatory frameworks and labor relations, particularly in Europe. Mehanna chose to build governance into the strategy from the start, working closely with the company’s works council.

Since deploying A.I., Merck KGaA has internally generated over 12 million prompts, a gold mine of data containing insights into how employees work, what’s on their minds, and what they need A.I. to help with. Mehanna said the company analyzes these prompts strictly at an aggregate level and never monitors individual employee activity.

“We learn from patterns in prompts, never from individual employees or their usage,” he said. “All usage is privacy-protected, and we do not monitor individuals.”

Before joining Merck KGaA, Mehanna served as chief data officer at Mercedes-Benz for five years. He often compares A.I. ethics to brakes in a high-performance car: easy to overlook, but essential.

“My view is that I want to have the best brakes in the world so that I can go fast. A Mercedes-AMG, Porsche or Ferrari has some of the best brakes because it also travels at very high speeds,” Mehanna said. “Governance and ethics work the same way. I want the best governance and ethics in place because the right guardrails allow us to move quickly while remaining safe and secure.”

Putting that philosophy in practice, Merck KGaA established a Digital Ethics Advisory Panel guided by five principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and transparency. Instead of simply approving or rejecting projects, the panel pushes teams to identify risks early and design safeguards before launch.

“Our outside experts ask difficult questions and make us think carefully about the consequences of potential actions. We then determine which guardrails are needed to proceed in a safe and compliant manner that aligns with our values,” Mehanna explained. 

Why models are no longer the edge

Like many tech executives, Mehanna’s view of the market has matured alongside the technology. He no longer believes the enterprise race will be decided at the foundational model level, as frontier models continuously leapfrog one another.

“Two years ago, I was fairly convinced that the race for artificial general intelligence or enterprise A.I. would be decided at the model layer—that whoever had the best model would win. I have definitely changed my mind about that,” Mehanna admitted.

“Models are still crucial, but they leapfrog one another every few months. They are therefore not a durable advantage,” he added. “I believe the more durable advantage lies in your context, data, processes, people’s fluency and, most importantly, the trust you build with your organization and your customers.”

That shift has changed how Merck KGaA builds its systems. A top-down semantic data layer across the entire company proved too slow. Instead, teams now integrate data incrementally—process by process and use case by use case.

On the inevitable question of A.I.’s impact on jobs, Mehanna rejects the notion that A.I. will simply eliminate human roles. Instead, it rewrites job requirements.

“We do not see roles disappearing. We see roles evolving,” Mehanna said. “A.I. becomes a dynamic tool for accelerating and extending work. The leader of the future will also have to lead a hybrid workforce composed of people and agents.”

Reflecting on leadership through industrial shifts, Mehanna references an unexpected source: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s management guide, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. Across disparate careers in athletics, entertainment and politics, the underlying constant remains clear.

“The underlying foundational principle is to always be useful, and that deeply resonated with me,” Mehanna reflected.