UnitedHealth Group Headquarters in Minnesota
UHG
Sandeep Dadlani, executive vice president and chief digital and technology officer at UnitedHealth Group, oversees one of the most ambitious digital transformations in the healthcare industry. The behemoth that he helps guide is among the largest companies in the world with 2024 revenues nearing $300 billion.
UnitedHealth Group’s businesses include UnitedHealthcare for health benefits and Optum for health services, and Dadlani has advocated for a cohesive digital strategy across this bifurcation despite the remarkable diversity of the business. Fortunately for Dadlani, he operates in an enterprise that recognizes the sanctity of technology. He noted that in many companies, his peers worry about getting a seat at the table where strategy is set and innovation is driven. At UnitedHealth Group, Dadlani noted, technology is the table.”
Dadlani’s team includes CIOs for each major division, a chief digital officer focused on consumer experiences and leaders for AI, data, cloud and infrastructure. They collectively enable the company to manage hundreds of petabytes of data and modernize legacy systems.
“We are helping clinicians focus on care, not administration,” Dadlani said, pointing to bots that now handle millions of routine interactions and reduce burdens on healthcare providers. He believes these will be catalysts for greater efficiency as well as greater customer outcomes.
Enhancing Access Through Digital-First Strategies and Scaling AI
A critical aspect of Dadlani’s transformation agenda is a digital-first approach to consumer and provider engagement. Today, 55 million people interact digitally with UnitedHealth Group services, a number that has grown dramatically over the past three years. The company’s mobile app, now a top performer in the medical category iPhone App Store, allows users to schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, review claims and access virtual care.
UnitedHealth Group’s commitment to AI is made real through the creation of the United AI Studio, a centralized platform where engineers develop AI models under strict governance. Every model is reviewed by a Responsible AI Board that includes clinicians, ethicists and legal experts. The platform consolidates large language models, secure data streams and reusable components to streamline development.
“AI is now a formal board agenda,” he said, noting that capital allocation and strategy reviews now incorporate AI-driven metrics.
Dadlani has promoted widespread adoption of AI through initiatives like Tech Tank, a companywide competition modeled on Shark Tank. Teams of technologists and business leaders pitch high-impact AI use cases driving ground-up innovation. Examples of innovations include leveraging ambient transcription technology to enhance doctor-patient interactions. With AI capturing and summarizing visits, clinicians can spend more time engaging patients and less time on documentation.
“The doctor can look into your eyes and ask, ‘How can I help you?’” Dadlani underscored. Meanwhile, advocates who assist with member inquiries now benefit from AI-guided knowledge tools, reducing call times and improving accuracy. Also, Dadlani expects 100 million customer service calls to be handled by AI this year alone, reducing average wait times and improving satisfaction as well.
Creating a Culture of Speed and Innovation
Dadlani’s mantra, “speed is the biggest IP,” guides how UnitedHealth Group interacts with external partners. His team meets with two startups weekly to identify breakthroughs that could be scaled across the enterprise. The emphasis is not just on experimentation but on moving the needle across the largest private sector healthcare company in the world. “We are not thinking like incumbents,” he emphasized. “We are thinking like disruptors.”
To address scalability challenges, UnitedHealth assigns senior sponsors to stuck projects and reviews AI programs quarterly with the full executive team. These interventions ensure that high potential initiatives are not lost in bureaucracy. “We obsess over scale,” Dadlani said. He credits the company’s mission, improving health outcomes, as a unifying force that drives alignment and purpose.
Speed as a Value Multiplier, Not Just a Metric
For Dadlani, speed isn’t about haste. It’s about accelerating meaningful value. “Speed isn’t about reckless haste. It’s about closing the gap between what’s possible and what’s practical,” he noted. This philosophy informs how UnitedHealth Group delivers technology, turning the ability to move fast into a competitive and humanitarian advantage.
At the heart of this acceleration is AI. Whether predicting disease earlier or summarizing complex patient histories into one page briefs and audio narratives for in home providers, AI is used to improve care quality while reducing time to value. These capabilities allow clinicians to start each encounter with better information, leading to faster, more informed decisions. “We can deliver transformative solutions faster than ever before,” said Dadlani. “Our goal is to move at 100X speed to make the health system better.”
Importantly, speed is a shared commitment across the business. Each business unit CEO at UnitedHealth Group now runs monthly AI reviews and participates in immersive workshops, taking personal ownership of the AI roadmap. “I haven’t seen this level of strong business tech partnership anywhere,” said Dadlani. “This trust, this friendship, this belief is then helping drive a higher speed in discovering and scaling use cases.” It’s a model of collaboration where technology leadership is embedded in business strategy rather than merely supporting it.
Building the Systems and the People for Rapid Innovation
To build sustainably at speed, Dadlani emphasizes the need for infrastructure, upskilling and proximity to the business. “AI has begun to change how our team members deploy their time and focus,” he said. Tools that automate repetitive tasks like letter writing and manual research are freeing employees to concentrate on higher value work. “We view AI as a tool or even as a superpower in helping to complete repetitive work so our employees can use their time on tasks requiring their unique expertise.”
This shift requires new skills. To that end, UnitedHealth Group has created learning programs tailored to employees at every stage of AI literacy. The AI Dojo, for example, is a curriculum built specifically for data scientists and engineers to sharpen skills most relevant to healthcare and responsible AI. “We have created learning modules from experts who build AI solutions to novices working to learn foundational skills,” he noted.
The company’s United AI Studio undergirds these efforts, providing tools to safely and responsibly scale machine learning models. With secure by design systems and a strong governance framework, teams can build and deploy quickly without compromising patient safety or regulatory compliance. “To move quickly and purposefully at scale, we have to stay close to the business,” Dadlani said. “Our objective is to have zero distance between what our customers and clinicians need and what we solve for them in sprints with quality and speed.”
Dadlani believes in being relentlessly pragmatic about problem solving. By spending time with clinicians and understanding their workflows, his team has reduced the burden of documentation and increased accuracy. “The problem is that clinicians have historically spent a lot of time doing administrative work,” he said. “This frees them up to focus on what matters most, the health of their patients.”
Building Guardrails and Looking Ahead
Responsible AI is a top priority. Every AI solution is vetted for bias, explainability and fairness with humans always in the loop for sensitive decisions. Dadlani is equally excited about future trends including agentic AI, conversational bots and even early forays into quantum computing. These technologies are already being tested in diagnostics and patient interaction models.
Dadlani envisions a future where individuals own and control their health data, enabling seamless and secure portability across providers. While regulatory and systemic hurdles remain, UnitedHealth is laying the groundwork for a more connected healthcare system. “This is not just a tech agenda. It is a business and societal agenda,” he said.
Through bold leadership and a culture of innovation, Dadlani is helping redefine what’s possible in healthcare technology at a scale few can imagine.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.