Reporting to the Head of Clinical Development AI Partnerships, the Director, Clinical Development AI Partnerships will play a key role in advancing AbbVie’s external innovation agenda for artificial intelligence applied to clinical development. This role will help identify, assess, and progress partnership opportunities from the global AI and life sciences innovation ecosystem, with focus on AI-enabled capabilities that can improve clinical trial design, efficiency, quality, execution, evidence generation, and participant engagement. 

This leader will be responsible for independently leading substantive workstreams across sourcing, evaluation, diligence, pilot design, benchmark planning, partner engagement, and internal governance recommendations. This person works in close collaboration with Clinical Development leaders, AI Strategy & Partnerships, Search & Evaluation, Business Development & Acquisitions, Business Technology Solutions, Transactions, Legal, Procurement, Privacy, Compliance, and R&D stakeholders. The primary scope is Clinical Development, with opportunities spanning therapeutic areas and transaction types such as pilots, research collaborations, licenses, option structures, and other partnership models. 

The successful candidate will bring enough clinical development context to understand the problems AbbVie is trying to solve, enough AI and technology fluency to assess external capabilities credibly, and enough strategy and deal-process discipline to help the organization make practical, evidence-based decisions. This is a builder role in a new and high-priority area: the person should be comfortable operating with ambiguity, developing trusted internal and external relationships, and converting emerging opportunities into rigorous, well-governed partnership paths. 

The Role 

This Director role will be a hands-on partner to the Development AI cross-functional team as well as to the broader AbbVie AI Partnerships team. This person will be leading AI Strategy and Operations for the ClinDev organization and serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership in strategy, functions, and business technology.  This role is pivotal in driving our organization towards becoming a leader in the application of AI in pharma, ensuring that AI initiatives align with our overarching business objectives, delivering tangible business value and accelerating our promise to patients. He or she will help translate AbbVie’s Clinical Development AI priorities into a focused external innovation pipeline. The core areas of emphasis include clinical trial acceleration, clinical trial innovation, and related AI-enabled capabilities that can improve the speed, quality, and execution of drug development.  

Responsibilities 

• Deal sourcing: Closely monitor the evolving landscape of AI and pharmaceutical innovation as it relates to clinical development. Proactively identify and evaluate potential partnering opportunities from AI startups, technology companies, frontier model labs, clinical technology platforms, digital health companies, academic groups, and life sciences investors. 

• Opportunity evaluation and diligence: Lead or co-lead the structured assessment of external opportunities with Clinical Development, R&D, BTS, S&E, BD&A, legal, privacy, compliance, and functional subject matter experts. This includes managing partner interactions, organizing diligence workstreams, synthesizing scientific and technical input, and preparing clear recommendations for senior leaders and governance forums. 

• Pilots, benchmarks, and technical evaluations: Design and coordinate pilots, benchmarks, proof-of-concept studies, and technical evaluations of AI models and platforms applied to clinical development. Ensure evaluations are scoped to answer decision-relevant questions, with clear success criteria, data needs, operational assumptions, risks, and next-step recommendations. 

• Deal flow management: Track active assessments, partner interactions, diligence materials, pilot status, decision points, and open issues. Communicate progress and risks to key stakeholders in a timely and concise way, including through written updates, management presentations, governance materials, and working team discussions. 

• Partnership and deal execution support: Contribute to the development of appropriate partnership structures, non-binding term sheets, statements of work, technical and operational inputs, risk mitigation strategies, and negotiation considerations in collaboration with BD&A, Transactions Legal, Procurement, BTS, and functional teams. 

• Ecosystem development: Build and maintain relationships with external partners and ecosystem participants to improve awareness of AbbVie’s Clinical Development AI priorities and to source high-quality opportunities aligned with business needs. 

• Internal alignment and stakeholder management: Help align Clinical Development leaders, functional SMEs, BTS, AI Strategy, and enterprise stakeholders on opportunity fit, value potential, implementation needs, and decision criteria. Facilitate meetings and working sessions that move the organization toward informed decisions. 

• Operating model and playbook contribution: Develop reusable approaches for Clinical Development AI external innovation, including diligence templates, pilot design principles, stakeholder maps, decision criteria, ROI and success metric frameworks, and practical guidance on buy-build-partner tradeoffs.