UnitedHealth is spending $1.5B on AI this year. Here’s where the money is going.

UnitedHealth Group is betting big on AI in 2026 — $1.5 billion to be exact.

During the company’s Q1 earnings call, leaders fleshed out how that investment is materializing.

“Think about it this way: A third of this is explicitly invested into software products and platforms, 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,” Optum Insight CEO Sandeep Dadlani said.

Optum Insight, the technology-enabled services business under UnitedHealth, will manage internal AI use cases, which could eventually be translated and commercialized beyond the company. UnitedHealth expects a 2-to-1 return, much of it within the next 12 to 18 months.

“We are getting after business units and functions alike and, importantly, critical processes that are core to several of our businesses,” UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley said. “This is not just a matter of being more productive at what we already do, but a reimagining of how we organize, operate and work, going forward. Few, if any, large organizations have ever done things like this at this scale.”

Prior authorization could be one cornerstone of the AI spend. Today, nearly 95% of UnitedHealthcare’s requests are submitted electronically, and about half of those are processed live. Ninety percent are approved within a single business day on average. After UnitedHealthcare and other insurers committed to reducing prior authorization last summer, they have been scaling back. By the end of the year, the company is aiming to cut total medical prior authorizations by 30% or more.

Optum Rx — UnitedHealth’s pharmacy benefit manager — has a “PreCheck” tool that has reportedly slashed prescription approval time from more than eight hours to fewer than 30 seconds. With PreCheck, denials from missing information fell by 68% and appeals were cut 88%, Optum CEO Patrick Conway, MD, said. He said the business reduced call center volume by 25% through bolstered digital and AI-enabled self-service, as well.

UnitedHealthcare recently rolled out a generative AI assistant, Avery, to ease care navigation and answer questions. Currently, roughly 6.5 million members with UnitedHealthcare employer-sponsored coverage and 160,000 Medicare Advantage members can use the chatbot. Over 20 million members are slated to have access to Avery by the end of the year.

This year’s investment is not UnitedHealth’s first major AI push.

“At our core, we’re a data company,” Craig Kurtzweil, chief data and analytics officer for UnitedHealthcare’s commercial business, told Becker’s last year. At the time, the company had identified more than 1,000 AI use cases, several of which came to fruition: Optum Real for claims, Crimson AI for operating room scheduling and Members Like You to assist members considering care pathways.

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