For nearly 500,000 workers fedexa massive AI journey is underway.
The logistics giant is in the midst of a broader AI literacy initiative to increase employee knowledge, increase efficiency, and prepare employees for advancement. Launched in early December in partnership with a technology consulting company Accenturea company-wide education program also aims to spark innovation from employees at all levels.
FedEx and its competitors in the shipping sector face a number of operational constraints, from tariffs and other policy changes to cost-cutting efforts that have led to recent FedEx factory closures and job cuts from Kansas to France. Rival UPS recently announced 30,000 job cuts, on top of the 48,000 it had implemented in 2025. FedEx’s management has been eager to adapt to this new world with emerging technologies at the forefront, and recent earnings, including this week’s latest report, have met with investor approval, and the stock is up nearly 50% over the past year.
“The more we invest in people who take a leading role in the learning process, the better off they are, the better off we are, and the better off the industry as a whole will be,” said Vishal Talwar, executive vice president and chief data and information officer at FedEx, who also runs DataWorks, the company’s data logistics solution.
According to the company’s most recent annual report, it employs 440,000 people worldwide.
FedEx continues to introduce new AI capabilities across all aspects of the organization, including advanced digital tracking and returns capabilities for shippers announced in early February. FedEx’s AI learning initiatives include personalized, role-based training for employees designed to keep pace with technology evolution. “This is a living curriculum that is updated monthly and quarterly, and that’s what we’re doing with Accenture,” Talwar said. “This was one of the key characteristics we looked for to ensure we were designing something that would remain relevant in the future.”
Tailor-made training is delivered through Accenture’s LearnVantage platform, using live, interactive training sessions that employees can take during work hours, back-office hours, or any other time. Talwar said the company is remaining flexible to see what works best for its employees.
In addition to individual sessions, employees are encouraged to create and participate in what Talwar calls communities of practice. For example, data scientists across the company recently launched their own data science community of practice to collaboratively ideate use cases. Hackathons are also common in the industry, where companies organize events to collaborate and compete to discover new technology developments and use cases.
Less common is the fact that FedEx launched an AI literacy initiative with the full buy-in of its executives, all of whom took two days off to head to Silicon Valley and conduct speed-dating-like rounds to ensure they partnered with the companies that were the best fit for their efforts. “I’ve never seen an entire executive team in an organization take two days off just to learn,” said Talwar, who joined FedEx in August but previously worked at IBM, Dell and Accenture. “The humility that we have to learn cannot be built by just starting a program alone. So when I say it’s a collective experience for the entire organization, I really mean it.”
Although the program is still in its early stages, Talwar is already seeing results starting to be seen. For example, frontline workers are beginning to seek corporate roles to advance their careers at higher rates. And as more people complete the modules, FedEx is measuring what it calls AIQ (AI Quotient), but Talwar said it’s not over-measuring.
“We measure progress around AI, not necessarily just success, because it’s very difficult to say that this success is solely due to AI,” he said. “In my opinion, AI needs to be seamlessly integrated into everything we do.”
Lessons from Microsoft’s technology education in the 1990s
According to Accenture’s 2026 Pulse of Change report, less than one-third (28%) of organizations have incorporated continuous AI learning.
“The biggest barrier to successful AI adoption is current inertia,” said Taylor Bradley, vice president of talent strategy and success at Turing, an AI superintelligence training company.
Just as Microsoft included Solitaire in all Windows operating systems starting in 1990 as a way to teach users how to use the mouse’s drag-and-drop system, Turing operates on a tenet of engaging team members in creative and strategic ways to take advantage of large-scale language models (LLMs) and other emerging technologies, Bradley said. For example, during an offsite HR event, the HR team built a lifecycle management system from scratch in a few hours, tested the concept with dummy data in a sandbox environment, and eventually scaled it into a production-grade talent automation system. This saved us approximately 2,000 hours of work while still in beta mode.
Sunita Verma, CTO of AI contract management platform Ironclad and former leader at Character.AI and Google, recently ran a “20 Days of AI Learning” campaign to encourage employees to get started with guidelines in place. “When people feel empowered to learn, test, and apply AI in meaningful ways, it accelerates AI adoption and leads to better and more responsible outcomes,” Verma said.
Other companies similar in size to FedEx are also pursuing AI literacy initiatives, like shipping competitor DHL Express. DHL Express continues to drive an AI-powered career marketplace to help existing employees seek opportunities within the company and determine what they need to learn to get there. Citigroup’s internal AI Champions and Accelerators program involves only a fraction of its hundreds of thousands of employees, but it provides a starting point for ripple effects through technology evangelism.
Returning to FedEx, there is no end in sight to the ongoing efforts across the organization, and this is perhaps the most distinguishing feature.
“Everyone in our business deals with technology, whether it’s the drivers who do pickups and deliveries or the customs organizations who handle customs,” Talwar said. “They handle technology differently, and each area can be further enhanced with AI. We decided to make sure that we are inclusive in offering this program and training to everyone, and more importantly, meet the training program at a time that is beneficial and contextual to the individual,” he said.
