Fannie McWatt

Publicis Health

EVP, Head of Data and AI Strategy

Biography

Fannie McWatt, PhD, is Executive Vice President and Head of Data and AI Strategy at Publicis Health, where she is designing methods and operating models for treating AI as an audience. Her work shapes how autonomous systems discover, interpret, and trust health information, and is developing emerging capabilities across the full commercialization process for healthcare and life sciences products. At Publicis Health, she leads the design of end-to-end AI agent systems: multi-step workflows that reason over complex healthcare data to inform strategy, accelerate decisions, and change patient and practice behavior. She also translates AI breakthroughs into governed, enterprise-ready offerings across strategy, creative, and operations. This work is grounded in nearly 20 years in healthcare, where she has led pre-launch and launch strategies for breakthrough therapies in immunology, neurology, infectious disease, and oncology. Before earning her doctorate at Columbia University, she was a clinical scientist at the New York Blood Center, performing high-resolution HLA typing to match umbilical cord blood units for pediatric cancer patients awaiting stem cell transplants.