Shobhit Varshney has been named chief AI officer at Optum.
Mr. Varshney said July 16 on LinkedIn that he will focus on AI strategy, platform and delivery. He will oversee the enterprise AI platform, including United AI Studio, AI and data science teams, and governance policies.
He joins from Citi, where he was global head of AI from August 2025 to July 2026. Before that, he spent more than 13 years at IBM, most recently as head of data and AI and as a vice president and senior partner at IBM Consulting, where he led the firm’s data, AI and automation business across the US, Canada and Latin America.
“I have spent my career building and scaling AI across the world’s largest enterprises, and I strongly believe the ultimate test of a technology as consequential as AI is whether it meaningfully improves humanity’s health and wellbeing,” Mr. Varshney wrote
The appointment comes just days after Optum said it would partner with Anthropic and leverage Claude to reduce administrative burdens. The company has not offered more information about specific use cases or the timeline for deployment.
UnitedHealth more broadly has been investing heavily in AI, saying it would deploy $3 billion toward the technology this year and next. Recently, Optum has rolled out a series of AI-enabled products aimed at other healthcare organizations for tasks like prior authorization, claims processing, and hospital operating room scheduling.
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