CVS’s customer experience lead on pleasing people across verticals

If you’re reading this, you may be a hospital exec, an investor, or a pharmacist. One thing you all have in common, though, is that you are all also customers somewhere.

Sri Narasimhan, SVP and GM of consumer engagement services, Health 100, at CVS Health, has worked at the health giant since 2021, where his job is to take feedback and create a better culture for consumers. His work spans all of CVS’s businesses, which of course includes its retail stores as well as its insurance company Aetna, primary care provider Oak Street Health, pharmacy benefit manager Caremark, and Health100, an agentic AI-based platform that CVS launched with Google Cloud back in March.

“I steep myself in the feedback that we get from our consumers. I’ll read reports my team sends me about what people are saying about the experiences they’ve had with our different businesses, and I try to understand as much as I can about those different groups,” he told Healthcare Brew.

Last week, CVS announced a major split of its healthcare conglomerate. The plan is to spin off its 9,000 retail pharmacies into a seperate company in 2028, though the company declined to comment on how it will affect Narasimhan’s role.

Narasimhan spoke with Healthcare Brew before the split was announced about his day-to-day in the unique role, including how CVS is using AI twins to address consumer needs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the bottom line that you bring to discussions with CVS’s different businesses?

From a consumer’s perspective, what they want isn’t complicated. What they have to navigate and what gets delivered can be complicated. If you’re talking to a person, they want to know: Is it covered? What does it cost? When will I get it? And then, can I trust anything you just told me? Those four things are the through line of every single business. It’s not as complicated as we make it…it’s just hard to deliver. Healthcare is complicated, and there’s a lot of parties involved.

Can you break down Health100? What is the goal of the platform?

Health100 is its own application. It’s something that’s available when you’re in the CVS pharmacy network, but it’s agnostic. It doesn’t have to be CVS…It will be available for anybody if you’re looking to manage your prescription, looking to manage your healthcare, your benefits.

What we’ve focused on with Health100 is: How do we improve the consumer engagement in that world, make it easier to navigate, hold your consumer’s hand through healthcare, and get you to the point where you’re able to get the things you need to get done completed. Make it more about care and less about administrative burden.

What have you accomplished this year?

In retail, for example, we were looking at if we had dollars to invest, where should we put that money? And a lot of what we were looking at is how do we improve the experience, particularly at high stress points of the day. What ends up happening in retail is [pharmacists] have to process a lot of scripts. But there are different times where different pharmacies will be busy…So one of the things we developed from the insights that our team found was something called “air support,” where a pharmacy that isn’t as busy can support a pharmacy that is more busy at a particular time of day by doing some of the back office activities.

How is CVS using AI twins to address customer needs?

[There] are the types of insights my team will work on across the business. How do we improve those experiences? What are different things that we can do to enhance the offering? One of the biggest ways we’re doing that is agentic twins. The concept there is that we can create AI twins of customers, and those customers are available to us at all times. We get about an hour-long interview. We get a lot of clickstream data, different information to build the twin, and then you do that at scale. We have about 150,000 now that are twins of customers that represent how they think, how they make decisions, how they make choices.

We use [the twin] in a lot of different ways. Things like message testing. For example, if we are looking at a medication, and we know that patients are experiencing side effects and things like that, what are ways that we can message that can keep them adherent? Messages that’ll resonate. Messages where we can offer ways to mitigate the side effects.