UnitedHealth Group Inc. is tracking how often some employees use artificial intelligence tools as part of a push to embed the technology throughout its operations, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company is monitoring whether some workers in its Optum services division perform at least one query a day with programs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal operations.
UnitedHealth is investing in AI “to fundamentally transform how we organize, operate, and work as a company moving forward,” a spokesperson said. The company has implemented more than one thousand AI use cases and boosted training on the technology for employees and external customers, the spokesperson said.
A company document on AI training reviewed by Bloomberg described an engagement dashboard to track usage, training progress and “identify adoption gaps.” It also said the company’s AI applications had avoided the need for more than 15 million calls, adjudicated hundreds of millions of claims, and contributed more than 150 million lines of code. The document also included positive feedback from people who had been through the training, called AI Dojo.
AI is central to UnitedHealth’s plan to rebuild confidence on Wall Street after its profits collapsed last year. The healthcare conglomerate has touted AI’s potential to improve the fragmented U.S. healthcare system. Last year, the company started testing a system called Optum Real that’s intended to speed up how medical claims are processed.