{"id":311708,"date":"2026-03-04T00:24:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T00:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311708\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T00:24:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T00:24:33","slug":"after-nike-and-kohls-elevance-healths-cdio-takes-on-health-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311708\/","title":{"rendered":"After Nike and Kohl’s, Elevance Health\u2019s CDIO takes on health care"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than two decades, Ratnakar Lavu\u2019s career in technology focused on retailers including Macy\u2019s and Bloomingdale\u2019s. As his career matured, he moved into the C-suite to serve as chief technology officer at department store Kohl\u2019s and global chief digital information office at sportswear giant Nike<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But in early 2024, Lavu took a big leap into an entirely new industry. He became CDIO at health benefits provider Elevance Health<\/a>, which ranks No. 20<\/a> on the Fortune 500 with $197.6 billion in operating revenue in 2025, a 13% increase from the prior year. Lavu says that although the industries are vastly different, both can benefit from investments in technology intended to make it easier to serve customers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy past experience has been with large consumer brands; we\u2019re always focused on leveraging technology to transform brands and create delightful, personalized customer experiences,\u201d says Lavu. \u201cAt Elevance Health, I\u2019m trying to do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, leveraging technology to bring \u201cdelight\u201d to the complex and expensive health care system is a far loftier challenge than selling sneakers or designer purses. American satisfaction with U.S. health care costs is at the lowest level<\/a> Gallup has recorded since 2001, with only 16% now saying they are satisfied, down from the all-time high of 30% in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly one in four say the U.S. health care system is \u201cin a state of crisis,\u201d while 47% believe it has \u201cmajor problems,\u201d according to a poll published in December.<\/p>\n

Lavu says he believes that AI can help simplify the system and improve health outcomes, and he focuses his investments on three areas, all of which have some exposure to generative AI. For the company\u2019s 45.2 million medical members, there\u2019s a ChatGPT-like experience built into Elevance Health\u2019s Sydney mobile app, where users can ask questions in natural language, such as, \u201cI need knee surgery. Am I covered and if so, how much will my co-pay be?\u201d Sydney can answer those questions. The chat feature can also recommend providers who are regionally close to the member and are also in network, which is more cost effective than an out-of-network health practitioner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second pillar centers on Elevance Health\u2019s health plans, which include its Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Wellpoint, and Carelon brands. Lavu has deployed AI for prior authorization, a process that requires a doctor to obtain approval for a health plan before providing treatment or writing a prescription. AI is automating some of those requests, though humans are still in the mix for some evaluations.<\/p>\n

Elevance Health has also built an internally developed AI chatbot called Spark, which leverages multiple large language models to handle document analysis and other common corporate tasks. Elevance Health says more than 60,000 associates use Spark and in the first half of 2025, 10 million messages were sent through the chatbot.<\/p>\n

The company is also in the process of deploying an enterprise ChatGPT license across the company and is working with the AI startup to give tens of thousands of associates an opportunity to earn certifications in AI fluency, which includes responsible AI, prompt engineering, and more advanced AI-enabled work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really dedicating our time and effort to make sure all our employees are upskilled,\u201d says Lavu.<\/p>\n

Lavu is still in the process of making meaningful headway on agentic AI, though he says this form of the technology is especially promising within health care, as it can handle more complex tasks across benefits and claims. He has been exploring agentic AI use cases across all three of Elevance Health\u2019s priority pillars and expects to scale them more aggressively in 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What Lavu is now focused on is setting up the proper guardrails to clearly define what tasks these agents can perform and, just as importantly, what they shouldn\u2019t do. He wants to very precisely train them on only the right data needed to perform their tasks. And employees will always remain in the mix.<\/p>\n

\u201cA human can actually oversee multiple agents,\u201d says Lavu. \u201cBut there has to be some oversight, because we want to ensure that the agent does not deviate from its task that it\u2019s been assigned.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Kell<\/p>\n

Send thoughts or suggestions to\u00a0CIO Intelligence here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

NEWS PACKETS<\/p>\n

Anthropic faces challenges on both home and foreign turfs. This week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was summoned to meet with the Pentagon in Washington for a meeting to discuss how the AI startup\u2019s technology is used in classified systems, as the Defense Department aims to use the company\u2019s technology more broadly than allowed under a $200 million contract that was signed last year. The New York Times reports<\/a> that the Pentagon has signed a deal with xAI and is getting close to another with Google, hoping those pacts can put pressure on Anthropic. Separately this week, Anthropic accused<\/a> three Chinese startups\u2014DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax\u2014of using data from its AI systems to train their own chatbots. OpenAI has made similar claims and both have warned the practice is a national security risk.<\/p>\n

Meta to spend billions in AMD chips deal. Meta and AMD (the sponsor of this newsletter) on Tuesday announced a multi-year deal to buy the latter company\u2019s chips and computers to run AI models, a transaction that\u2019s expected to be worth \u201cdouble-digit billions,\u201d<\/a> according to Bloomberg, who attributed the figure to AMD CEO Lisa Su. Another part of the deal will allow Meta to take a financial stake of up to 10%<\/a> in the chip company, which is similar to a deal that AMD struck with OpenAI<\/a> last fall to provide chips in exchange for a performance-based stock warrant that would vest as specific milestones were met.<\/p>\n

IBM\u2019s shares take a tumble, thanks to Anthropic. Bloomberg reports that IBM\u2019s shares had their worst day<\/a> in more than 25 years after Anthropic said the company\u2019s Claude Code tool could help modernize a programming language from 1959 but is still used by many governments and private companies to run financial, administrative, and business applications. Cobol still supports 95% of ATM transactions<\/a> in the U.S. and 80% of in-person credit card swipes. IBM quickly responded to buffer the market fears. “The value IBM mainframe delivers has nothing to do with Cobol,” wrote Rob Thomas, IBM\u2019s senior vice president of software and chief commercial officer in a blog post<\/a>. He added that no matter how the application is written\u2014be it Cobol, Java, etc.\u2014”the language is not the source of that value. The platform is.”<\/p>\n

Did an AI coding bot cause two outages at Amazon Web Services? A kerfuffle emerged between Amazon and the Financial Times after the news outlet reported<\/a> that the tech giant\u2019s cloud division, AWS, had experienced at least two outages that involved the company\u2019s own Kiro AI coding tool, citing four people familiar with the matter. But Amazon issued a public rebuttal<\/a> that asserted in both instances that the issue was a user error\u2014specifically, misconfigured access controls\u2014and not AI. Amazon told the FT that it was \u201ca coincidence that AI tools were involved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walmart says AI played a key role in its latest earnings report. Walmart, which recently lost<\/a> the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500 to rival Amazon, reported strong sales growth<\/a> for the latest quarter due to rising demand from the grocery and online businesses. But CIO Dive homed in<\/a> on the role of the retailer\u2019s AI efforts, as new CEO John Furner told Wall Street analysts that technology and AI \u201cis helping us create greater customer solutions, reduce friction, simplify decision-making and pinpoint where our inventory is.\u201d Automation has also helped Walmart move inventory more seamlessly across its vast system. It now claims that 60% of stores receive some freight from automated distribution centers.<\/p>\n

ADOPTION CURVE<\/p>\n

Healthcare executives are more bullish on AI than clinicians. As the global healthcare system is expected to face a worker shortage of at least 10 million<\/a> by 2030, leading experts increasingly prescribe to the idea that AI can help. Three out of every four healthcare executives say that AI has a positive impact on care quality and 65% believe the technology can address staffing shortages \u201cat least somewhat,\u201d according to a survey<\/a> of 1,347 clinicians and 167 executives fielded by Gallup and funded by healthcare education company Covista.<\/p>\n

The study found that AI is already fairly pervasive across health systems: 71% say it is being used for documentation, 54% for electronic health records, and 48% for diagnostics. But even as AI use cases proliferate, clinicians remain a bit more skeptical than the top brass. Only 45% believe that AI can address staffing shortages \u201cat\u00a0 least somewhat,\u201d and a mere 6% believe it can solve the problem mostly or completely.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith any innovation, any new technology, it\u2019s hard to overstate the importance of trust,\u201d Steve Beard, CEO of Covista, tells Fortune. \u201cThe way to do that is to get wins in places where the stakes are lower, in nondiagnostic, nonacute care settings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Courtesy of Covista<\/p>\n

JOBS RADAR<\/p>\n

Hiring:<\/p>\n

– Code for America is seeking a CTO<\/a>, a remote-based role for a company headquartered in Oakland, California. Posted salary range: $250K-$320K\/year.<\/p>\n

– Chief is seeking a vice president, head of technology<\/a>, based in New York City. Posted salary: $285K\/year.<\/p>\n

– Town School for Boys is seeking a CTO<\/a>, based in San Francisco. Posted salary range: $180K-$210K\/year.<\/p>\n

– CoralTree Hospitality is seeking a CTO<\/a>, based in Englewood, Colorado. Posted salary range: $250K-$275K\/year.<\/p>\n

Hired:<\/p>\n

– Xcel Energy announced<\/a> the appointment of Rob Cain as CTO, effective immediately, succeeding Tim Peterson, who accepted a position outside of the Minnesota-based utility. For the past seven years, Cain served as a partner in the Minneapolis office of consulting firm McKinsey. He\u00a0 also previously served as a partner at consultancy PwC and as CIO at beverage giant Coca-Cola.<\/p>\n

– Michael Baker appointed<\/a> Rod Malehmir to the role of CTO, leading the engineering services and consulting company\u2019s technology team of more than 400. Malehmir joins from consultancy Tetra Tech, where he served as senior vice president of AI and digital solutions.<\/p>\n

– TripleKey appointed<\/a> Jon Brown to the role of CIO. He joins the cybersecurity and software risk management company with more than 30 years of leadership experience, including serving as CIO for Veterinary Practice Partners, CIO of the North Carolina-based healthcare system Mission Health, and director of IT security at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.<\/p>\n

– American National Standards Institute has named<\/a> Ed Anderson to serve as chief digital officer, effective Monday. Most recently, Anderson was chief administrative officer and chief financial officer for the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity International. He also previously held leadership roles at private charity World Vision International and as a presidential appointee with the U.S. Peace Corps.<\/p>\n

– Volatus Aerospace announced<\/a> the appointment of Krish Srinivasan as CTO, where he will oversee the unified engineering organization across Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. Srinivasan joins the drones company after most recently serving as CTO for the healthcare technology company CanAide. He also held leadership roles at healthcare-focused firms Greenway Health and Siemens Healthineers.<\/p>\n

– Flywire appointed<\/a> Patrick Blanc as CTO, overseeing the global engineering team and the technology strategy and execution across the global payments company\u2019s platform and software. Most recently, Blanc served as CTO of French payments company Ingenico and also previously held technology leadership roles at Visa and PayPal.<\/p>\n

– XiFin named<\/a> Sanjay Kumar as CTO to lead the healthcare IT company\u2019s AI innovation strategy. Kumar most recently served as CTO of medical device maker ResMed\u2019s residential care software business. He also previously served as VP of engineering at Teradata, Intuit, and Sabre Holdings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For more than two decades, Ratnakar Lavu\u2019s career in technology focused on retailers including Macy\u2019s and Bloomingdale\u2019s. As…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[97662,97663,97664,97665,97666,134,527,17053,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-311708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-chief-information-officer-cio","9":"tag-chief-technology-officer-cto","10":"tag-cio-intelligence","11":"tag-fortune-500","12":"tag-fortune-500-companies","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-healthcare","15":"tag-insurance","16":"tag-new-zealand","17":"tag-newzealand","18":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}