Bianca Anghelina

Company: Aily LabsTitle: Founder & CEOIndustry: TechnologyNotable in 2024: Introduced a new autonomous AI agent designed to provide forward-thinking, personalized recommendations to corporate leaders to aid in decision-making.

You might have seen a headline or two in recent years about a company hiring an AI to serve as its CEO. It's still more gimmicky than reality, but for how long, who knows. It's already fair to say CEOs who don't in the least have the power of AI at their fingertips risk disrupting themselves and their businesses.

For Bianca Anghelina, who founded Aily Labs in 2020 to offer an iPhone AI app for executive decision-making, her professional experience led to firsthand knowledge of just how disruptive AI could be in business roles, and how to integrate it instead of be replaced by it.

From work on structuring systems and data at BMW, to planning and modeling, pricing, and profit & loss analysis at drug companies Novartis and Sandoz, Anghelina worked on operations across dozens of countries and on business plans that took up to a year to develop – and which would still be less than perfect after all of that effort. That changed when she found AI could simplify the process and get a better plan in place within weeks.

"I had this idea to get inspired by how technology companies actually run their business," she told Laurel Strategies' CEO Alan Fleishmann on an episode of his podcast, Leadership Matters. "I started to look into companies like Microsoft, and how they actually apply AI. And I got this 'inside out' perspective on how AI can change the way of working. … what I experienced with AI is disrupting my own role."

"AI changed my life," she told venture capital firm Insight Partners, an Aily investor, in an interview. "It used to take months to get a budget plan together and suddenly I could do it in weeks, which meant my time could be spent on more valuable activities like business strategy."

At Novartis, she led global digital finance and the company's integration of AI, but Anghelina began developing her business acumen much earlier. Growing up in Romania, in a small Transylvanian town called Sibiu, with a statistician mother and a father who she says had a love for numbers, one of Anghelina's favorite games to play she called "Doing Business." She went on to earn a business degree in Munich, took her first stab at product creation – an RFID chip-enabled messaging product she pitched to companies like Siemens – and continued on a path she described as "train my brain for structured solutions, and find solutions as fast as possible."

Like many with an entrepreneurial spirit, it was during Covid that Anghelina decided to build her own company to offer a decision intelligence app. "I didn't want to just create a new tool. … what decision intelligence is about is also about connecting people in an organization and creating a completely new way of working," she told Fleishmann. "Put AI on the fingertips of any employee, without the need of knowing the technology of being a programmer."

Aily Labs, which partners with CEO advisory firm Teneo, has signed clients including pharma giants Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Teva. It has been profitable since its first year, and last year saw a 500% increase in customer growth. The company has over 350 employees located in offices in Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Cluj, Romania, and New York.

"It's basically a one-day integration from the moment we get the data," Anghelina told Pharma Voice. "You get the personalized insights based on your own company and a 360-degree view of the business."

For some C-suites, it may remain a leap of faith to greenlight a project or supply chain shift, or change staffing levels, by looking at recommendations on a phone rather than consulting a board. But Anghelina sees it as part of an inevitable executive future. "Being the first, and trying out something completely new, can be challenging, because there are a lot of unknowns, but it's also a huge benefit, because we are not just riding the wave of AI, we are shaping the wave of applied AI for business with our app being the very first iOS decision intelligence platform out there," she said in the Leadership Matters podcast.

Anghelina — who co-founded the company with Sara Bisbe López, who was an associate director of data science at Novartis and has since moved on from Aily — also shares a message for women taking risks. "It's not that easy to be female founders in the technology space," she told Fleishmann. "This reminds me of my own early days, I was also not brave from day one in taking risks. … I think that we can show that everything is possible."