Staged across sleek suburban Minneapolis campuses, the day felt closer to a Silicon Valley product keynote than an insurer’s media event, complete with live software demos, an AI assistant making medical appointments, and a walk-through of the company’s intelligence center it uses to triage member and patient issues across the country.
Across nearly every session, UnitedHealth presented itself as a technology and data company, one that can build tools for its tens of millions of members, patients, and customers – and also sell solutions to the rest of the industry. Coming about two years after the Change Healthcare cyberattack laid bare how much of the nation’s claims plumbing already runs through Optum, the ambition is notable.
None of this, of course, addresses the sprawling number of controversies UnitedHealth and the wider payer industry continue to face, with federal lawsuits and a criminal investigation ongoing over its Medicare Advantage practices, the vertical integration of nearly every part of the healthcare industry under one roof, how AI is already impacting the cost of care, and whether true value-based risk models can work outside of select markets.
Six more themes that stood out:
1. The company is trying to turn the page on its hardest stretch
UnitedHealth is still navigating what was arguably the worst period in its history. In late 2024, the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk led to a surge of public anger directed toward the company and health insurers broadly. Shortly after, financial turmoil took hold across the company’s businesses as medical costs climbed, spurring what returned CEO Stephen Hemsley described as a new tone of “change and reform” for the organization.
During the June event, UnitedHealthcare COO Mike Baker was unusually direct about the period and the personal impact that followed.
“You pause to soul-search a little bit and ask yourself, my goodness, am I missing something? Are we really part of the problem here, not part of the answer to the issues that exist in the American health system?” he said. “What I love about this era in our company is that we are in a line of work today where a real need that exists in the system matches the scale and capabilities of an enterprise like this, which matches the will and ambition and gumption to make change,” he added.
Mr. Baker described Mr. Thompson, who he referred to as “BT,” as a friend and mentor whose work was “turned into a caricature of sorts,” and acknowledged the company is still navigating the aftermath.
The remarks come as Luigi Mangione, the 28-year-old man charged in the killing, continues to make headlines and awaits a state trial scheduled for later this fall.
2. A real-time data command center
Since early 2024, UnitedHealthcare has been operating a command center it calls COVE, or Consumer Operations Vitals and Experience. The center features a wall of more than 30 live screens that tracks member experience in close to real time. Senior director Liv Murphy said the operation covers nearly all 50 million members and expects to field 78 million calls and 200 million digital interactions this year alone. It scans click streams, survey comments, call transcripts, Medicare complaints and claims data for early signs of frustration, using AI to transcribe and rescan calls daily and to refresh the entire member base every 24 hours for people who may be in distress. The team of around two dozen employees in front of the screens can then deploy company resources toward resolving surfaced issues.
One screen tracks social media mentions of the company across platforms such as TikTok and Facebook using keywords to catch problems before they reach the call center. Mr. Baker noted that some of what trends there relates to the Mangione case, and said the technology helps separate “news unrelated to the work” from signals the team needs to act on.
The center’s usefulness has shown up in situations like a May systems outage at CMS that delayed the processing of Medicare enrollment applications for UnitedHealthcare and other payers, leaving members with a June 1 coverage start date without ID cards or confirmation their plans were active. The company said COVE caught the spike in member calls, coordinated with CMS to resolve the backlog and helped safeguard coverage access for more than 100,000 people.
3. A $3 billion AI bet
UnitedHealth is spending a combined total of $3 billion on AI this year and next, and the message at the showcase was that it intends to sell much of that work to the rest of the industry. Through what it calls United AI Studio, the company said it has more than 1,000 use cases in production and is working to automate the transactional core of its business. About two-thirds of UnitedHealthcare employees work in calls and claims, work that CEO Tim Noel said will shift toward a “concierge” model as automation takes over routine tasks. On prior authorization, he reiterated a goal of processing 80% of outpatient decisions in real time by the end of 2027, part of a broader industry commitment.
Optum Insight CEO Sandeep Dadlani delved into products the company already sells to other payers and providers, such as Optum Real for claims processing and Optum Integrity One, an RCM platform for health systems and payers.
“We have more than 100 installs of Optum Integrity One, the hottest-selling AI product right now for us,” Mr. Dadlani added.
4. Fewer employed physicians inside a shrinking network
After years of rapid expansion, the care delivery division, Optum Health, is pulling back. The unit missed 2025 earnings expectations by $6.6 billion and has been unwinding value-based arrangements covering roughly 200,000 patients, most of them in fully accountable PPO plans, while absorbing CMS risk-model cuts known as the V28 transition. Optum CEO Patrick Conway, MD, previously told investors the misexecution stemmed from a “non-standardized and overly localized management approach.”
At the showcase, Wyatt Decker, MD, who serves as UnitedHealth’s chief physician, drew a sharp line between the physicians Optum employs and the far larger group it counts as affiliated. The company directly employs fewer than 10,000 physicians, a figure that sits inside a total network of roughly 85,000 employed, contracted and affiliated providers. Within the last few years, the physician network had topped 90,000.
5. A copay-only health plan as the face of ‘transparency’
Among its consumer products, UnitedHealthcare has been leaning hard on Surest in recent years, a copay-only plan with no deductible or coinsurance that shows members a single, upfront price for care before they book. Chief data and analytics officer for the commercial division, Craig Kurtzweil, said the plan now covers more than 1 million members and is offered as an option by roughly one of every two large employers the insurer works with, making it one of its fastest-growing commercial offerings.
“The consumer knows transparently exactly what the cost of that episode is going to be before they enter the doctor’s office,” Mr. Kurtzweil said.
The plan uses variable copays to steer members toward providers it rates as more effective and lower-cost, and the company framed it as a preview of where its commercial insurance business is headed overall.
6. Their answer to Siri
Another major consumer bet at UnitedHealthcare is Avery, a generative AI assistant that Prianka Advani, the company’s senior vice president of AI delivery and telephony, described as its version of a voice helper. Members use it through the insurer’s app, and it can answer benefit and cost questions, book appointments on its own, or hand off to a human employee when needed. In a live demo, it called a physician’s office and scheduled an appointment for a patient.
“What Siri is to Apple, and what Alexa is to Amazon, Avery is to UnitedHealthcare,” Ms. Advani said.
Avery is currently available to about 6.5 million members with employer-sponsored plans and 160,000 Medicare Advantage members. UnitedHealthcare expects the tool to be available to a total of 20.5 million commercial, Medicare and Medicaid members by the end of 2026.
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 pay
