Srikant Narasimhan

Srikant Narasimhan is Vice President and Head of Customer Experience, Insights, Innovation and External Advocacy at CVS Health, where he is pushing CX beyond retrospective measurement and toward understanding customer behavior quickly enough to influence what happens next.

Narasimhan spent years working with the traditional tools of CX, from NPS and text analytics to customer feedback and predictive models. Now, he no longer waits for customers to describe an experience after the fact, but looks for signals in call transcripts, digital behavior, and other data that can reveal friction while it's still unfolding.

His view of AI is similarly practical. “Human plus AI is better than human without AI,” he says. Narasimhan sees the technology less as a replacement for people than as a way to strip low-value work out of their day and give them more capacity to help patients.

That pragmatism shows in CVS’s work with Cresta. One of its first AI applications was call summarization, which quickly reduced after-call work and helped build support for broader uses. CVS later adopted Cresta’s predictive CSAT across every call, replacing a much narrower view of sentiment from surveys that drew responses from only about 5% of customers.

Narasimhan’s larger idea is that CX should move closer to the moment decisions are being made. Whether AI is removing administrative work, reading signals across thousands of conversations, or helping teams model how customers might respond before a change goes live, the aim is the same: give people better information sooner so they can improve an experience before friction has time to settle in.