Around $5 trillion is spent on U.S. health care each year, a system that many Americans rate poorly, and one which will confront even greater challenges in the years ahead as annual expenses continue to rise, the population ages, and clinical workforce shortages persist.
Pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems, insurers, and pharmacy benefits managers operate in a complex industry that’s earned a reputation for siloing data and badly lagging other sectors like banking and telecom when it comes to deploying new technological advancements. Greater investments in artificial intelligence are lauded as a key treatment for the health care system’s most serious problems, though most in the industry report they still lack sufficient resources and planning in AI and other digital investments.
Sandeep Dadlani, the chief digital and technology officer at insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, says he understands that the system is broken. “I empathize with everybody who has a grievance towards health care,” says Dadlani. “The system has to be fixed by many players, not just by us.”
UnitedHealth, ranked fourth on the Fortune 500, says it is seeing some big productivity gains and adoption from the company’s 1,000 AI use cases already in production. These applications, a mix of generative and traditional forms of AI, include more than 60 million lines of AI-written software code that has already been accepted by around 20,000 engineers, 65 million customer calls that were initially answered by an AI chatbot in 2024, and 18 million AI-enabled searches to help customers find a doctor that were conducted in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Another generative AI tool expected to launch later this year in the UnitedHealthcare and Optum subsidiary apps is a consumer-facing conversational bot that will help customers find a doctor, schedule appointments, or review their lab results. That tool was initially tested with UnitedHealth’s employees before it will debut externally.
“It’s a maze,” says Dadlani, of the labyrinth that customers face when dealing with health care providers, insurers, and laboratory services. “So something that helps navigate through that and provides great end-to-end access, that’s the dream.”
Dadlani spoke to Fortune in early May, before the surprise announcement that CEO Andrew Witty had resigned. Dadlani’s efforts overseeing the company’s AI evolution come as UnitedHealth, which serves more than 52 million consumers, undergoes a difficult period. In December, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered in Manhattan and in April, the company’s first financial results since the killing, UnitedHealth reported earnings that missed Wall Street expectations and cut its bottom-line target for the full year. The company is also reportedly facing a Justice Department probe for possible criminal Medicare fraud.
There is also a class-action lawsuit in the courts that alleges UnitedHealth has used AI to illegally deny claims. Dadlani refutes this. “AI is never used to deny a claim,” he says. “If a claim is not eligible to be approved, it goes up to a human agent,” who, he says, then makes the final determination.
Dadlani says around 90% of claims are auto adjudicated, the process in which software is able to manually review a claim. Of the 10% of claims that go through an extra step for review, most of the issues are clerical, meaning there are missing details or the information wasn’t input into the system properly. After that manual review, Dadlani says 98% of claims are approved and for the remaining 2%, denials tend to be attributed to either ineligible benefits or because of clinical or medical safety determinations.
Later this year, Dadlani says he intends to launch new AI products that will make auto approval for claims even higher. “We are already seeing in our early experimentation that AI can help fill some of the missing information for these claims,” he says.
UnitedHealth’s vast AI portfolio is reviewed on a monthly basis by every business unit. On a quarterly basis, chief information officers come together to monitor how AI is being used across the enterprise. The company has also established a responsible AI board that is a mix of internal and external technologists, clinicians, legal experts, and others who review hundreds of AI use cases each month before authorizing what can go into production.
Dadlani says UnitedHealth monitors AI use cases for safety, bias, fairness, and legal compliance. He stresses that AI is not being used to perform a clinical diagnosis. “We don’t see AI replacing doctors or clinicians,” he says. “We want AI to be a tool.”
To bring the workforce along, UnitedHealth launched an advanced AI learning course in early March that saw more than 10,000 enrollees. The company has also set up a dedicated platform, called United AI Studio, that allows employees to securely access the large language models offered by large AI hyperscalers, as well as the small language models that UnitedHealth developed on its own based on proprietary datasets.
The company also had about half-a-dozen use cases in production based on agentic AI, which is designed to more autonomously complete complex tasks—ideally with limited or no human supervision. Most of the agentic AI use cases have been for repetitive, administrative tasks. The technology will need to mature more before it expands to other parts of the business.
“We will be very cautious when we get into more clinical use cases and the use of agents,” says Dadlani.
John Kell
Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.
NEWS PACKETS
Airbus reportedly downgrades CTO title in executive shakeup. Airbus has appointed Remi Maillard, the European plane maker’s top executive in South Asia to be its next head of technology, a key design and engineering appointment as Airbus moves forward with the years-long development of a new jet line that will succeed the best-selling A320neo jetliner. Maillard will oversee research and technology, in a role that also combines the leadership of engineering at the core commercial airlines business. Maillard, who is succeeding Chief Technology Officer Sabine Klauke, will no longer have that title, nor serve on the company’s main executive committee, as reported by Reuters. There’s conflicting intel on why that is: one source told Reuters the change reflected the weight that’s being given to the next airplane project, but another says that the technology function has been downgraded.
Salesforce pays $8 billion for Informatica. After acquisition talks fell through in 2024 between software providers Salesforce and Informatica, a deal was struck by the companies on Tuesday, a competitive process that saw Salesforce beat out multiple rivals, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg notes that since the companies first got to talking, Informatica’s stock had slid as much as 59%, making the takeover terms more appealing for Salesforce, which competes against Informatica with the company’s MuleSoft platform. That overlap may attract regulatory scrutiny and also points to a trend of consolidation in the software-as-a-service industry. The Journal, meanwhile, reports the deal is the largest for Salesforce since it paid $28 billion to buy workplace-collaboration software provider Slack in 2021.
Anthropic unveils a new generation of AI models. The Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic unveiled a new coding model, called Claude Opus 4, which the AI hyperscaler says can code autonomously for nearly seven consecutive hours after being deployed on a complex project. Anthropic told Fortune that some of the new capabilities of Claude Opus 4 include following instructions more precisely and improvement in its “memory” capabilities. Another frontier model that Anthropic launched last week at a developer conference was the Claude Sonnet 4 and both new releases highlight the fierce competition among large AI companies—including OpenAI, Google, and Meta—to build and frequently release more advanced AI models, especially those that can assist with software coding, where CIOs have reported productivity lifts of well over 20%.
Data center outage stings X. Over the weekend, X’s engineering team acknowledged that some users of the social media platform had issues logging in or delays in notifications and premium features, blaming the issues on a data center outage. The website first began to experience issues on Saturday and over the course of a few days, even as it got back online, there were some lingering performance issues for some users. Though X didn’t share specifics on what led to the long outage, Engadget reports that the timing lined up with a reported fire at an X data center in Oregon. X’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, meanwhile has said that the issues at X highlight his view that “major improvements need to be made” and he reiterated his recent commitment to less time on politics and more time focused on running his companies, including electric vehicle maker Tesla and xAI, the AI company which merged with X earlier this year.
ADOPTION CURVE
Banks remain committed to spending more on AI and other technologies. Coming off a solid first quarter when many big banks reported resilient earnings results due to strong consumer spending, many economic indicators have shown that consumer confidence is slipping and have been predicting that spending will slow. That same spending restraint hasn’t yet been embraced by the banks themselves, which are accelerating their investments in technology, according to a new study of 424 business and technology leaders by Hanover Research, conducted on behalf of Swiss financial services software company Temenos.
When asked what was on the top of their strategic agendas for 2025, the most popular response (46%) said they would invest in technology to improve the customer experience. That easily bested “offering new financial products/services” at 35% and the 34% that said reducing operating costs or modernizing their core banking software systems. The survey also found that around three quarters of global banks plan to boost their investments to improve system integration and data analytics.
When leveraging generative AI, banks are most focused on improving the customer experience (64%). They are also investing in generative AI to improve the customer support function and bolster internal employee productivity, with less ubiquitous use cases dedicated to identifying fraud and improving regulatory compliance. The survey also found that so far, only 11% of banks report they have fully implemented generative AI today, though 43% report they are in the process of doing so.
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Vibrant Emotional Health is seeking a CTO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $261K-$300K/year.
- Arch Insurance Group is seeking a CTO, based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Posted salary range: $210K-$283.5K/year.
- Citi is seeking a digital platforms data governance lead, SVP, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $176.7K-$265.1K/year.
- Brooklinen is seeking a director of technology, based in Brooklyn, New York. Posted salary range: $152K-$200K/year.
Hired:
- Daimler Truck has appointed Raghavendra Vaidya as CIO, where he will oversee the German-based commercial vehicle manufacturer’s IT department and succeed Marcus Claesson, who has decided to leave the company. Previously, Vaidya was responsible for all IT operations in India for Daimler Truck. He also previously held leadership positions at Mercedes-Benz and General Electric.
- Simmons Bank appointed David Kennedy as EVP and CTO, overseeing technology capabilities for all areas of the Arkansas-based regional bank. Prior to joining Simmons, Kennedy served as CIO at another regional bank, Southeastern. He also previously served as CTO of Stone Energy, a Louisiana-based oil-and-gas company that fell into bankruptcy in 2016.
- Focus Financial named Mark Israel as CTO, joining the wealth management company to oversee the enterprise-wide technology strategy across key areas including infrastructure, data and AI, and cybersecurity. Israel most recently served as EVP for technology and transformation at money management firm Fisher Investments and was previously a partner at accounting giant PwC.
- Nebraska Public Media appointed Duane Smith as CTO, joining the statewide public media network after most recently serving as CTO at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Smith also spent more than 15 years of his career at WJCT Public Media in Jacksonville, Florida, where he served as director of technology.
- Concentric AI announced the appointment of Lane Sullivan as chief information security and strategy officer, overseeing the data security startup’s cybersecurity program. Sullivan most recently served as CISO at managed health care company Magellan Health, which was acquired by Centene in 2022.
- Icims named Dipak Pandya as CTO, where he will steer the recruiting software provider’s engineering team. Pandya previously served as head of product and technology at Nuorder, an e-commerce company that facilitates wholesale buying and selling. Pandya also previously served as chief product officer at software developer EagleView and CTO at web archiving services provider Smarsh.