How healthcare and pharma companies deploy AI
Healthcare and pharma companies deploy AI along 2 lines: insurers put it into paperwork and phone lines, and drug makers into factories, dossiers and sales rather than drug discovery. UnitedHealth Group runs more than 1,000 AI tools in production, and 99% of its AI applications are administrative, not clinical. Pfizer credits much of roughly $600 million of manufacturing savings to its Golden Batch AI, and Merck & Co. halved the time and cost of compiling reimbursement dossiers.
Verified See methodology
How healthcare and pharma companies have deployed AI
- Piloting
Elevance Health
Health insurance and health services
Spark, a chatbot Elevance Health built in-house on multiple large language models for document analysis and common tasks, runs alongside an enterprise ChatGPT rollout (Feb 2026) and HealthOS, its clinical data exchange with care providers.
60,000+
Associates using AI productivity tools
- Experimenting
CVS Health
Health insurance, pharmacy benefits, retail pharmacy and care delivery
Health100, a CVS Health subsidiary announced with Google Cloud in Mar 2026, is the consumer AI platform; inside its businesses CVS Health builds its own tools and buys others, such as Salesforce Agentforce Health for Aetna and CVS Caremark call centers (May 2026).
~75%
CVS Pharmacy calls resolved by conversational AI
- Experimenting
HCA Healthcare
Hospitals and health systems
HCA Healthcare builds its own AI products in a physician-led Digital Transformation and Innovation department, such as Timpani on Palantir Foundry and Nurse Handoff on Google's Gemini, and buys others, such as Commure's ambient documentation, GE HealthCare's perinatal platform and OpenAI's ChatGPT for Healthcare.
130+
Hospitals using Timpani AI scheduling
- Experimenting
Humana
Health insurance and healthcare services
Humana built its own agentic AI platform, which runs Agent Assist for member advocates with Google Cloud's models (Feb 2026), and buys AI tools for prior authorization (Cohere Health), clinical notes (Abridge) and its primary care records system (athenahealth).
20,000+
Member advocates in the Agent Assist rollout
- Experimenting
Kaiser Permanente
Integrated health care and health insurance
Kaiser Permanente bought Abridge's ambient documentation tool for its clinicians in Aug 2024 and builds its own clinical models, such as the Advance Alert Monitor for hospital patients and the KPIN booking assistant for members.
25,000+
Clinicians offered ambient AI
- Experimenting
The Cigna Group
Health insurance, pharmacy benefits and health services
The Cigna Group builds its own data assets and predictive models into what it calls a health intelligence engine, and buys foundation models from OpenAI and Anthropic, voice agents from Sierra and workplace tools such as Microsoft Copilot and Cursor (Aug and Sep 2026).
~10M
Customers with access to the myCigna AI assistant
- Experimenting
UnitedHealth Group
Health insurance, care delivery, pharmacy services and health technology
United AI Studio is UnitedHealth Group's proprietary AI platform for building, deploying and monitoring AI under common practices; Optum Chief AI Officer Shobhit Varshney has overseen it since Jul 2026.
1,000+
AI tools in production
- Piloting
Merck & Co.
Pharmaceuticals, vaccines and animal health
GPTeal, a platform Merck & Co. built to give staff secure access to outside large language models, carries everyday writing work; a Google Cloud deal worth up to $1 billion adds Gemini Enterprise agents (Apr 2026).
Halved
Time and cost of reimbursement dossiers
- Piloting
Moderna
Biotechnology
ChatGPT Enterprise, rolled out across Moderna in 2024 after the in-house mChat chatbot, carries more than 4,000 employee-written GPTs (Jan 2026); Moderna's research teams build their own AI on AWS.
100%
Knowledge workers using ChatGPT daily
- Experimenting
AstraZeneca
Biopharmaceuticals
AstraZeneca builds agentic tools on its own enterprise AI and data platforms, among them Development Assistant for clinical data and Velocia for medical evidence, and in 2025 gave employees who reach a set level of AI accreditation early access to an AI agent builder; more than 1,500 agents were built in the first 2 months.
90%+
Small molecule discovery pipeline AI-enabled
- Experimenting
Eli Lilly
Pharmaceuticals
LillyPod, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs that Eli Lilly owns and operates, went live at a ribbon-cutting in Indianapolis on Feb 25, 2026, and TuneLab has shared Lilly's discovery models with outside biotechs since Sep 2025.
1,016
GPUs in LillyPod
- Experimenting
Johnson & Johnson
Pharmaceuticals and medical technology
An internal generative AI application is the sanctioned tool for Johnson & Johnson staff, and the company built secure enclaves for its large and small language models (Mar 2025); JAIDA, a generative AI assistant, helps employees navigate internal systems and policies (Aug 2025).
~120,000
AI learning completions (2025)
- Experimenting
Novartis
Pharmaceuticals
Novartis runs no single named AI platform: R&D builds tools such as a Target Discovery Engine on data42, a data platform Novartis began building with Palantir in 2016 or 2017, and 2026 job postings describe an enterprise AI and MLOps platform on AWS and Databricks, an Agentic Factory and a US agentic AI operating system.
About 6,000
Novartis US employees in a Data and AI Foundations course
- Experimenting
Pfizer
Pharmaceuticals and vaccines
Pfizer's technology team builds and manages an enterprise AI backbone while each division owns its AI strategy, model use and investment (Fortune, Sep 2026); named tools include Vox for scientists and Charlie for marketing content.
98%
Eligible employees who took the first AI course
Findings
What the healthcare profiles show
Merck & Co. is the only healthcare or pharma company with a business return it credits to AI: Merck said in Apr 2026 that Google's technology cut the time and cost of compiling country reimbursement dossiers by half, in live submissions. No company in the sector reports a firm-level AI figure, and none is at Scaling or Embedded.
The sector's largest savings figures mix AI with other levers and give no AI share: CVS Health's more than $1 billion of operating expense savings (Aug 2026) combines technology efficiencies and AI, UnitedHealthcare's nearly $1 billion of 2026 cost reductions is a target set in Jan 2026, HCA Healthcare's about $400 million of 2026 savings is a target for a wider resiliency program (Jan 2026), Humana's expected more than $100 million over a few years (Nov 2025) includes finance outsourcing to Genpact, and Pfizer's roughly $600 million of manufacturing savings through 2025 credits the Golden Batch AI use case without its share (Feb 2026).
Health insurers and hospital groups report AI results as operating measures with no cost attached: Elevance Health reports 61% fewer denials for insufficient clinical information at health systems using HealthOS (Jun 2026), UnitedHealth Group 33% less chart review time and 26% shorter appeal cycles (Oct 2026), Aetna complex claims processed more than 20% faster (May 2026), Kaiser Permanente MRI waits cut by up to 60% in its Northwest region (Jun 2026), and HCA Healthcare an hour to an hour and a half saved per physician per 12-hour shift with ambient notes (May 2026).
Elevance Health and Moderna reached Piloting on company-wide rollouts with no AI-credited return: Elevance Health counts more than 60,000 of its roughly 97,100 employees using AI tools (Oct 2025) and Moderna every knowledge worker using ChatGPT daily (Aug 2025), while Merck & Co. pairs its dossier return with more than 80% of its workforce on its proprietary AI platform (Jan 2026). Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Novartis count AI training instead of AI users, such as nearly 120,000 AI learning completions at Johnson & Johnson in 2025 (Jun 2026) and more than 17,000 AI-certified employees at AstraZeneca (Apr 2026).
Pharma companies are investing in their own AI compute and in discovery models: Eli Lilly opened LillyPod, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, in Feb 2026, Pfizer plans to expand to more than 1,200 GPUs (Feb 2026) and signed model deals with Boltz (Jan 2026) and Chai Discovery (Jun 2026), and Novartis began a Chai Discovery collaboration in Jul 2026. Health insurers instead build platforms on outside models, such as United AI Studio at UnitedHealth Group, Spark at Elevance Health and Humana's agentic AI platform on Google Gemini.
Stages
Where healthcare and pharma companies stand
Piloting
Elevance Health, Merck & Co., Moderna
Piloting means the company reports a business return it credits to AI in at least one use case, or a company-wide AI rollout with a user count and a named owner.
Experimenting
AstraZeneca, CVS Health, Eli Lilly, HCA Healthcare, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Novartis, Pfizer, The Cigna Group, UnitedHealth Group
Experimenting means the company has reported neither a business return it credits to AI nor a company-wide AI rollout with a user count. Pilots, partnerships, plans and spending alone keep a company at Experimenting.
Returns
The returns healthcare and pharma companies credit to AI
Only realized returns the company reported and credited to AI itself, with their dates: revenue, cost, headcount, losses avoided or output per employee.
| Company | Use case | Return |
|---|---|---|
| Merck & Co. | Reimbursement dossier compilationMarket access | Time and cost to compile reimbursement dossiers cut by half with Google's technology (Apr 2026) |
Compare
Healthcare side by side
| Company | Ownership | Platform | Models | Hosting | Reach | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elevance Health | EVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer Ratnakar Lavu, an executive officer | Hybrid: Spark built in-house; enterprise ChatGPT license bought | Multiple unnamed LLMs in Spark, plus OpenAI's ChatGPT | Not disclosed; a single outside vendor can provide its data center, mainframe and multi-cloud services (2025 Form 10-K) | 60,000+ associates use AI tools (Oct 2025) | Piloting |
| Merck & Co. | EVP and CIDO Gaurav Gupta, on the Executive Team (since Sep 2026) | Hybrid: GPTeal built in-house; Gemini Enterprise bought from Google Cloud | OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Llama in GPTeal; Google Gemini; own KERMT and TEDDY | AWS (Bedrock, SageMaker) and Google Cloud; GPTeal's hosting not disclosed; company data kept from external exposure | More than 80% of the workforce (Jan 2026) | Piloting |
| Moderna | Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, on the Executive Committee | Hybrid: ChatGPT Enterprise bought; research AI built in-house | OpenAI for employees; in-house machine learning in research | OpenAI's hosted ChatGPT Enterprise for employees; AWS for research, data and machine-learning workloads; no company data centers disclosed | All knowledge workers use ChatGPT daily (Aug 2025) | Piloting |
| AstraZeneca | SVP, Chief Digital, Data and AI Officer; Enterprise AI unit since Dec 2025 | Hybrid: Enterprise AI and data platforms built; Copilot and Bedrock bought | Several providers, plus in-house and acquired foundation models | AWS (Amazon Bedrock) and Microsoft's hosted Copilot; Oracle's cloud for the Oracle collaboration (Oct 2026); drug discovery starting on Sferical One, a shared NVIDIA supercomputer in Sweden; no own AI data centers disclosed | 50,000+ employees in AI training (2025); 17,000+ AI-certified (Apr 2026) | Experimenting |
| CVS Health | Tilak Mandadi, Chief Experience and Technology Officer and President of Health100, reporting to the CEO | Hybrid: Health100 built on Google Cloud; Salesforce and ServiceNow agents bought | Google Gemini in Health100, trained open-source LLMs, vendor agent platforms | Google Cloud for Health100; Microsoft Azure, preferred cloud under a 5-year deal from Dec 2021; Salesforce and ServiceNow clouds; no own data centers named | ~75% of pharmacy calls resolved by AI (Jun 2026); no employee usage count | Experimenting |
| Eli Lilly | Chief AI Officer Thomas Fuchs, alongside EVP and CIDO Diogo Rau on the Executive Committee | Hybrid: LillyPod and TuneLab built in-house on NVIDIA hardware; partner models bought | Proprietary discovery models, open-weight LLMs such as NVIDIA Nemotron, partner models | LillyPod on-premises in Lilly facilities, inaugurated in Indianapolis; TuneLab on an unnamed third-party host; no cloud named | LLMs available company-wide (Jun 2026); no user count | Experimenting |
| HCA Healthcare | Michael Schlosser, EVP and Chief Clinical Officer, reporting to the CEO | Hybrid: Timpani (on Palantir Foundry) and Nurse Handoff built in-house; ambient AI from Commure; ChatGPT for Healthcare from OpenAI | Google Gemini in Nurse Handoff; OpenAI; Commure and GE HealthCare products | Google Cloud for Nurse Handoff and the data lakehouse; Palantir Foundry for Timpani; AWS for GE HealthCare's CareIntellect; OpenAI and Commure services; Expanse EHR in the cloud, on Google Cloud in the UK | Timpani at 130+ hospitals (Jun 2026); ambient notes at about 67 hospitals (May 2026) | Experimenting |
| Humana | CIO Japan Mehta, reporting to the CEO; SVP of enterprise AI since May 2026 | Hybrid: In-house agentic AI platform; vendor AI tools bought | Google Gemini through Vertex AI; vendors' own models in bought tools | Google Cloud (cloud deal since Jul 2024; Agent Assist's models); Microsoft Azure, preferred cloud from 2019; third-party data centers | Agent Assist rolling out to service centers of 20,000+ advocates (2026) | Experimenting |
| Johnson & Johnson | EVP and CIO Jim Swanson, on the Executive Committee | Hybrid: Internal gen AI app built in-house; Nvidia and cloud platforms bought | Undisclosed for internal tools; Nvidia platforms in surgical AI | Secure company enclaves for language models (cloud not disclosed); Microsoft Azure named digital surgery cloud (2022); Nvidia edge hardware in ORs and devices | Usage not published; 56,000+ trained to use gen AI (Mar 2025) | Experimenting |
| Kaiser Permanente | VP of AI Daniel Yang oversees AI quality under the CMO; CITO Neil Cowles runs technology | Hybrid: Abridge bought for clinical notes; clinical models built in-house | Abridge's models plus in-house machine learning and LLM-based tools | Hosted cloud on Microsoft Azure under a 2021 deal with Accenture; where Abridge and in-house models run is not disclosed | Ambient AI offered to more than 25,000 clinicians (Jan 2026) | Experimenting |
| Novartis | Split: CIO in Operations runs IT and data; R&D and US units run their own AI | Hybrid: R&D tools on data42, built with Palantir; Microsoft, Anthropic and AWS tools bought | Microsoft, Anthropic Claude, Amazon Quick Suite; partners' discovery AI | Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud platforms, with Databricks for machine learning; Claude hosting and any company AI data centers not disclosed | Tens of thousands use AI tools daily (Aug 2026 report); no exact count | Experimenting |
| Pfizer | CIO and EVP Dennis Hancock; Chief AI, Data and Analytics Officer Jeremy Forman (Feb 2026) | Hybrid: Enterprise AI backbone built in-house; Vox, Charlie; partner models | Anthropic Claude via Bedrock, custom ChatGPT, Boltz and Chai models | AWS (Bedrock, SageMaker) for Vox and lab tools; 80% of infrastructure cloud-based by 2023; GPU and Charlie hosting not disclosed | 98% of eligible staff took the first AI course | Experimenting |
| The Cigna Group | EVP and Chief Data, Digital and AI Officer, on the Enterprise Leadership Team | Hybrid: Health intelligence engine built in-house; models and agents bought | OpenAI and Anthropic language models, plus proprietary predictive models | Not disclosed; Cigna runs data centers and uses unnamed third-party cloud providers (2025 Form 10-K) | AI assistant open to ~10M customers (Jul 2026) | Experimenting |
| UnitedHealth Group | Optum Chief AI Officer Shobhit Varshney; CEO Stephen Hemsley reviews AI monthly | Hybrid: United AI Studio, built in-house; models bought and trained | Hyperscaler LLMs, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google, plus in-house small language models; 117 LLMs available to staff (Jun 2026) | Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for Optum Real; AWS AI services reported; own data centers not disclosed | 80%+ of member calls use AI (Jan 2026); ambient AI available to 70% of employed Optum Health providers | Experimenting |
Questions
AI in healthcare, answered
- Which healthcare and pharma companies are furthest along with AI?
- In the Enterprise AI diffusion report, Elevance Health, Merck & Co., and Moderna are at Piloting and AstraZeneca, CVS Health, Eli Lilly, HCA Healthcare, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser Permanente, Novartis, Pfizer, The Cigna Group, and UnitedHealth Group are at Experimenting. A stage follows from the returns and rollouts a company has publicly reported in the last 18 months, not from its spending or plans.
- How do health insurers use AI?
- Health insurers use AI most in member service, claims, prior authorization and care management. UnitedHealth Group says more than 80% of member calls use AI (Jan 2026), CVS Health says about 75% of pharmacy calls are resolved by AI (Jun 2026), Humana's member advocates have used Agent Assist since Oct 2025, and The Cigna Group has opened its myCigna AI assistant to about 10 million customers (Jul 2026). Elevance Health is the only health insurer at Piloting, on more than 60,000 employees using AI tools (Oct 2025); no health insurer has reported a business return it credits to AI alone.
- How do pharmaceutical companies use AI?
- Pharmaceutical companies use AI in drug discovery, manufacturing, regulatory documents and employee assistants. Merck & Co. cut the time and cost of reimbursement dossiers by half with Google's technology (Apr 2026), Pfizer runs its Golden Batch AI use case in manufacturing, AstraZeneca uses AI in more than 90% of its small molecule discovery pipeline (Feb 2026), and Johnson & Johnson reports lead optimization time cut in half and a clinical report going from 700 hours to about 15 minutes (Apr 2026). Eli Lilly runs its own NVIDIA supercomputer, LillyPod, and Moderna says every knowledge worker uses ChatGPT daily (Aug 2025).
- What return have healthcare companies reported from AI?
- Healthcare and pharma companies have reported almost no return they credit to AI alone. Merck & Co. is the exception, with reimbursement dossiers compiled in half the time and cost (Apr 2026), without a dollar figure. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said on Oct 27, 2026 that AI had started to improve the P&L, and Eli Lilly's Diogo Rau said in Mar 2026 that AI helped Lilly make more GLP-1 product in 2025, but neither company gave a figure. CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group, HCA Healthcare, Humana and Pfizer report savings that combine AI with other technology or cost programs.