Every major biopharma business is staking out territory to take advantage of the artificial intelligence (AI) gold rush. Amid a mishmash of strategies -- like forging partnerships with innovative software companies and biotechs, acquiring promising players, and developing AI capabilities in-house -- no competitor is taking exactly the same approach. It's reasonable to expect that there will be winners and losers, or at least leaders and laggards for now.

With that in mind, let's look at a trio of big pharmas that are making moves to be on top of the pile with regard to squeezing the most value out of AI.

1. Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly's (LLY 1.19%) desire to be a leader in using biopharma AI isn't new, but it's driving a huge amount of recent investment activity.

In 2019, the drugmaker forged a partnership with Atomwise, a private biotech dedicated to discovering new medicines using AI, wherein it agreed to pay as much as $550 million in milestone awards and up-front fees. As many as 10 drug targets are under investigation, with the idea being that Atomwise's platform will help to reduce pre-clinical development time frames.

Then 2021, Eli Lilly signed a deal with Verge Genomics, another AI drug discovery company, that was worth $25 million in up-front payments and as much as $694 million in milestones and royalties. That collaboration centers around finding new physiological targets that might be helpful in treating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Most recently, in May, the drugmaker paid XtalPi, a biotech pursuing laboratory robotics and AI-enabled drug discovery, a total of $250 million in up-front and milestone payments as part of the pair's new collaboration. That venture aims to use XtalPi's heavily automated laboratories as well as its generative AI drug discovery capabilities to advance candidates targeting an undisclosed condition.

Importantly, all of the above uses of AI are exactly what Eli Lilly's CEO has outlined as particularly interesting from the perspective of biopharma companies, so the business will almost certainly make more investments in the space, and likely quite soon. So far, it's unclear how much value the investments are returning, and it might take a few more years to find out.

2. AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca's (AZN 0.19%) near-term goals with AI overlap with Eli Lilly's, but they go a bit further. This month, it inked a deal worth $247 million with Absci to team up and develop an anti-cancer biologic. As you might have guessed, Absci is yet another biotech devoted to developing drugs with the help of AI.

Last year, the company started a drug discovery collaboration with Illumina, the most important gene-sequencing business, and one of the pioneers in using AI and genomics data for pharmaceutical target identification. Illumina's management is already trying to position itself for a long-term arrangement for cooperation.

But AstraZeneca's ambitions go beyond using AI for drug development. In November, it announced that it was launching Evinova, a new business dedicated to developing digital technologies for clinical-trial design and operations.​​

It claims that Evinova's AI platform will help researchers and biopharma companies to plan clinical trials, estimate trial costs, and even calculate the anticipated carbon-emissions footprint of trial operations as envisioned.

With a set of offerings like that, it could realize revenue from its AI initiative much sooner than its competitors, so it's worth paying special attention to now.

3. Novartis

Novartis (NVS -1.64%) is positioned slightly differently than Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca, with its recent investments in AI seeking to streamline labor-intensive organizational and clinical tasks.

In late 2019, it partnered with Microsoft with the aim of overhauling its organizational practices to leverage the power of AI at every level. The two are also working on cracking difficult medical chemistry problems using AI, which could easily accelerate the throughput of its entire research and development pipeline. But there hasn't yet been any indication of that actually happening.

In early December, it announced an investment of an undisclosed sum in Yseop, a company creating generative AI solutions for medical and regulatory writing tasks. Eli Lilly was already an investor before that.

And Novartis is also collaborating with AI-enabled data analysis companies like RetinAI, working on potential therapies for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD).

It's an open question to investors whether Novartis' AI strategy is safer or riskier than the direct investments being pursued by its peers. But so far, it looks like it's a more conservative approach overall.