For the close to half-a-million workers at FedEx, a major AI journey is underway.
The logistics giant is in the midst of a widespread AI literacy initiative that it says will make employees more knowledgeable, efficient and promotion-ready. Launched in early December in partnership with tech consulting firm Accenture, the enterprise-wide education program is also meant to spark innovation from employees at all levels.
FedEx and its competitors in the shipping sector face many business constraints, from tariffs and other policy changes to cost-cutting initiatives that resulted in recent FedEx plant closures and layoffs in places from Kansas to France. Rival UPS recently announced 30,000 layoffs to add to the 48,000 it conducted in 2025. FedEx leadership is keen on adapting to this new world with emerging technology at the forefront, and its recent earnings, including its latest report this week, have met with approval from investors, with shares up close to 50% over the past year.
“The more we invest in our talent being on the leading aspect of that learning journey, the better off they will be, the better off we will be, and the better off the broader industry is going to be,” said Vishal Talwar, executive vice president and chief data and information officer at FedEx who also runs the company’s data logistics solution Dataworks.
According to the company’s most recent annual report, it has 440,000 workers globally.
FedEx continues to introduce new AI capabilities from every end of the organization, like advanced digital tracking and returns capabilities for shippers, announced in early February. The AI learning initiative at FedEx includes personalized, role-based training for employees designed to evolve as the technology does. “This is a living curriculum that will continue to refresh itself every month, every quarter, and we have that in our engagement with Accenture,” Talwar said. “It was one of the key attributes that we asked for to make sure we designed for something that remains future-relevant.”
The bespoke training operates through Accenture’s LearnVantage platform and uses interactive live training sessions, which employees can do during work hours, back-office hours or any other time. Talwar said the company remains flexible as they figure out what works best for its people.
In addition to individual sessions, employees are encouraged to create and take part in what Talwar calls communities of practice. For example, data scientists across the company recently kicked off their own data science community of practice to collectively ideate on use cases. There are also hackathons, common among the industry, where a company puts on an event to collaboratively compete to discover new technological developments and use cases.
Less common is the fact that FedEx began the AI literacy initiative with a full buy-in from the C-suite, with every executive taking two days off to head to Silicon Valley and conduct a speed dating round of sorts, ensuring they partnered with the most compatible company for their efforts. “I have never seen an organization’s full C-suite take off for a two-day to just learn,” said Talwar, who has been with FedEx since August but previously worked at IBM, Dell and Accenture. “That humility that we have to learn, you can’t build it with just launching a program in isolation. So I truly mean it when I say the whole organization is having a joint experience.”
While the program is still in its infancy, Talwar is already seeing the effects pan out. Frontline workers are beginning to seek corporate roles to advance their careers at a higher rate, for instance. And even though FedEx is measuring something it calls AIQ (the AI quotient) as more people complete modules, Talwar said they’re not over-measuring.
“We are measuring progress around AI, not necessarily just success, because it’s going to be very difficult to say this success is only attributed to AI,” he said. “AI, in my view, needs to be seamlessly embedded in everything that we do.”
1990s lesson from Microsoft on tech education
Less than a third (28%) of organizations have embedded continuous AI learning, according to Accenture’s 2026 Pulse of Change report.
Taylor Bradley, vice president of talent strategy and success at AI superintelligence training company Turing, said that the “greatest barrier to successful AI adoption is the inertia of the status quo.”
Much like Microsoft included Solitaire on all Windows operating systems beginning in 1990 as a way to teach users how to use a mouse drag-and-drop system, Bradley said Turing operates on the dogma of engaging team members with creative and strategic ways to leverage large language models (LLMs) and other emerging technology. For example, during an offsite human resources event, the HR team built a lifecycle management system from scratch in a few hours, testing the concept with dummy data in a sandbox environment and ultimately scaling it to a production-grade talent automation system that saved roughly 2,000 labor hours while still in beta mode.
Sunita Verma, CTO of AI contract management platform Ironclad and a former leader at Character.AI and Google, recently conducted a “20 days of AI learning” campaign to inspire employees to get started with guidelines in place. “When people feel empowered to learn, test and apply AI in meaningful ways, it accelerates adoption and leads to better, more responsible outcomes,” said Verma.
Other enterprises closer in scale to FedEx are also pursuing AI literacy initiatives, like shipping competitor DHL Express, which continues to advance its AI-powered career marketplace for existing employees to seek in-house opportunities and determine what they need to learn to get there. Citigroup’s internal AI Champions and Accelerators program involves just a small percentage of its hundreds of thousands of employees, but provides a ripple effect starting point via tech evangelism.
Back at FedEx, the organization-wide, ongoing initiative has no end in sight, which is perhaps its most stand-out feature.
“In our business, whether it’s a driver that’s doing pickup and delivery or it’s our clearance organization that’s dealing with customs, everybody is dealing with technology,” Talwar said. “They deal with technology differently, and each one of those areas can be amplified further with AI. We decided to make sure that we were comprehensive in providing this program and training for everyone, and more importantly, we were meeting the training program at the point on where it’s helpful and contextual for the individual,” he said.
