Emma Walmsley

Dame Emma Walmsley (born 1969) spent 17 years at L’Oréal before joining GSK’s consumer division in 2010 and becoming CEO of the whole company in April 2017 — the first woman to lead a major global pharmaceutical firm. She stepped down on December 31, 2025, handing over to commercial chief Luke Miels, with GSK’s board asking her to keep advising on geopolitics and new technologies through the transition.

Betting pharma’s hardest problem on AI

Walmsley made AI central to GSK’s turnaround, building gsk.ai into one of pharma’s largest in-house machine-learning units and serving on Microsoft’s board from 2019 to 2024. She often cited concrete wins: GSK used AI to model where respiratory syncytial virus infections were spreading, placing trial sites more efficiently and cutting roughly two years off the RSV vaccine’s clinical development. Discovering a new medicine, she noted, can take a decade, cost billions and fail 90% of the time — the inefficiency AI is best placed to attack.

She kept pushing to the end of her tenure. Profiling her “impatient overhaul” of GSK in September 2025, Semafor reported her quip that she is not famous for her patience as she pressed to ramp the company’s AI capability up another level. In a 2023 Fortune interview she called AI’s implications “a really profoundly important question for every leader to be asking at the moment,” predicting it would change everything about how the industry works.

Her record was not without critics — GSK’s share price lagged rivals for much of her run, and her September 2025 exit announcement surprised the market — but her AI investments are widely seen as having positioned the company for the machine-learning era of drug discovery.