Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:00]
Hello and welcome to the HFS GCC Advantage. Today’s conversation is about a question many GCCs are now facing: how do you move from scale and execution to AI-powered enterprise value?
To discuss this today, we have Prashanti Bodugum, Head of Evernorth Health Services India. Evernorth is a very interesting story, because healthcare is one of the most important and complex industries for AI. The opportunity is huge, but the responsibility is equally large. This is not a space where technology can be applied without context. It needs domain depth, regulatory understanding, empathy, governance, and a very clear view on the human impact. And that makes this Evernorth story especially relevant.
Prashanti also brings a rich GCC leadership perspective, having seen the model evolve over many years. So this should be a great conversation on what it takes to build an AI-powered GCC in a sector where outcomes ultimately affect caregivers, patients, and healthcare customers. Prashanti, welcome to the show.
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[01:04]
Thank you, Achyuta. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today with you.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[01:10]
Thanks, Prashanti. So before we get into the AI story, can you give us a brief overview of Evernorth Health Services, the role of the India center, and your own journey, your own career leading GCCs over the years?
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[01:25]
The story of Evernorth Health Services India is a little over two years now, and in many ways is a story of accelerated transformation. The reason I say it is that what typically takes traditional GCCs a significant amount of time — at least five-plus years — to achieve transformation when it comes to building capability, talent, innovation and enterprise value, I have to say we have compressed all of that into less than a two-year time frame.
And if you look at Evernorth Health Services itself, we are the health services business of the Cigna Group. We bring in pharmacy, care and benefit solutions, and we try to help healthcare become more predictable, affordable and simple. So this is the mission: improving health outcomes and creating better experiences for the customers, patients, clients and communities we serve.
So with this mission, and with the speed at which we have been accelerating our journey, within the global capability centers, India plays a very, very critical role for us, because we are on a journey to help enable the whole capability building. We are on the journey to become an enterprise partner today. And all of this is happening at the intersection of technology, operations, data, analytics, AI, digital and the customer experience — all of them co-existing here within the GCC at the same speed, and therefore helping us drive innovation and business outcomes as well.
What’s particularly exciting for me is that my own journey has been being part of the traditional GCC maturity model for the last 20-plus years. And I have seen GCCs which started as shared services become integrated operations, and then digital, and then ultimately technology and operations, which kind of started giving the business outcomes. But here I have been able to bring that experience of scaling GCCs through different stages of maturity over the years, and I have seen this all come together in the last 15-plus months to help us get to where we are today.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[03:39]
Moving on — Evernorth has, as you rightly pointed out, grown rapidly in a short period of time. How are you thinking about the GCC’s evolution, from being a scale and capability center to becoming a strategic partner that drives enterprise value and connected healthcare outcomes? You did touch upon it earlier, but can you go a little bit deeper on how you have seen this shift, this evolution, happen?
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[04:07]
See, one thing, Achyuta, that started happening in the GCC ecosystem is that we are no longer about cost arbitrage, right? We are now moving away from cost to bringing in the deep domain expertise and the AI capabilities which can start helping drive the enterprise outcomes.
So with that said, the advantage that we have is the fact that we no longer have to do an as-is transition. We are at a point where we can reimagine the way the work is being done, and then transform it before we transition it. So these are very different trends when I look at it overall.
And I think as an Evernorth organization, we have been able to crack that for ourselves. We started very traditionally in terms of building the capability in the first year. Our idea was to go after scale, so that there is no point of return. That was the very important setup for us in the first year of our journey. And as you would have known, in the first year we tried getting to 2,000-plus people.
And this was because we had a very strong ecosystem in India in terms of the partners that we work with, which has been more than 20-plus years of experience of partners working with Cigna and Evernorth. And then healthcare itself was a fairly spread space when it comes to the talent ecosystem, in terms of getting the right talent.
So when we came in and said that we want to build the critical capability, it was a fairly easy point for us and we were able to attract the talent, because the key was: this was the time when all of healthcare was trying to look at sustaining, or re-looking, or resizing. And we were entering the space at the time when the rest of them were fairly looking at the sustenance and existence of their own healthcare GCCs here. So it became an added advantage.
We built the capability in terms of the scale. But then the last 15 months has been: do we really have to go the traditional way, or do we take an AI-first approach and an innovation-led approach? Because we have a microcosm of everything that we have created.
So what it helped us do is start redefining our measure of success. From how work is happening in India, we quickly pivoted to what it means for the enterprise, what it means to improve the healthcare experiences of those we serve, versus what technology outcomes do we want to get to. That became the key charter for us, and that’s where we started the journey of moving teams, co-locating them, ensuring that they are tied to a business problem they are trying to solve.
I can give you a very good example. Claims processing becomes extremely important for us, and the speed at which our claims get processed is one of the key outcomes that we drive. We have been able to bring an AI-first solution into the way we are now processing claims. So that’s one simple example of how we have been able to move away from the traditional way of just focusing on technology outcomes to business outcomes.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[07:42]
Great, thank you, Prashanti. Prashanti, a lot of GCC AI conversations remain at a very high level, at pilot level, right? Can you share one or two practical examples of how you are using AI — whether it is any of the sub-categories, the activities that you deliver, and what impact are they creating for the business, and for your customers, your caregivers, healthcare consumers, your HQ customers? So, can you share some examples there?
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[08:12]
Yes. So we view AI as a strategic capability, not just a technology initiative, right? Because for us it’s very important to think about the outcomes that we can deliver. And this always becomes an amplification of human expertise, and how technology can enable it. So for us, the simple principle becomes: technology should amplify human expertise and help us deliver better value — better health outcomes, I would say.
And there are three ways that we look at it. One is AI literacy. This is one key focus area for us.
The second, which becomes extremely important because we are in healthcare, is responsible governance. And the reason I say it is because while we are okay to have AI or technology take decisions on our choices of what we want to buy, or patterns of preferences, we still want to be in control of our health decisions — be it as patients, or be it as caregivers. It’s always about us wanting to be in control, and not let a technology take a decision for us, because these are health outcomes and it’s tied to the lives of the people that we care for. So, responsible governance becomes very important. That’s the second pillar that we focus on.
And the third one is that everything we do, and the workforce that we have across, needs to transform as well. So these are the three things that we are focusing on.
And first, when we say we are investing significantly in building an AI-first workforce — what we are trying to do is, we do have something called an AI Center of Excellence and an AI Enablement Center. So the Center of Excellence, the Enablement Center and the talent development teams are all coming together to bring in an AI learning ecosystem that meets colleagues where they are in their AI journey. It could be a non-tech person, or it could be a tech person. It does not matter — but everybody needs to be AI proficient. And that’s the program that we have, and each one of them has their own journey. So it’s foundational literacy, I would say, to prompt engineering, to advanced applications and use case development. Every aspect of AI is what we are experimenting with. And this is the first one.
The second is in terms of our leadership capability. What we are trying to do is partner with some of the very strong consulting and academic organizations, and we are developing high-potential talent through very structured AI programs, where we are trying to bring in classroom training with very genuine healthcare-outcome-driven use cases as capstone projects, and then hands-on experimentation in terms of real-world application.
So our senior engineers and leaders are going through these programs to make sure that they get to understand how AI needs to be applied. They get to understand how we can build health outcomes based on some of the use cases that we are bringing in, and naturally build the confidence, with human in the loop, in terms of the outcomes that we are trying to drive. So that is something that we are trying to do. That’s number one.
Second, when I say responsible governance: innovation is happening everywhere, right? And we are a regulated industry, and so speed alone is not going to be important to us. What’s going to be important is the trust that we are able to build — the compliance, the security and the transparency.
So when I look at this — are we in a position where AI can help reduce the friction points of our providers and healthcare practitioners, focusing more on reduction of their manual work, so that they can be in front of the patients and spend more time with the customers? There are a lot of examples that I can quote there. How are we reducing the friction points for a provider, or a caregiver, or healthcare practitioners, or agents in terms of the front line dealing with our customers? So those are all cases where we have made a lot of progress in terms of how some of these responsible AI solutions have been put in place with very clear guardrails and practices.
However, are we at a point where, without a human in the loop, we are able to take some of the decisions for patients? Not yet, right? So that’s where there is a lot more experimentation happening.
And lastly, when we talk about each one of the solutions we are building, we are looking at: how does this help simplify healthcare? How does this help improve experiences? And how does it help drive better outcomes? So these are some of the questions that we continuously keep asking as we start innovating and trying to bring AI into the mix.
The last one, as I said — at the end of the day, AI literacy becomes important not just for the technicians here, or the technologists here, but across the organization. Because how are they adapting to a new way of looking at it? If I look at a claims operator who is trying to process a claim, how can I make him AI-literate, so that it becomes foundational in the way he is looking at processing the claims very differently using the AI tools, than what he or she was doing right now? So that’s the third part of it, where we are talking about the workforce itself transforming, to be able to take these examples and build AI responsibly at scale.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[14:24]
Just to wrap up, Prashanti, a quick 30-second take on the future outlook. As you look ahead — crystal ball gazing — what does the next phase of Evernorth Health Services India look like? How do you see the center evolving? Will it be the hub for AI and agentic services for the entire enterprise? Will it be embedding more into enterprise workflows? And how do you define success three years later?
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[14:53]
If you fast-forward two years or three years, and you’re asking what does that look like — I wish I were an oracle and could say this, but I think I can define it as: for me, it’s not just about adopting AI. I think it will be all about how effectively we use AI, data and human ingenuity. This becomes extremely important. And how are we able to create better experiences, better outcomes and a healthier future for those we serve? So that, to me, is the key goal.
Having said that, a significant portion of this is given the way we are building our talent to understand US healthcare and harness the innovation that we are trying to do to improve the health and vitality of those we serve. So that’s the power that we believe we can build here from our GCC. And it is probably not something that we would measure, again, with the number of people, but it’s about the number of outcomes for the enterprise that we are not only enabling but also driving from here.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[16:06]
Thanks, Prashanti, for joining us and sharing your perspectives and vision. What I found valuable is how grounded in reality this AI story is that you are presenting, and I like the balance you brought to the discussion. In healthcare, AI cannot be about automation. It has to be about responsible augmentation, judgment, stronger governance, and — as you rightly pointed out to us — giving more people more time to focus on the human side of care.
The Evernorth story is a great example of where the GCC model is headed: from scale and execution to AI-powered value creation and end-to-end capability ownership. Thank you again for being a part of the HFS GCC Advantage, Prashanti.
Prashanti Bodugum — Head of Evernorth Health Services India[16:53]
Thank you, Achyuta. I really appreciate the opportunity and thoroughly enjoyed the session with you. Thank you.
