Healthcare's Biggest AI Opportunity Isn't Clinical. It's Consumer. A Conversation with CVS Health

CVS Health operates one of healthcare’s largest consumer platforms, with businesses spanning health insurance, pharmacy benefits, retail pharmacy, care delivery and digital channels. This creates a rare opportunity to understand the full journey people navigate as they seek care, fill prescriptions, manage coverage and work to stay healthy.

The company’s overarching goal is not simply to improve each touchpoint. It is to remove the fragmentation that forces patients to piece care together on their own across multiple channels and organizations.

In this episode of Healthcare is Hard, Keith Figlioli talked to CVS Health’s head of enterprise customer experience, insights and innovation, Sri Narasimhan, to learn how the company uses customer signals, AI, and agentic twins to make healthcare more proactive and consumer-centered.

Sri brings an unusually broad background to this challenge. He worked in Bangladesh and India on tuberculosis control, HIV initiatives and public health during college, but then decided to branch out so he could ultimately bring a more diverse skillset back to the healthcare industry. He started an economic consulting firm before going to business school. Then he joined GE, where he learned about commercial functions and consumer value. After GE, he worked at the tech company Medallia, where he sharpened skills around speed of innovation, and then moved to Wells Fargo where he worked as head of customer experience for branch banking, learning how to operate in a highly regulated environment.

In 2021, Sri joined CVS Health where his work now sits at the intersection of consumer strategy and AI. During this interview, Sri shared his vast knowledgeand experience to discuss topics including:

• ‍Navigating bureaucracy. Sri pointsout that patients do not benchmark healthcare against other health plans, pharmacies or health systems. They compare it with the simple experiences they have everywhere else. He says most people want answers to four questions: Is itcovered? What will it cost? When can I get it? And can I trust the answer? Healthcare’s tendency to bury those questions in process and bureaucracy is a major source of frustration that Sri is focused on addressing.‍
• AI versus primary care. Trust grows when people get something valuable, and Sri expects consumers to increasingly turn to AI for quick answers about symptoms, diagnoses and side effects as those tools become more useful and accurate. But for serious health issues, he believes the provider relationship will remain essential. AI may change the questions patients bring to clinicians – and which interactions require a clinician at all – but people will still want a trusted human when the stakes are high.‍
• Agentict wins revolutionizing consumer research. Sri calls this technology one of the most transformational capabilities he has seen because it allows CVS Health to simulate the reactions of roughly 150,000 individual consumers in minutes. Through consented interviews, behavioral data and other context, CVS Health built digital twins of actual consumers that simulate how they think and act. Instead of recruiting a new panel, running a focus group or launching a small pilot every time the company wants to test an idea, CVS can assemble the relevant population from its bank of agentic twins and pressure-test messages, choices and scenarios before going live. As Sri puts it, “I have 150,000 patients in the room with us.”

To hear Sri and Keith discuss these topics and more, listen to this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.

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