Brook Colangelo, chief information officer at Waters Corp., says the lab equipment company’s newest artificial intelligence tool can help drugmakers speed up their quality testing processes.
On Wednesday, Waters debuted a new AI-powered integration called Peak Integration into its Empower software platform to drastically reduce manual interventions traditionally performed by scientists for quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) in drug discovery and manufacturing. These QA/QC processes ensure medicines are safe, effective, and compliant with the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory standards.
Waters says that the new AI and machine learning capabilities within Empower—which has 500,000 users and supports the release of popular drugs ranging from aspirin to Wegovy—can reduce manual interventions by 95%. Waters also says that the new AI feature improves testing accuracy by 76% and is 50% faster than the prior process.
“The advancements here are around how we take automation and how we take AI to help unlock more human potential in the scientists that are using this technology,” says Colangelo, who has served as CIO at Waters since 2018.
The latest AI/ML innovation from Waters required a bit of patience. Waters worked closely with an undisclosed, top-ten pharmaceutical company for about one-and-a-half years, with much of that time dedicated to securing legal agreements and guaranteeing that there were safe processes in place to exchange data to train the initial AI models.
“Once we got into it and had a novel model that we started training, it actually went pretty quickly from there,” says David Leitham, vice president and general manager of Waters’ informatics software business.
It is the second major AI feature that Waters has announced for Empower, following an AI/ML anomaly detection tool that debuted in February 2025, and also the second major AI announcement from the company in October. Two weeks ago, Waters launched “AI Link,” a software capability that brings Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol—the AI startup’s open standard that connects AI models and agents to software and data through a common interface—to the lab company’s informatics platform.
“We have been less vocal than some of our competitors,” says Colangelo, explaining Waters’ current efforts to laud its AI capabilities.
Leitham says that Waters’ new AI feature, called Peak Integration, targets repetitive, mundane tasks that are “frankly not a good use of the scientist’s time or expertise, but also add variability to the results of the experiment.” A scientist could be tasked with reviewing hundreds of chromatograms, graphs that show separate compounds in a mixture or formulation, but would need to hunt for just one or two that don’t fit the desired profile.
While the general public’s view of AI is shaded by concerns about its impact on jobs, the environment, and even humanity’s future—so much so that President Donald Trump wants to ban the term artificial intelligence in favor of his preferred name, super intelligence—drug discovery is one AI use case that occupies more favorable terrain.
There are hopes that AI can accelerate drug discovery and reduce the $2 trillion, 10-year process of getting medicines approved and into the market, improving everything from research to development to clinical trials and manufacturing, as well as targeting medicines to the most appropriate patients.
Pharmaceutical giants have aggressively announced partnerships with major AI players, including deals between Nvidia and Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and OpenAI, and Merck and Alphabet’s Google Cloud, all among the more than three dozen pacts that have been announced throughout 2026, according to Reuters.
“There have been a lot of pharma and life sciences companies that have talked a lot about AI, but not in this area,” says Colangelo of the new Waters’ tool and its focus on QA/QC.
Internally, Colangelo’s AI bets have included giving more than 2,000 Waters employees access to the conversational tool called AI Advisor. In its manufacturing operations, Waters built a scientific data lake to unify historical and current engineering, quality, and production data. AI added to the manufacturing processes provides greater end-to-end traceability and has higher-quality production, Waters says.
Another way Colangelo intends to rely on more AI usage involves the integration of a biosciences and diagnostics solutions business that Waters bought from medical technology firm Becton Dickinson. That deal—which more than doubled the size of Waters—valued the business at $18.8 billion when the deal closed in February.
He says that the Becton Dickinson unit had 8,500 IT employees, though only around 20 joined Waters. And very few employees from other core functions, like human resources and finance, also migrated to Waters following the transaction.
“We have to replace a lot of that work,” says Colangelo, who says he intends to generate efficiencies from AI, though he couldn’t share concrete details at this time. “Instead of doubling the size of the IT team, we’re going to use AI to transform it.”
John Kell
DON’T MISS: Cyber threats don’t stand still—and neither do the startups working to stop them. From AI-powered deception to hidden vulnerabilities, businesses face an increasingly complex security landscape. For the fourth annual Cyber 60, Fortune, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and AWS spotlight the most innovative cybersecurity startups helping companies anticipate threats, strengthen defenses, and protect their operations.
NEWS PACKETS
Anthropic files for IPO. On Monday, the Claude maker filed its S-1 with the SEC, marking the first official step toward what could be one of the largest initial public offerings ever. Anthropic’s market value could reach up to $2 trillion, putting it in the same stratosphere as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which closed its first day of trading in June at a $2.1 trillion valuation. The filing showed that Anthropic’s revenue grew 14x to $16.3 billion for the first six months of 2026 versus the prior-year period and that the company holds $131.7 billion in cash and short-term investments, but also infrastructure spending agreements totaling $657 billion. And no big deal: there’s also that headline-grabbing warning that if AI isn’t developed and operated with the proper safeguards, these systems “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”
Broadcom secures big debt deal; CoreWeave sputters. Semiconductor giant Broadcom, which was reportedly racing to finalize an AI debt deal ahead of Anthropic’s IPO, did so this week by announcing $63 billion in financing commitments that will allow the AI startup to lease specialized chips beginning in 2027. But the Wall Street Journal reports that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan had to step in and personally make calls to bank executives to ease concerns about rising interest rates and the durability of the AI boom. Elsewhere in the market, those concerns have pummeled the stocks of CoreWeave and other neocloud firms—the companies that rent out AI infrastructure—which are also confronting the same worries about interest rates and how bullish the AI thesis should be, while also carrying heavy debt loads.
Apollo’s chief economist: AI has had “Zero payoff” to most American companies. Torsten Slok, the chief economist at asset manager Apollo Global Management, said that AI has delivered “zero financial payoff” to American companies outside of the technology sector. He wrote in a blog post that revenue per worker has risen for the Magnificent Seven tech giants, but has been flat for the other 493 firms in the S&P 500. Slok also asserted that there were no signs that AI has boosted productivity or had an impact on the bottom line. “The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins,” wrote Slok. “That may be harder than it sounds.”
Big Tech’s 3Q earnings to add more clarity to AI spending plans. With earnings due this week from Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, Wall Street will get yet another fresh update on how much these tech giants are committing to AI infrastructure. The trio is projected to report a double-digit increase in revenue for the quarter, but the capital expenditures lines in their financials have dominated headlines over the past several quarters. Meta Platforms, which on Monday announced a $95 billion stock offering to fund its investments in AI, posted better-than-expected Q3 revenue last week and is developing plans to monetize its new Muse AI agent. Meta also disclosed its capital expenditures totaled $34.9 billion during the quarter, compared with $31 billion in the second quarter.
Barclays links job cuts to AI; hires first-ever chief AI officer. Barclays announced it would cut 5,000 jobs, or 5% of the British bank’s total workforce, citing efficiencies gained through the use of AI that led it to trim supporting roles, including software developers. The news came as Barclays reported a 12% increase in quarterly profit that missed Wall Street’s expectations, according to the New York Times. One day later, Anita Tanna—who joined Barclays in 2021 as a managing director—shared that she would become the bank’s chief AI officer, focusing on accelerating AI adoption at the bank.
ADOPTION CURVE
Agentic AI governance frameworks still have some notable gaps. Six out of ten security and technology decision-makers give themselves a passing grade on agentic security, describing their governance measures as “established,” according to a recent survey of more than 3,700 professionals by cloud-based software provider ServiceNow.
And yet, 90% of organizations say they had an agentic security incident in the past year, and fewer than half of these technology leaders say the governance frameworks that they’ve established explicitly cover key elements of AI agent deployment: inventory, ownership, and permissions; real-time monitoring; and accountability.
Nadir Izrael, ServiceNow’s global VP of cybersecurity and risk products, tells Fortune that a good starting point is to establish that no agents can run without approval from the business. Technologists also need to embrace a discovery mindset to uncover where non-human identities may reside across every piece of hardware, cloud workload, or software-as-a-service product, according to Izrael. From there, control planes need to be established so that an IT team can quickly stop an agent when things go awry, he adds.
The study found that only one in five tech leaders say their companies have a single accountable owner for agentic AI governance. This can create a divide in which the chief information security officer looks at agentic AI as a potential attack surface, but the chief AI officer is more incentivized to promote adoption, while also balancing governance and controls.
“A broad platform that can cater to all these different personas is critical,” says Izrael. “The personas have different views and different outcomes, but the underlying data and governance are one and the same.”
Courtesy of ServiceNow
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
– Leidos is seeking a government services CTO, based in Reston, Virginia. Posted salary range: $154.1K-$278.5K/year.
– FairSquare is seeking a chief information and AI officer, based in San Diego. Posted salary range: $290K-$375K/year.
– Munchkin is seeking a VP of technology and AI, based in Los Angeles. Posted salary range: $285K-$350K/year.
– Kapitus is seeking a SVP of data, AI strategy, and transformation, based in Arlington, Virginia. Posted salary range: $187.2K-$300.3K/year.
Hired:
– Tractor Supply announced the appointment of Fahim Siddiqui as chief technology and digital officer, effective Monday, where he will lead the farm and ranch retailer’s enterprise technology and digital organizations. Previously, Siddiqui served as CIO at home-improvement retailer Home Depot from April 2022 to May 2025. He also held senior leadership roles at Staples, Vidyo, and Intralinks.
– Avantor appointed Mikey Santiago as its CIO, leading the IT strategy and advancing the digital transformation agenda for the life science tools company. Most recently, Santiago served as CIO at healthcare company Danaher, a role he held since 2023. He was also previously CIO at Cytiva and Beckman Coulter.
– Heritage Financial appointed Pat Casey to the role of CIO, effective November 2. Prior to joining the Washington-based bank, Casey held senior technology roles at Kite Realty Group, CNO Financial Group, Ahold Delhaize, and OfficeMax/Office Depot.
– Ardent Health named Gaurav Khanna to the role of chief digital and information officer. Prior to joining the hospital operator, Khanna served as VP and segment CIO for Humana’s healthcare services business, CenterWell Pharmacy. He was previously the chief information and digital officer for Contessa Health.
– Toro announced that Neal M. Lackritz would join the landscaping equipment company as CTO, effective November 2, a newly created role at the manufacturer. Lackritz joins Toro from pet-care technology firm Whisker, where he had served as VP of engineering. Earlier in his career, he held technology roles at Ariens, Genesis Motion Solutions, Apple. and Bose.
– Firm360 announced the appointment of Richard Calhoun as chief product officer, a newly created role at the accounting software company. Most recently, he served as CPO at software firm Stratus. Calhoun also previously served as a senior technology leader at OrgChart, BigTime Software, and Projector PSA.
– PairSoft named Vijay Vidiyala to the role of chief product and technology officer, overseeing the financial automation software company’s product and engineering teams. Most recently, Vidiyala led product, engineering, and operations teams across the U.S., Europe, and India at enterprise software firm Model N.
– BrightStar Care appointed Amer Waheed to serve as CTO. He joins the in-home care services provider after most recently serving as CTO at healthcare company Fuze Health. He also previously served as CTO at home services franchise company Neighborly.
