UnitedHealthcare expands its Avery AI assistant to about 21 million members
UnitedHealthcare has expanded Avery, its generative AI assistant, to about 21 million members across commercial, Medicare and Medicaid plans. Avery launched in March to roughly 6.5 million employer-plan members and 160,000 Medicare Advantage members. Members can use it in the UnitedHealthcare app to ask about benefits, costs, claims and in-network providers, and it can phone physician offices to book appointments for them. The company says Avery resolves about 90% of member interactions without a human, and hands the rest to a human advocate.
Why it's notable: A large payer is putting an AI agent that phones provider offices in front of tens of millions of members, so practices may field more calls from an automated caller. The 90% resolution figure is the insurer's own and has not been independently verified.