This week, Cigna announced a landmark partnership with OpenAI. The goal of the collaboration: to help patients with complex conditions recieve better support. Notably, the first use case will be for cancer patients, specifically to help them find resources, coordinate care, and help with generalized support as needed. Given its stature and tenure in the industry, Cigna already has a massive ecosystem built around it for care navigation and to address chronic care needs; now, with this partnership, patients will be able to more quickly access resources and information on demand.

Dr. Amy Flaster, Chief Medical Officer at Cigna explains the value: “Receiving a complex diagnosis alters a person’s life instantly. Patients find themselves confronted with difficult treatment decisions, emotional stress and a health care system that can be hard to navigate…Whether a patient is struggling with treatment side effects or coping with the emotional impact of a diagnosis, bringing the power of OpenAI to The Cigna Group will help connect patients to our specialized clinicians, resources and support. This is how we can begin to realize the promise of AI to unlock better health outcomes: identifying issues earlier, offering support between doctors’ visits, and making complex care feel less overwhelming.”

The use of OpenAI’s frontier models will help surface clinical, pharmacy, behavioral and benefits information to understand what a patient needs so that care managers can determine the right support infrastructure. Additionally, by collating patient information and side effects, care managers can better chart out specific needs throughout the care journey.

Cigna is certainly not the only company exploring deeper use-cases in the AI space. Optum, for example, has launched an entire AI marketplace where healthcare companies, payer and provider organizations can find products to suit their ecosystem and create deeper partnerships. Serrah Linares, senior vice president of growth and innovation at Optum Insight, explained that “The launch of the Optum AI Marketplace represents a significant step forward in making advanced AI technology solutions more accessible for health care organizations. It leverages our extensive expertise to ensure that all solutions meet the highest standards of quality and reliability.”

There has also been significant investment on the patient facing arena. Most health insurance companies now have an on-demand agents that consumers can readily interact with when selecting a plan or trying to navigate an existing policy. In fact, a recent report by McKinsey found that consumer facing AI tools have “changed consumer expectations to the point that customers now expect higher accuracy and reliability during the consumer journey, human-like conversations with AI bots (whether text- or voice-based), hyperpersonalized offers and communication, and on-demand products and interactions tailored to their needs.”

Nevertheless, not all people necessarily as confident with the technology. Insurance policyholders, especially, are wary of what this means from a customer service perspective. Per InsuranceBusiness , “Two-thirds of policyholders said their biggest concern is not AI itself but the fear of being unable to reach a human when it matters. Ninety percent said knowing when they are interacting with AI is very or extremely important to them. That concern is task-specific. Roughly two-thirds of policyholders said they would trust AI-delivered answers to general insurance questions or coverage details. That trust drops to just 45% when it comes to information needed to file a claim correctly, a finding that points to a clear line in how policyholders are willing to accept AI assistance.”

Moreover, some reports have indicated that insurance companies may also be leveraging AI in determining the outcome of patient claims. There has been significant controversy around this topic in recent weeks; patients are asking for more thoughtful reviews, and insurance companies have responded indicating that human experts are ultimately making the final decisions. As a corollary, some companies are leveraging AI to make their claims processing more efficient, which they say may lead to more benefits and faster response times for consumers. A recent study by Microsoft explains: “in 2024, more than 30 million personal auto claims were reported in the US alone…Each one typically required adjusters one to three days just to gather, read, and interpret documents. The slow, manual nature of traditional claims processing is one of the most labor intensive and high impact functions in insurance […] AI can help automate document understanding and summarization for faster and more accurate processing…With millions of claims processed annually and cycle times measured in days or weeks, even modest improvements can potentially create significant financial and customer experience gains.”

Nonetheless, consumers remain wary of extensive AI use in the insurance and claim lifecycle, especially given that there is a generalized fear of increasing prices, more stringent coverage rules and rates of denials. However, if insurance companies can meaningfully leverage AI to bring more efficiency to the ecosystem and make it easier for consumers to understand how the process works, perhaps there may also be some benefits to capture. Time will tell how this industry will shape itself with this rapidly evolving technology.