Another big pharma company is seeking reinvention in the digital era. This time around, it’s Sanofi, the French drug mainstay long known for its insulin and diabetes portfolio – but which has faced mounting pressures in a crowded field choc full of competitors.

Now, Sanofi and Alphabet’s Google are teaming up to use data collection and artificial intelligence in a bid to spur drug development and changes in health care delivery.

“Combining Sanofi’s biologic innovations and scientific data with Google’s industry-leading capabilities, from cloud computing to state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, we aspire to give people more control over their health and accelerate the discovery of new therapies,” said Sanofi chief medical officer and EVP Ameet Nathwani in a statement.

The purpose of the Sanofi/Google partnership is three-fold and will be conducted with the help of a newly established, virtual Innovation Lab (the companies didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal): better understanding diseases, increasing corporate efficiency, and improving patient/customer experience.

In other words: This is every bit as much of an operational streamlining and high-tech marketing effort (for instance, by using Google technology to better design sales forecasts through the use of real-world datasets) as it is a quest to develop new drugs. And Google’s cloud services will play a large part in that quest, as similar technology expands its role across multiple life sciences companies.