UnitedHealth’s Next Big Business Line? It Could Be AI Tools and Services
UnitedHealth Group Inc. will invest nearly $1.5 billion this year in work involving artificial intelligence, with many of those projects aiming to be sold as products for customers in addition to upgrading internal processes and lifting the healthcare titan’s productivity.
Speaking recently to analysts and investors, executives of Minneapolis-based United outlined the scope of some of the services developed already developed and housed in the company’s Optum Insight subsidiary as well as their hopes for future growth. Among the products already in the market are Optum Real, which Optum CEO Pat Conway said can help payers and providers cut three-quarters of their manual costs on tasks such as claim adjudication and coverage validation.
Also up and running is Optum AI, a consulting firm that is pitching advice and guidance on how healthcare companies can embed AI in their own systems and/or lean from some of the more than 1,000 use cases that have Optum teams have worked on.
For CEO Stephen Hemsley and his team, the potential to generate sizable returns is there given United’s massive scale. And that includes the opportunity to market other services and grow OptumInsight’s top and bottom lines. On United’s first-quarter earnings conference call April 21, Hemsley called the ambitious AI push “kind of uncharted territory” because it has such large potential.
But Hemsley also said it’s difficult to attach firm dollar figures to the possible growth that lies ahead. Really gaining traction outside United proper, he added, is likely a story for “later into 2026 and into 2027.”
“Few, if any, large organizations have ever done things like this at this scale, so we match our desire for speed with prudence and humility,” Hemsley said.
On the conference call, Chief Digital & Technology Officer Sandeep Dadlani offered a wide-ranging overview of United’s AI priorities that included several data points. Here, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, are his words:
As we said earlier, we are spending about $1.5 billion in AI across UnitedHealth Group. Think about it this way, one-third of this is explicitly invested into software products and platform, accelerating Optum Insight's transition of business models into an AI-first software and services firm. The remaining two-thirds is spent across signature end-to-end processes and functions across UnitedHealth Group.
Let me give you some examples: Areas like consumer member experience. You must have noticed we just launched Avery, a generative AI chatbot answering member questions for UnitedHealthcare, which will be expanded to over 20 million members by the year-end. Another example is in administrative simplification; Tim [Noel, CEO of UnitedHealthcare,] spoke about prior [authorization] and the automation in UHC as well as Optum Health and Optum Rx.
A third area is clinical workflows. For example, ambient [listening] rollout for physicians and nurses in Optum Health and then summarization capabilities for nurses and clinical reviews. And then functions like HR, finance, marketing—fundamentally reimagining these processes and areas.
In the end, all internal investment in AI use cases is routed through Optum Insight and has the potential to be commercialized outside of UHG. And we expect a return, conservatively, of 2:1 on these programs over the next few years—many of them paying back within the next 12 to 18 months.
Optum Insight AI-first products are already seeing great external traction. For example, this quarter, we launched digital prior auth in keeping with the enterprise priority on prior auths. We already have a couple of payer clients and provider clients using them [and] another 50 clients in the pipeline. And the early results are that prior auths submitted through our software have shown a 96 percent approval rate on first submissions.
Optum Real, an AI-first platform launched a couple of quarters ago, now has half a billion transactions year-to-date and expects to close the year at over 2.5 billion transactions. And Optum AI, our new AI consulting arm, has already signed its first few contracts, helping companies like LabCorp through their operational AI initiatives. So that should give you a good sense of AI inside and outside the company.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.