Sanofi Is Using AI Agents To Cut Through Enterprise App-Hopping

Companies pay for enterprise software, then often pay outside providers to help employees navigate the applications they already license. Even a routine IT request can mean contacting an outsourced service desk, where someone follows the company’s guidelines to resolve a problem and close a ticket, generating another charge.

At Sanofi, those recurring costs helped expand the ambitions for Concierge, the healthcare and pharmaceutical company’s internally developed agentic AI assistant. It began by answering employees’ questions about the company, but Sanofi’s chief digital officer Emmanuel Frenehard saw an opportunity for it to complete tasks that his company paid outside providers to handle.

“We were jumping from one system to another because each system managed only part of the process. I started thinking, what if we could bring all that data into one interface and create new processes that were no longer constrained by the barriers between those systems?,” Frenehard tells me in an exclusive interview. “Agentic AI is extremely powerful, but it is also costly. It should be used where the returns are high, not for small automations.”

McKinsey’s Technology Trends Outlook 2026 reports that 89% of organizations regularly use AI, yet only 37% attribute any positive impact on earnings before interest and taxes to their AI programs. The report argues that the biggest gains will come from redesigning workflows around employees and AI agents working together, an approach Sanofi is pursuing through Concierge’s support and purchasing capabilities.

As agentic AI becomes more capable and widely available, how much of the underlying software can enterprises actually stop paying for? An AI assistant can handle an employee’s request while existing applications still execute the work, leaving companies with a new AI platform to fund and the same software contracts to renew.