Today on Forbes, How Lily used AI to crank up production of its popular GLP-1s.

While much of the excitement surrounding AI has focused on drug discovery, the world's largest drug company, Eli Lilly, has quietly seen its first major AI success in manufacturing.

The technology is being used to increase production of

their highly sought-after GLP1 medications, Zepound for weight loss, and Manjaro for diabetes.

Diogo Rao, Lily's chief information and digital officer, tells Forbes, quote,

We literally made more product last year than we possibly could have without

AI. While he declined to specify exact numbers, he says it was, quote, enough that it would

have been material in our earnings reports. That's a big deal, as high demand for Lily's injectable

drugs has caused a major production struggle.

The FDA determined there was a shortage of these drugs from late 2022 through 2024,

temporarily allowing compounders to make them under certain conditions despite the drug's patent protections.

Rau said, quote, that was top of mind for us that we want to not be on the

shortage list. We had a process that we all thought we had optimized. The risk of being on

shortage made us look again, even though we thought we had a process that was as good as it could

be. To crank up its GLP1 production, Lily used what's known as a digital twin,

a virtual representation of a factory that uses real-time data to show precisely what's going on

in the real world, letting it test improvements in the digital world before rolling them out.

Digital twins are increasingly used to optimize manufacturing.

Lilly utilized AI and a digital twin to optimize its GLP1 drug manufacturing, boosting production significantly.

By modeling its entire factory, the digital twins simulated different configurations to find the most efficient processes.

In addition, it was able to better detect defects in its injectors, Rao says.

For example, its technology can take dozens of photographs of each one of those auto-injectors

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