When you think of legendary marathoner Des Linden, the images that come to mind might be her battling through rain and wind to win the 2018 Boston Marathon or wearing the stars and stripes representing Team USA in one of her two Olympic marathons. What you may not picture are streams of data, artificial intelligence, and a digital replica of her heart.
Yet, that is exactly where Des’s story and the future of the insurance industry intersect, as I’ll share in a TCS-sponsored session at ITC Vegas, the world’s largest annual conference for the insurance industry, focusing on technology and innovation.
Join us October 14 when I’ll sit down with Des to discuss her professional running career, her transition to ultramarathons, and trail running, her role in the TCS Future Athlete Project, and what her journey can teach us about the future of insurance.
However, before we embark on our journey to the future, let’s see where it all began.
In 2023, TCS partnered with Des on its Digital Twin Heart project, an initiative that created the first-ever digital heart of a long-distance runner. The goal was to analyze how her cardiovascular system responded to training loads, recovery cycles, and stress, and to use those insights to optimize her performance and longevity.
For Des, it was a chance to see her body in a completely new way, turning years of experience and intuition into measurable and predictive insights. For TCS, it was the beginning of something bigger: the Future Athlete Project, which applies Digital Twin technology and AI-powered modeling to a group of more than 20 elite and amateur athletes globally, all training for upcoming TCS-sponsored marathons.
While the Future Athlete Project provides an ideal proving ground and showcase for enhancing athletic performance, TCS’ long-term vision is to utilize the program to identify ways it can improve the health and wellness of society at large. Measuring not just what’s going inside a person’s body today but anticipating what might happen tomorrow and intervening before problems arise.
That idea should sound familiar to insurance leaders. For decades, insurance has been largely reactive—assessing claims, covering losses, and pricing policies based on historical data. But just as athletes can no longer rely solely on post-race analysis, insurers can no longer afford to operate by looking in the rearview mirror.
AI, connected devices, and continuous data collection are transforming insurance into a forward-looking industry. For example:
The lesson from the Future Athlete Project is clear: with the right data, the focus shifts from recovery to prevention, from paying for loss to building resilience.
Des Linden’s career has been defined by adaptability. She adjusted her training at a pivotal time in her career, she thrived in the chaos of Boston’s brutal weather in 2018, and now she’s reinventing herself as a professional ultramarathoner and and trail runner.
Insurance companies face similar challenges. Climate change, cyber risks, shifting demographics, and new regulatory environments demand the same constant adaptation.
At ITC Vegas, I’ll discuss with Des how she has built adaptability into her athletic and entrepreneurial life and how that mindset connects to the Perpetually Adaptive Enterprise vision that TCS champions for the insurance industry.
If you’re passionate about driving innovation in insurance, don’t miss this conversation. Just as the Future Athlete Project is reimagining performance in sports, the insurance industry has the opportunity to reimagine risk, resilience, and trust in what is shaping up to be the most transformative time in history.