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Twin, where have you been?
To:Brew Readers
IT Brew // Morning Brew // Update
How digital twins are helping CVS simulate customers.

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In today’s edition:

🩻 Twin fever

Pick a card, any card

Hey, that’s private!

—Brianna Monsanto, Eoin Higgins, Caroline Nihill

IT STRATEGY

Collaged side by side of an AI robot and human employee working at a desk. (Credit: Morning Brew Design)

Morning Brew

Twin, where have you been? Apparently at CVS Health, where some consenting individuals are helping its customer experience and insights team make decisions about digital products.

CVS Health is one of the latest companies taking digital twin technology for a test drive. It currently leverages over 100,000 digital twins based on real people, which it refers to as “agentic twins.” The technology is designed to help employees make decisions about the customer experience.

Agentic twin, you say? IT Brew caught up with Sri Narasimhan, VP of enterprise customer experience and insights at CVS Health, to learn about the value of its agentic twins.

Historically, conducting a research study involved finding a pool of people, conducting focus groups, and following up—a lengthy process that could take four to six weeks. Now, Narasimhan said, CVS Health has AI agents representing customers that teams can prompt to understand how services and products are working.

But how accurately do digital twins simulate customers?BM

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CYBERSECURITY

Two credit cards racing each other to a payment terminal machine

Anna Kim, Photo: Adobe Stock

Born to flex, diamonds on the neck—there’s nothing AI agents like more than (no) checks (on their power).

Yes, yes, we know, AI agents can’t “like” anything. But as the technology is given expanded permissions to shop for users and organizations, we could see attackers manipulating agentic access.

Let me in. It comes down to permissions, said Jordan Mauriello, CTO at SHI. Major providers like Mastercard and Visa, as well as online systems like Google, have given AI agents the ability to make purchases on behalf of users. But sellers haven’t necessarily restricted what those agents can do.

“People will try to solve a very specific problem with agentic AI,” Mauriello said. “They’ll open up permissions to solve that problem and then forget to go back and lock those permissions down, and now the agent has access to things that maybe it should not have access to.”

AI agents are causing trouble through credit card access.EH

Together With Starburst

IT STRATEGY

SEC personally identifiable

Piscine/Getty Images

How much personally identifiable information (PII) do companies actually need to store?

Organizations are collecting massive amounts of data from customers, mobile devices, and more. Not all of it is stored securely: a roundup from cybersecurity company Huntress, for example, showed that billions of records containing PII are exposed from large-scale data breaches.

How does this happen? Ken Braatz, CTO for SupportNinja, told IT Brew that PII is harvested from users across browsers, search activity, dropping cookies, and more. Companies tap that information to build and sell products.

But more data means more IT infrastructure such as storage, which means a larger attack surface. This is especially true when companies choose to hold onto particularly valuable information such as payment data, social security numbers, and more.

What minimizing PII could do for an enterprise’s storage.CN

Together With KPMG Managed Services

PATCH NOTES

Picture of data with "Clean Me" written on it + bottle of cleaner in front of it, Patch Notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 3 million. That’s how many devices were hijacked by four recent botnets, according to the Department of Justice. (CyberScoop)

Quote: “So many people are starting to use these tools to outsource their cognitive and emotional functions, and in the process of doing this they’re forgetting all these basic things that they’ve learned to do.”—Artist Sam Lavigne, creator of Slow LLM, a web tool that causes AI chatbots to work extremely slowly, on the impact of LLMs on human cognition (404 Media)

Read: Reddit is figuring out how to fight back against its bot problem. (Engadget)

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