FedEx cites AI healthcare gains; CVS deploys 150,000 digital twins
FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam told the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit this week that his company is “on the optimistic side” of the artificial intelligence safety debate, as companies deploying the technology are moving forward even though so-called frontier AI developers may slow development.
The divergence surfaced on the first day of the WSJ summit, where executives from companies that use AI reflected a different outlook from those that build the most advanced systems. Deployers “would, however, be happy with some guardrails on those models,” the Journal reported.
The idea of a slowdown took hold over the weekend after one researcher who departed Anthropic and another still there warned that AI was advancing “so fast that humans might lose control—and AI could then kill us all,” the Journal reported. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for slowing the pace of development, a sentiment echoed by rivals. It remains highly uncertain whether any AI company actually will slow its development, the Journal reported.
At the WSJ summit, Subramaniam pointed to AI-driven improvements at FedEx as evidence the technology is delivering value now. “AI has helped FedEx grow its healthcare business by improving the predictability of its deliveries,” Subramaniam said.
Vishal Talwar, FedEx’s chief digital and information officer and president of its FedEx Dataworks unit, echoed that view. “We both think that it’s in our hands and it’s up to us to apply for good, and I think it can do a lot of good for the society,” Talwar said.
CVS Health told attendees it operates roughly 150,000 digital twin agents programmed to imitate consumers, allowing the pharmacy chain to conduct deep customer research in minutes rather than weeks. Sri Narasimhan, the company’s vice president of enterprise customer experience and insights, said one research task that previously took six to eight weeks now takes 20 minutes.
The digital twins are designed to evolve. Tilak Mandadi, CVS’s chief experience and technology officer, said the agents are “exposed to all the publicly available media and news and policies and everything else,” so they are learning and in theory mimicking the way human preferences change over time and in response to the world.
The maker of CVS’s simulation tool, Simile, envisions a more autonomous future. Rather than bringing the system questions, companies will eventually feed it goals — a revenue target for a new product, for example — and the AI will create a “multiverse of possibilities” and reveal the way forward, according to Simile CEO and co-founder Joon Sung Park.
Park once predicted that “chief simulations officers” would become common at Fortune 500 companies. When Journal editor Ben Ashwell raised that prediction, Mandadi pushed back, calling the once-popular chief cloud officer title the “dumbest thing in the world.” Titles should be attached to results — such as a great experience — and people should be incentivized to find the appropriate tool for the desired outcomes, Mandadi said.
“The problem with associating a person with a technology is that that technology suddenly becomes a solution for everything,” Mandadi said, “because their bonus depends on it.”