“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.