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If you're listening on Spotify, look for our poll under the episode description, or you can send an email to tnb at wsj.com. Now onto the show. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, May 9th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. UnitedHealth Group says it's turning to artificial intelligence for a thousand use cases. But when it comes to processing claims, it's treading carefully.
plus how GenAI chatbots are upending internet search and how marketers are responding. But starting with UnitedHealth, the company says it now uses AI for a thousand applications across its insurance, health delivery, and pharmacy units.
This comes as it and the broader industry face growing scrutiny over health insurance practices. In December, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in a targeted attack. Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported in February that the Justice Department had launched a civil fraud investigation into the company's billing practices. The WSJ's Victoria Craig spoke about all this with our enterprise tech reporter, Isabel Busquets.
I was shocked by the number, a thousand applications for using AI inside UnitedHealth. What does it use AI for? Yeah, a thousand use cases at UnitedHealth Group, which is America's largest health company. And they have the insurance business. They have a health care delivery business. They have a pharmacy business. So the fact that they have such a huge scale is what enables them to target so, so many use cases and applications.
Only about half of them are this new generative AI. Half of them use a more traditional form of AI. They're doing a lot of things in healthcare delivery. They can record and transcribe and summarize conversations between doctors and patients. They can look over medical records and scan for potentially undiagnosed conditions for nurses who are going out into the field, into rural areas to do house calls.
They can help them digest like hundreds or thousands of pages worth of medical documents and pull out the most salient points they need to know. It can also serve that to them in a podcast form.
We can't really talk about UnitedHealthcare without mentioning CEO Brian Thompson, who has gunned down here in New York City late last year as outrage really grew around denial of coverage. And the company says that AI is not used to deny claims, but it's used in the evaluation process and it can accept them.
They're being sensitive around how they're using it here. They say AI is not ever used to deny a claim. It can only be used to approve a claim. And, you know, the vast majority of claims are evaluated in an automated way with no AI. But some claims can't go through that sort of automated process because there's information missing.
And so they've been working on developing this AI that can basically go into various systems and track down that information and attach that information to the claim so that maybe it can be auto-approved, but if it can't be auto-approved, then...
then it'll go on to a human. They're a company that's attracted a lot of controversy over the years. And specifically, people have been a little unhappy with their use of AI. So they were the target of a class action lawsuit that was filed in 2023 over the use of AI in the claims process. And
Their response was essentially that AI in that case was helping human workers, assisting human workers, but it wasn't making decisions. And let's talk about the guy who you spoke to for this story. He's the chief digital and technology officer at the company. He told you he sees AI integration, as you've just been saying, as a way to help, quote, fix the medical system in the U.S.,
So walk us through, I know you have explained how AI is being used inside the company, but in what ways did he explain that AI can be used to help fix the system, to make the process better for customers? A lot of what we talked about was AI's ability to reduce the administrative burden. So just things like
summarizing documents, automating back-end processes, areas where it's not necessarily touching clinical workflows, but just automating paperwork stuff. That's an area where he sees a lot of potential to
make things faster and also hopefully potentially less expensive. We talked about how administrative costs are a huge part of the cost of healthcare. And so if there's a way we can bring those administrative costs down, that's good for consumers, but it remains to be seen exactly how much and if consumers are really going to benefit from all this use of AI. It's kind of too early to tell there.
That was Victoria Craig speaking with WSJ reporter Isabel Busquets. Coming up, how AI is changing the game for SEO. That's after the break.
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Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT have changed the way people search for things online. And that could be bad news for marketers who in the past relied on SEO or search engine optimization to get clicks. So how are they having to adapt? Patrick Coffey covers marketing and advertising for the WSJ's CMO Today.
Patrick, how have Gen AI chatbots changed the way people search online? There are two main ways that search is changing. Number one, when you search for things on Google, often at the top of your search results page will be an AI-generated summary of the answer to the question you asked or the topic that you were
And the second way is that we see increased usage of the large language models, most prominently ChatGPT, but also Google's Gemini, Perplexity, a number of different competitors. People are turning to them in place of Google or Bing to ask everyday questions, to help them look for products. It's beginning to have extreme repercussions.
ramifications for the search business. We're seeing a rise in what's called zero-click search, where people resolve their queries without actually clicking on any links. In fact, earlier this week, testifying in court in the Google antitrust case, the senior vice president of services at Apple said that traffic through
Safari had declined for the first time in 20 years. That's significant because it shows that fewer people are clicking on things. And I spoke to a partner at Bain and Company, which recently ran a survey finding that 80% of respondents said that approximately 40% of their searches they complete without having to click anything. And that's new.
So what does this mean for marketers then? Why is this a problem? Well, marketers over decades have spent millions and millions of dollars on search engine optimization. Essentially, all the things you can do to your websites and your online presence to make sure that it pops up prominently in search. Many companies, especially those in the e-commerce, retail, this is just a core part of their marketing and advertising. And now they have to reconsider that.
Because they're seeing that these behavioral shifts are starting to eat into their click-through rates, their website visits, their prominence in search. It's really freaking them out. Okay, so how are marketers responding then? There's essentially an entire side industry that is helping brands appear more prominently in the AI searches.
They're having to go back into their websites and their apps and change the language a little bit, but more importantly, re-examine the technical aspects of their websites. Things like how quickly their pages load.
the number of tags that are included in their code that are designed to track visitor behavior on their websites. And they're trying to tailor these things more to the bots called crawlers that are sent out by the millions.
to collect the data that informs the LLM. That then creates the answers that millions of people get when they use ChatGPT or when they search for something on Google and get the summary on top. This trend has created a wave of businesses claiming to specialize in new industry acronyms beyond SEO, such as GEO, which is Generative Engine Optimization.
AEO, which is answer engine optimization, thinking of platforms like ChatGPT that answer your queries. And of course, AIO or artificial intelligence optimization. You mentioned marketers changing their language. Tell us more about that and how it would help with LLM crawlers on their sites.
They found that the chat GPTs of the world prefer this kind of conversational language. They're programmed to be very casual because that's the way that people use the app. Whereas in the past, search engines would prefer highly specific technical language.
In your story, you talk about MailChimp. Can you tell us a little bit more about what they do and how they've been adapting to this new Gen AI search era? So MailChimp, the email software company, has found fewer people visiting their sites. So in order to address this, they started tailoring their sites to appeal to the crawlers from AI platforms. And this is because the bots are designed to...
essentially go machine to machine. The idea of a website is no longer optimizing for a human reader, but optimizing for the bots that are there to gather the data. We now have more websites that are created only for the bots to gather the information to feed the LLMs. And that's only going to increase as AI disrupts the way that we search online.
Are Gen AI companies doing anything about this? OpenAI announced last month that it will soon roll out a shopping button where people who search for products can go directly to the merchant's website. And this is a big deal, especially for e-commerce companies, because one of the challenges for marketers was that there was no connection between LLM searches and sales.
That was our reporter, Patrick Coffey. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Charlie Duffield. I'm your host, Julie Chang. Additional support this week from Victoria Craig and Melanie Roy. Jessica Fenton and Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Dinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute.
Thanks for listening.