After Katya Andresen joined Cigna Group as chief data, digital and AI officer in September 2021, she says the emergence of generative artificial intelligence as a disruptive new technology led many to ask themselves: “How do I use AI?” 

Andresen thinks that’s the wrong question. “We’ve been on a mission to change that question to, ‘how do I lead in an age of AI?’” says Andresen. That framing is less focused on the functionality of any given AI tool and chasing countless use cases, and instead homes in on measurement that shows an AI investment can change health outcomes.

Along those lines, Cigna has announced this summer that it projects the AI and predictive analytics tools that the company uses to help patients identify chronic conditions—including cancer, kidney disease, and high-risk pregnancy—can save an estimated $200 million over the next three years by proactively connecting patients with clinicians. Separately this summer, Cigna announced a $100 million investment through 2028 to use AI to reduce the time clinicians need to spend documenting their cases and speed up the prescription process.

And yet another AI use case, which Andresen shared with Fortune, involves using AI to better understand common inbound patient questions that Cigna was receiving about biosimilars, which can treat chronic diseases at a fraction of the cost of biologics. Unlike a generic drug, which has the same active ingredients as branded counterparts, biosimilars aren’t an exact match because they’re made from living organisms like bacteria and plant cells. But both are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

One biologic, called Humira, can cost a patient $7,000 per month to treat inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. But Cigna looked at thousands of prior customer conversations with its representatives about biologics and biosimilars, and then used those insights to craft stronger digital messaging to encourage a switch to the cheaper alternative. This targeted campaign led more than 80% to opt for the biosimilar, Andresen says.

“That led to a lot more margin,” adds Andresen. “But more importantly, it created a couple hundred million dollars of savings for patients.”

Extracting millions in cost savings from these high-priority use cases is critical for Cigna, which generates $275 billion in annual revenue and ranked 14th on the latest Fortune 500 list, as national healthcare spending exceeds $5 trillion annually due to the rise of chronic conditions, an aging population, and the cost of a hospital stay and average prices for new prescription drugs soaring.

Patients frequently express that they are fed up with navigating the industry’s complex system, and millions report they’ve turned to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to ask health- or healthcare-related questions. Nearly six-in-ten report using AI to research health information before a doctor visit, and about 14 million adults say they have skipped a visit with a provider after using AI, according to a survey published by Gallup in April.

This movement does raise thorny questions about the guardrails put in place around AI chatbots, even those created by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, because they need to handle sensitive patient information and have the ability to accurately answer complex questions about medical insurance plans and treatments.

“The good news is, because we are highly regulated, we have a massive amount of controls in place to begin with,” says Andresen. “We are not starting from zero.” That layer of compliance and governance has existed for well over a decade for the machine learning models that Cigna has leveraged, she adds, and is also closely controlled for any data that’s access by third-party vendors.

Andresen has had to recently hunt for answers to these common healthcare questions after a close family member was diagnosed with breast cancer. She says this experience has shown that personalization, not just navigation, is the differentiator that AI can provide.

“I think we’re headed to a place where we are going to find that AI in healthcare becomes conversational, ambient, and more proactive,” says Andresen. “We can be more and more precise with treatments, with recommendations, and we can get better and better at understanding what works…and feed that back into our models, so that everything gets better all the time.”

Five years ago, when Andresen joined Cigna, it was her first role leading a healthcare company, after previously serving as a senior vice president of financial services at Capital One, serving in executive leadership roles at mission-focused tech firms Cricket Media and Network for Good, and earlier in her career, working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters News and the Associated Press.

She says that AI technology is evolving so rapidly that a mix of Cigna’s own proprietary data to build competitively specific tools, as well as key partnerships with big AI players, will be the differentiator. Andresen has launched workplace tools like chatbot Microsoft Copilot and AI coding agent Cursor, while also working closely with large hyperscalers like OpenAI and Anthropic to tap their large language models.

There are also times when Cigna will opt to work closely with AI startups that have homed in on a very specific use case, like Sierra, which builds conversational AI agents for customer service. “We’ve worked really closely with them on their product roadmap,” says Andresen.

Other generative AI use cases that Cigna has deployed include using LLMs to summarize millions of phone calls placed to call center agents, and then leveraging those insights to create an AI tool that makes it easier for those employees to search for the answers to questions like, “does my policy cover this treatment for plantar fasciitis?”

An AI virtual assistant was also built inside Cigna’s mobile app, a conversational tool that can similarly address patient questions, while in the clinical setting, AI-enabled summarization has reduced note-taking by up to 90% for health practitioners who work for Cigna’s telehealth service MDLIVE.

“The principles behind all this are hopefully clear, which is, what problem are we trying to solve, and how can AI help?” says Andresen. “That’s always the starting point.”

John Kell

NEWS PACKETS

Data centers are becoming a hot issue for the midterm elections. Amid a Gallup survey earlier this year that showed that 71% of Americans oppose data center construction, the issue is becoming increasingly difficult for the industry to positively pitch as Democrats and Republicans have been airing negative television ads to get aligned with voters. Data centers, Democratic pollster Zac McCrary tells the New York Times, are “one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.” Tech leaders are working to subdue the negative sentiment, with the Wall Street Journal reporting this week on how OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and others are hosting open houses, announcing multimillion-dollar community pledges, and making water conservation-focused commitments to make data centers more appealing to local communities. Another note of caution: a vast majority of data centers that are expected to be online by 2027 haven’t even started construction.

Nvidia places a bet on Poolside. AI chipmaker Nvidia announced a comprehensive agreement with Poolside, including a $1 billion investment and $6 billion that will be paid to license the AI startup’s technology and hire some of its engineers, according to the WSJ. The startup’s leaders, meanwhile, won’t join Nvidia and will instead continue to work on research projects. The transaction represents the latest effort by Nvidia to increasingly support open source models, which can be cheaper and more customizable than closed-source models. With Poolside, Nvidia is aiming to more directly compete with China’s AI giants like DeepSeek, which have drawn more attention from U.S. businesses as AI costs continue to rise.

Leadership departures accelerate at OpenAI. In just the past month, the ChatGPT maker has seen several high-profile executive departures, including news this week from the WSJ that the head of data centers, Chris Malone, has left the company. Malone’s exit was connected to a strategic pivot at OpenAI, in which the company is relying more on deals with cloud providers to support its computing power instead of building its own facilities. Other leadership departures this month have included Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who left after less than a year at OpenAI, and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, an OpenAI veteran since 2018.

Demand appears tepid for Anthropic’s Fable 5. Less than three months after Anthropic debuted its most costly large language model, the Claude Fable 5, the Financial Times has reported that demand has been muted as enterprises are realizing that not every AI task requires the most sophisticated and costly models. Citing data from corporate financial technology provider Ramp, the news outlet reports that spending on Fable 5 has only amassed to 11% of the business spending Anthropic notches from its customers, a figure that’s remained unchanged since early July. Meanwhile, data and legal technology company Thomson Reuters and insurance giant Travelers have talked publicly about how they are now relying on open-source and internal models, respectively, to help lower the cost of AI.

Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a multi-billion-dollar sale. AI platform Hugging Face is mulling a sale that would value the company at $13 billion or more, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Rumors of a potential deal come mere weeks after a July incident in which the company’s systems were hacked by OpenAI’s AI agents, leading the AI hyperscaler to announce last week that it would pause some aspects of AI training for two weeks as it also unveiled new security protocols. On Monday, Alabama’s attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI for more information related to the Hugging Face hack, saying the probe would address “hard truths about the threats companies and consumers are facing from rogue AI.”

ADOPTION CURVE

AI is boosting demand for more cybersecurity jobs. Amid concerns that AI chatbots can lower the barrier of entry for cybercriminals and warnings from technologists that these threats present an ongoing risk, new research published by a consortium of technology leaders including Cisco, Accenture, Google, and Microsoft found that cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing areas of the technology workforce. Demand for these roles grew 9.5% across the G7 countries for the six-month period ending in March 2026, according to the latest findings from the AI Workforce Consortium.

And yet, there are still more than 4.8 million open cybersecurity roles and the AI Workforce Consortium reports that the share of G7 cybersecurity postings that required AI skills stood at 28.5% of all listings between October 2025 and March 2026, compared to 14.2% in October 2024.

“We see the shift being really visible right now in cybersecurity, where the frontier models like Anthropic’s Mythos and Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber have changed cybersecurity as we know it,” Marci Paino, chief learning officer at Cisco, tells Fortune. “We see that they’re using AI-powered capabilities to tip the scale in favor of defenders over adversaries, and it’s really critical.”

Paino adds that 36% of cybersecurity leaders plan to invest in AI-powered security capabilities in the next one to two years, but only 25% are prioritizing investments in people. This suggests that while there’s a lot of demand for cybersecurity talent, enterprises are also expecting agentic AI systems to assume some higher volume, repetitive tasks. That will require cyber leaders to continue to rethink human and machine collaboration.

“Increasingly, every worker will need to manage a portfolio of agents to get work done, and not just those who are in technical leadership positions today,” says Paino.

Courtesy of AI Workforce Consortium

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– W.E. O’Neil Construction is seeking a CIO, based in Irvine, California. Posted salary range: $265K-$300K/year.

– C3 AI is seeking a VP, CIO, based in Redwood City, California. Posted salary range: $285K-$325K/year.

– M&T Bank is seeking a head of corporate technology, based in Buffalo, New York. Posted salary range: $201.2K-$335.3K/year.

– Upstream Bio is seeking a VP of IT, based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Posted salary range: $296.8K-$362.7K/year.

Hired:

– LPL Financial named Jonathan Lewis as chief technology and information officer, leading architecture, engineering, and infrastructure for the wealth management firm. Most recently, Lewis served as head of digital and trading technology for wealth management at banking giant Wells Fargo. He also previously served as head of asset management technology at J.P. Morgan.

– Patterson Companies named Wasi Ahmed as CIO, where he will report directly to CEO Robert Rajalingam and serve as a member of the dental and animal health products distributor’s leadership team. Previously, Ahmed served as CIO at construction materials distributor Foundation Building Materials and as CIO at manufacturer Yokohama Tire.

– Gateway Fiber appointed David Curran as CTO, where he will oversee the development of the fiber-optic internet provider’s network. Most recently, Curran served as VP of network architecture at telecommunications giant Verizon. He also previously served as a director at Frontier Communications.

– Rigetti Computing promoted Andrew Bestwick to the role of CTO, as the quantum computer developer consolidates quantum processor architecture, chip development, and hardware engineering under one title. Bestwick joined Rigetti in 2015 as SVP of quantum systems. He previously worked as a semiconductor and financial services consultant at Bain & Company.

– ServiceTrade announced the appointment of Brian Schaad as CTO, leading the engineering organization, which includes software development, data science, and information security. Prior to joining the software vendor, Schaad led engineering at another software firm, Consensus.

– Spinnaker Support appointed Rex Young as CIO, reporting to CEO Matt Stava and leading the software maintenance vendor’s technology strategy. Young most recently served as CIO and chief information security officer at fleet compliance and driver risk management software company SambaSafety.

– PRG announced the appointment of Joe Simon as chief technology and information officer, overseeing the entertainment and event technology provider’s enterprise infrastructure. Previously, Simon served as chief information and technology officer at sports betting and gambling company Entain.

– OverDrive named Liz Carrasco as CTO, leading the digital content distributor’s technology strategy and engineering organization. Previously, Carrasco spent more than a decade in senior technology leadership roles at entertainment giants CBS Interactive, ViacomCBS, and Paramount.