As AI use cases expand, healthcare players have been working to ensure AI readiness among staff. Health insurers are no exception.
While payer AI use has faced scrutiny, particularly over possible AI-driven denials, functionalities are much broader than what is commonly challenged. Health insurers have been identifying use cases left and right — and then preparing their employees accordingly.
Onboarding staff
Some payers, including Elevance Health and UnitedHealth Group, are offering robust training opportunities for workers.
Last year, Elevance partnered with OpenAI to expand employee education and professional development. Workers can earn AI certifications, with focuses ranging from prompt engineering to advanced AI-enabled projects.
“By expanding access to AI-focused training alongside broader learning opportunities, we are preparing our people to grow their careers while ensuring we continue to build the skills needed to lead in a dynamic business environment and deliver an enhanced healthcare experience for the people we are privileged to serve,” Ryan Craig, Elevance’s executive vice president and chief human resources officer, said in a fall news release.
Becker’s recently acquired a document outlining UnitedHealth’s AI Dojo training. The program allows self-paced learning, featuring hands-on activities, capstones, office hours and automated evaluations. While some courses the company offers are introductory, others focus on healthcare applications and building solutions through retrieval-augmented generation.
AI leaders join the C-suite
Companies are recruiting relevant executives to lead AI initiatives. UnitedHealth, SCAN Group, Alignment Healthcare and Humana have recently named these leaders. Their backgrounds run the gamut, spanning academia to the White House.
Some companies are specifically looking for leaders who embrace a cultural shift in the workplace. For example, SCAN’s first chief AI and analytics officer, Aman Bhandari, PhD, reports to Chief People and Transformation Officer Lindsay Crawley-Herbert.
“We believe that successful AI transformation is fundamentally about people,” Ms. Crawley-Herbert said in a news release. “The challenge with AI isn’t implementing the technology — it’s marrying the complexity of the technology with how the workforce adopts and uses it effectively and ethically.”
In an interview with Becker’s, Dr. Bhandari emphasized that “the people part is the hard part.”
Tracking internal adoption
In May, Bloomberg reported that UnitedHealth has been monitoring some Optum employees’ AI use, verifying the frequency of their ChatGPT and Copilot queries. Company documentation reviewed by Becker’s confirmed the company maintains a centralized dashboard reflecting usage and training progress.
In a 2022 story for The New York Times, UnitedHealth employees said the company would monitor some workers’ digital engagement, which tied to compensation.
Establishing safeguards and reckoning with AI’s future
Governance frameworks can help guide responsible AI use throughout an organization.
“We’ve set up quality and review standards early on,” Craig Kurtzweil, chief data and analytics officer for UnitedHealthcare’s commercial business, told Becker’s last year. “The main challenge is the approval processes needed to get AI projects off the ground, but we’re committed to doing the necessary work to ensure these technologies are safe and effective.”
But AI’s widespread adoption across business functions — from customer experience to claims review — can pose a lingering threat to employees. Rising medical costs have been a factor contributing to health plans’ budget pressures, and health insurers have been seeking efficiencies in their operations. Cuts have been prevalent: Several payers have already laid off employees in 2026.
“As we drive greater efficiency across our business, we have made the difficult decision to reduce roles in our workforce,” a spokesperson for The Cigna Group told Becker’s earlier this year, as the company prepared to cut roughly 2,000 jobs.
At the same time, there have been questions about how much of a role AI can practically play across healthcare. AI’s ability to assume clinical responsibilities still remains largely unclear. Several insurers have vigorously defended their commitment to maintaining a “human-in-the-loop” approach in parts of their decisionmaking, but there could be some variability with what human involvement actually looks like.
At the Becker's 5th Annual Fall Payer Issues Roundtable, taking place November 2–3 in Chicago, payer executives and healthcare leaders will come together to discuss value-based care, regulatory changes, cost management strategies and innovations shaping the future of payer-provider collaboration. Apply for complimentary registration now.
