AI-powered health tools are changing the way advisers support their clients. Emile Stipp, CEO of Vitality AI, explains how these tools turn personal health data into actionable insights, helping clients make better decisions about their health and insurance. For IFAs, this isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about delivering real value. Vitality AI allows advisers to provide tailored advice, improve client engagement, and support better long-term outcomes, all while meeting the evolving expectations set out in the FCA’s Consumer Duty.
Ask anyone in leadership what AI is bringing to their organisation, and ‘creating efficiencies’ is likely to be mentioned. But, in my view, the most successful organisations are not only using AI to create efficiencies, but they’re also asking: ‘what can we do for customers that we couldn’t do before?’ Efficiencies are great for a business’s own benefit. But using AI to share value with customers represents the real game-changer. Focusing on shared value makes you think of functionalities and innovations that were just not possible before the age of generative AI.
In other words, to help answer the question of what AI powered health tools bring to IFAs, we must first ask: what do they bring to customers? With this focus, the outcome is defined in terms of retaining existing customers and gaining new.
In this article, I endeavour to answer that question. I’ve used The Financial Conduct Authority’s core Consumer Dutyrequirements as sub-headings, to help highlight the relevance of AI-driven healthcare to meeting and exceeding these important goals. Whether you’re advising individuals or SMEs, it all applies.
But first, what is AI-driven healthcare?
In short, it’s many things. From chatbots designed to give users health information when it is relevant or important to them, including lifestyle and wellness, to platforms that help people make sense of health information, understand their most impactful lifestyle changes, and even receive coaching at scale. Some of these functions are already offered by retail AI tools, such as ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Health.
They all rely on a key requirement: individuals must bring the right data to these tools at the right time. They depend on people recognising symptoms, seeking out help, uploading extensive data and information about their health record, or asking questions in the right way.
Often, this only happens once someone feels symptoms. While useful, this is a reactive model. It fails to address that most of the factors driving a person’s long-term health trends need to be addressed proactively, long before symptoms appear, through exercise, quality sleep, well-timed screenings and navigating the health system effectively.
Clear communications – speaking to customers in their own language
There’s also a question of data accuracy – or data truth – and the potential for misinformation. Chatbots and platforms tend to draw on health information from across the internet, delivered to people according to how SEO-engineered it is, as opposed to how accurate, relevant and well-sourced it is.
A major study by BMJ Open found that nearly half (49.6%) of responses across five popular chatbots were problematic, to varying degrees. In corporate environments, when advanced AI systems are pointed at data that’s personal to individuals, and data and metadata about other people like those individuals, the accuracy of responses goes up significantly.
To provide relevant information about health and wellness, considerable contextual data is typically required. This means that models deployed within environments with quality longitudinal health and wellness data perform much better.
And that’s what Vitality AI was designed to deliver to health and life insurance members. In other words, improvements to long-term health outcomes through behaviour change, driven by data that’s personal to individuals, data that takes into account the value of such behaviour change and the propensity of the individual to take the necessary action.
It uses Google’s advanced AI to bring together all of Vitality’s contextualised, longitudinal data to offer personalised, actionable steps for members to improve their health.
The big advantage is that it provides that all-important ground truth data set. In other words, highly accurate, verified and factual data used to train, test and evaluate machine learning models. This, coupled with attractive rewards, represents the key to improved engagement.
Fair value – making health insurance accessible for more people
AI-driven personalisation leads to more opportunities for insurers to share value with IFAs and customers. Firstly, it lowers the cost of insurance and provides more cover for less to more people. Secondly, customers are rewarded with a rich set of rewards if they engage – and with personalisation, engagement is accessible to more customers than ever before.
On top of this, in terms of improved customer service, quicker underwriting decisions, a smoother experience and better outcomes. Of course, more value to customers and better customer experiences bring considerable benefits to IFAs too. Naturally, IFA experiences also improve as soon as the power of AI is deployed in administrative systems.
Customers quite rightly want more from their policy than just onward treatment. They’re increasingly looking for help to prevent illness, too. This includes support and encouragement to develop healthy habits; to change behaviour for the long-term, helping them live healthier for longer.
At the same time, our industry is not immune to the impact of wider health challenges and these, alongside rising demand and wider increases in medical inflation, are combining to push up premium costs.
As AI becomes more embedded in our programme, it’s part of our strategy to continue to make insurance more affordable. We’re the leading insurer in the UK to actively apply behaviour-linked pricing to our life and health insurance, based on rewarding members who make positive health choices with lower premiums and richer benefits. This is a core function of our model and philosophy, and permeates our thinking on every new product we launch.
Good customer outcomes – preventing serious illness before it happens
Tackling cost pressures and making health insurance more accessible to more people involves investing in prevention and moving healthcare upstream – preventing serious illness before it happens. This is probably best evidenced through the positive behavioural change driven by the Vitality Programme.
As we revealed in our Health Claims Insights Report 2025, for overall claims, highly active members saw 27% lower healthcare costs and those who were a healthy weight had a 35% lower risk of hospitalisation.*
Highly engaged members also reduce their mortality risk. This leads to an equivalent life expectancy increase of almost five years, according to Vitality’s research, peer-reviewed by the London School of Economics.
Last, but certainly not least, Consumer Duty is about ensuring products meet customer needs. Everything in this article arguably speaks to this aspect. But it’s also worth mentioning that Vitality AI is currently developing tools to assist advisers in a variety of contexts, and more of these will go live over the coming months and years – making personalised recommendations and broadening their conversations with customers.
The goal is to help make product discussions more relevant and tailored, especially in terms of SME clients. Employers are increasingly being leaned on by the government to help improve the health of working-age people in the UK. Achieving this is entirely dependent on shifting the insurance industry from one-size-fits-all to personalised and, in turn, from reactive to proactive. This is the way.
To hear more from Emile on this topic, listen to our latest IFA Talk podcast here
Based on in-hospital cost-per claim for Vitality members recording 4 or more active days per week on average, compared to those with an average of 0. VitalityHealth claims data 2021-2024.
