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Joyner, who heads CVS’s pharmacy-benefit business, will succeed Karen Lynch

CVS Health CVS -2.08%decrease; red down pointing triangle is naming longtime executive David Joyner as its new chief, succeeding Karen Lynch at the helm of the struggling healthcare giant.

Joyner has been president of CVS Caremark, the company’s pharmacy-benefit manager, as well as an executive vice president of CVS. He is set to take over as president and chief executive on Friday.

Roger Farah, chairman of CVS’s board of directors, will also become executive chair.

CVS is making the changes after repeatedly cutting its forecasts for this year’s financial performance, moves that led to a 19% decline in its share price this year, a push for changes by a major hedge fund, and a board review of strategy that included the option of breaking up the company.

CVS is now planning to announce third-quarter results that will fall short of Wall Street expectations and to back away from its most recent full-year earnings projection for 2024, issued in August. A new downgrade would represent the fourth since the company’s investor day in December 2023.

Joyner and Farah said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that CVS will now move forward intact.

“We believe that we have a really important part to play in terms of simplifying and delivering a better healthcare experience for this country,” Joyner said. CVS’s assembled assets will allow it “to actually deliver on the promises that we’ve made, and now it’s all about execution.”

Joyner will face a difficult task. Not only must he turn around CVS’s Aetna health-insurance business, but he must also contend with Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of pharmacy benefit giants including Caremark. CVS also faces longstanding challenges in the retail pharmacy business.

Best known for its namesake pharmacies, CVS is one of the biggest healthcare companies in the U.S. Last year, it notched about $358 billion in revenue.

In addition to filling prescriptions at its drugstores, CVS furnishes health insurance through Aetna, treats patients at its senior-focused Oak Street clinics, and pays for drugs through its Caremark unit.

The company combined the disparate functions with the promise that it would smooth patients’ experiences, improve their healthcare and bring down costs.

But CVS has fallen short of its original goals for growth and transformation.

Especially problematic has been the company’s recent bet on Medicare health-insurance coverage. CVS’s Aetna expanded enrollment in its Medicare plans just as medical costs were rising and the federal government was changing rules around certain industry billing practices.

Aetna’s Medicare woes have been at the heart of CVS’s financial difficulties this year, including the expected issues with the third-quarter earnings. Other insurers have recently reported similar problems.

Joyner said he would focus closely on the performance of Aetna. He pointed to recently announced improvements in the insurer’s Medicare quality ratings, as well as efforts by CVS to roll out new payment models for its retail pharmacy and pharmacy-benefit businesses.

“The overall company performance is disappointing,” Farah said. “As the year began to unfold and we struggled to deliver on our one-year and three-year commitments, we really just came to the conclusion that it was time for a change.”

Joyner, 60, has worked at CVS or predecessor companies nearly his entire career, including an early stint at Aetna and then at Caremark before CVS acquired the pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM, in 2007.

After the combination, Joyner worked on the integration of Caremark and CVS, which he said helped equip him to help bring together CVS’s current units. He retired from CVS in 2019, returning last year to take over leadership of the PBM.

The board chose Joyner partly because his history at the company meant he could start having an impact immediately, Farah said. “It would be very difficult for an outside executive to have the expertise in all phases of health care,” he said.

Farah said the board voted unanimously for the management shift, though he said it was a difficult decision.

Lynch, 62, is a longtime managed-care executive who ran Aetna before becoming CEO of CVS in 2021. She helped preside over the company’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and wrote a book on leadership.

Under her watch, CVS spent $10.6 billion on the Oak Street clinics business and an additional $8 billion on home-visits firm Signify Health, which focuses on Medicare.

CVS now expects its third-quarter earnings, set to be formally unveiled Nov. 6, to be in the range of 3 to 8 cents a share, or between $1.05 and $1.10 a share on an adjusted basis. Analysts had expected adjusted earnings per share of $1.69, according to FactSet.

The nonadjusted results will include a charge related to store closures and some cost-cutting moves the company is making. The results will also incorporate a charge to record premium deficiency reserves.

CVS will also report that medical costs are still running higher than expected, an issue that has come up in other insurers’ recent reports. Aetna’s medical loss ratio, or the share of premiums spent on healthcare costs, will be around 95.2%, compared with analysts’ expected 91.1%.

Créativité et intelligence artificielle : «Pourquoi il faut (re)lire Marguerite Yourcenar»

FIGAROVOX/CHRONIQUE - Dans Paradoxe de l'écrivain, publié en 1983, Marguerite Yourcenar s’interrogeait sur la place de la créativité humaine dans le roman. Un livre plus que jamais d’actualité à l’heure de l’essor des intelligences artificielles génératives, explique notre chroniqueuse Aurélie Jean.

Aurélie Jean est docteur en sciences et entrepreneuse. Elle a notamment publié Les algorithmes font-ils la loi ? (L'Observatoire, 2022) et coécrit Résistance 2050 (L'Observatoire, 2023). Dernier livre paru : Le code a changé. Amour et sexualité au temps des algorithmes, aux éditions de l'Observatoire.

«Ils sont étrangement uniques car ils ont su tirer étrangement parti des circonstances et des faits et des émotions qui avaient été les leurs. Et c'est ce qui fait qu'ils sont reconnaissables.» Ces mots de l'écrivaine Marguerite Yourcenar résonnent chez quiconque a déjà créé dans sa vie… c’est-à-dire nous tous ! Et oui ! Même enfant on crée à travers un dessin, une maison faite en lego ou en pâte à modeler, ou encore une histoire entièrement imaginée dans une mise en scène qui incluent des dinosaures, des poupées, des voitures ou encore des peluches.

En pratique, quand on crée, on fait appel à ce qu'on nomme des ressorts et une ou plusieurs intentions. Les ressorts caractérisent le point de départ de l'acte de créer qui représente celui qui crée c’est-à-dire son histoire, et ses expériences. Les intentions caractérisant ce vers quoi on va, à savoir la raison concrète de l'acte de créer comme faire passer un message, rendre les choses belles, ou encore s'amuser. Peu importe la nature des ressorts et des intentions, leur existence est nécessaire à la création qui est alors le propre de l'être humain qui, contrairement à la machine (et donc à l'IA), maîtrise toutes les intelligences. En effet, la machine ne maîtrise que (le résultat de) l'intelligence analytique alors que nous - êtres humains - maîtrisons les intelligences émotionnelle, créative et pratique.

Certains aimeraient nous faire croire que l'humain deviendrait obsolète face à la machine toujours plus efficace, mais c'est oublier de préciser que cette même machine est déjà plus intelligente que nous analytiquement (et c'est tant mieux !). En revanche, elle ne maîtrisera jamais les autres composantes de l'intelligence bien humaine. En cela, une IA générative n'écrit pas ou ne crée pas un texte mais le génère comme son nom l'indique… et les écrivains le savent bien.

La pensée de Marguerite Yourcenar est intéressante car elle soutient d'une certaine manière l'idée que le style d'un auteur ne peut en aucun cas être utilisé sans en évaluer l'usage au sein d'un modèle d'IA. Le cas contraire, le plagiat en est la conséquence évidente. En pratique, une IA générative comme ChatGPT, entraînée sur un jeu de textes pantagruéliques, fabrique ce qu'on nomme des corrélations et des analogies statistiques sur ces textes en détectant des signaux faibles et forts, pour en retour générer un texte en réponse à une requête. À ceux qui affirment qu'une IA générative est capable d'écrire du Proust ou du Baudelaire, on leur répondra que ce n'est pas comprendre le besoin d'intentions et de ressorts chez celui ou celle qui écrit et qui n'existent aucunement chez la machine. Mais aussi qu'un style bien identifiable doit pouvoir être valorisé au sein des bases de données utilisées pour construire ces IAs génératives afin d'écarter le risque de plagiat, et la violence qui va avec. On comprend alors les discussions actuellement en cours où les écrivains, les scénaristes ou encore les journalistes revendiquent leur droit de protéger leurs créations… et leur style !

La pensée de Marguerite Yourcenar, il y a presque quarante ans, nous démontre également qu'il faut toujours contextualiser les grandes questions et préoccupations de notre époque dans les temps longs… On y trouve souvent des réponses qui nous éclairent, des interrogations qui nous bousculent ou encore des espérances qui nous font vivre. Marguerite Yourcenar avait raison, et on lui dit merci.

It’s been hard to browse tech headlines this week and not read something about billions of dollars being poured into data centers.

The world’s largest asset manager, Blackstone Group, reportedly plans to invest $8.2 billion to develop data centers in Spain. Energy and data center company Crusoe Energy Systems announced it raised $3.4 billion dollars in debt financing — and reportedly will raise an additional equity investment led by Founders Fund — for a data center in Texas that will be used for OpenAI. And pension fund AustralianSuper announced it has committed $1.5 billion to become a minority owner in DataBank, a provider of enterprise-class data centers across North America.

Of course, all of that is just this week and doesn’t even touch on the fact that Amazon plans to invest $100 billion in AI data centers in the next decade, nor the planned OpenAI and Microsoft joint data center project that is expected to cost $100 billion.

That heightened level of investment seems to be starting to bubble up to the startup realm. So far this year, $1.3 billion has been invested in database-related startups — those that provide connectivity, efficiency or other needed tools/solutions for the centers — per Crunchbase data.

The raises by data center-related startups this year already nearly matches the total raised in 2023 and could even reach the nearly $1.9 billion similar startups received in 2022 if the last two-and-a-half months of the year are strong.

Of course, this week helped out a lot, with Lightmatter locking up a $400 million Series D led by new investor T. Rowe Price at a $4.4 billion valuation. The startup uses light to link chips together and to do calculations for the deep learning necessary for AI.

The week also saw Xscape Photonics — a startup also using photonics technology to address the energy, performance and scalability challenges of AI data centers — raise a $44 million Series A led by IAG Capital Partners and with investment from the likes of Cisco Investments and Nvidia.

It seems like it should only be a matter of time before even more rounds into similar data center-related startups are announced as Big Tech pours billions into the new data centers needed to keep the promise of AI alive. Those centers will need new innovation — especially when it comes to tackling the energy consumption problem — and it is likely Big Tech and VCs will be there to provide the cash necessary to nurture those new technologies.