Bob Bradway has a word for the kind of leader who will thrive in the AI era: “autodidact.” Curious. Self-taught. Comfortable with uncertainty. The kind of person who picks up a new tool on a Saturday and figures it out by Sunday — which, as it happens, is exactly what Bradway himself does.
The Amgen CEO spends his weekends vibe-coding, has required his entire senior executive team to take AI courses, and talks about artificial intelligence with a rare fluency. In a podcast interview with AI pioneer Andrew Ng, he was told: “A lot of times you sound more like an AI person than a biotech CEO.”
The irony is that Bradway runs a company built on the opposite of the autodidact. Amgen’s competitive moat is its experts — scientists who have spent decades learning that molecules are delicate constructions indeed. “The hallways are full of people who have the experience of understanding if you make a substitution of one amino acid for another, there’s a consequence,” Bradway said. “We want to be very careful not to lose that.”
Reconciling those two things — the adaptable generalist and the irreplaceable specialist — is the central challenge of Bradway’s AI moment. And few CEOs are better positioned to navigate it. That’s because Bradway didn’t just start thinking about AI recently. He started in 2012.
