[Hiring] AI Strategy Senior Principal @The Cigna Group

Role Description

The AI Strategy role identifies, frames, validates, and prioritizes the AI opportunities that offer potential for significant enterprise revenue and margin growth. This individual acts as an organizational thought leader to our company's leadership to decide what opportunities to attack, how to attack them, how to prioritize them, and what to initiate, accelerate, or stop ahead of critical investment decisions.

This is a strategy and business-judgment role. It sits with SBU and functional leaders to turn financial, operational, and clinical problems into investment-ready theses:

• The problem
• The customer or clinician
• The first principles approach
• The opportunity value
• The investment required to unlock that value
• The risk
• The conditions under which the work should proceed or cease

This is not a builder role. Solution design, technical feasibility, and build execution sit with AI Business Partners, Product Builders, enterprise architecture, and technology colleagues. AI Strategy owns the quality of the question and the quality of the bet.

Key Responsibilities

• Problem Framing & Opportunity Assessment
  • Partner with enterprise and SBU, finance, operations, and clinical and pharmacy leaders to identify business problems where AI could create significant, even non-linear, value unlock.
  • Frame each opportunity in business terms: who is served, what changes, what value is at stake, what risk is introduced, and what would have to be true for the work to succeed.
  • Conduct rigorous qualitative and quantitative user and market research to validate the opportunity in order to derisk the bet.
  • Distinguish problems for which AI offers non-linear advantages and conduct a first principles decomposition of the problem's points of leverage and AI's ability to unlock value against those points.
  • Translate enterprise and SBU challenges into opportunities with measurable financial value, outcomes, and experiential improvements.
  • Bring a clear recommendation to proceed, sequence, partner, or stop.
• Portfolio Strategy & Investment Framing
  • Stack-rank opportunities on strategic alignment, customer or clinical value, feasibility, risk, cost, and speed to value.
  • Develop business cases, investment theses, value realization models, and roadmaps.
  • Assess buy, build, partner, and hybrid paths as business choices, and flag duplicate investment across teams.
  • Explore non-traditional investment routes to solving problems.
  • Define success metrics and measurement instrumentation before work is staffed.
  • Revisit the AI portfolio as evidence arrives, and retire or reframe work that is not earning the next increment of investment.
• Progression Criteria & Value Discipline
  • Establish stage-gates and evidence expectations for concept, pilot, and broader adoption decisions.
  • Define what good enough to continue looks like in business and adoption terms.
  • Identify the workflow, operating model, and organizational changes required for value to show up.
  • Use results from live work to refine what the enterprise should fund next.
  • Partner with the DD&AI program function and technology partners on portfolio tracking and value reporting.
• Healthcare Context & Responsible Use
  • Align recommendations with clinical and operational realities, regulatory context, and member or provider impact.
  • Partner with legal, compliance, privacy, information security, governance, and model risk management.
  • Apply Responsible AI principles as decision criteria.
  • Recommend where AI should automate, assist, recommend, or escalate.
  • Raise risk early enough that it shapes the investment decision.
• Stakeholder Alignment & Influence
  • Advise business, clinical, product, and operations leaders on which AI bets are worth making and why.
  • Communicate recommendations clearly and compellingly.
  • Align stakeholders with competing priorities and variable AI fluency.
  • Represent AI Strategy in intake, planning, and investment conversations.
  • Mentor colleagues on problem-framing quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Finance, Healthcare Administration, Public Health, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Typically 8+ years in strategy, product strategy, management consulting, business operations, finance, digital transformation, or a related field inside a large or regulated enterprise.
• Demonstrated experience framing business problems, writing investment cases, and helping leaders make fund, sequence, or stop decisions.
• Ability to evaluate value, adoption risk, implementation complexity, and total cost of ownership at a decision-quality level.
• Working literacy in what current AI capabilities can and cannot do.
• Knowledge of what it takes to build great products.
• Experience operating in a matrix, with competing stakeholders and incomplete information.
• Clear written and verbal communication with senior business leaders.

Requirements

• Master's degree, MBA, or equivalent advanced degree (preferred).
• Experience in healthcare payer, provider, pharmacy, clinical, benefits, or healthcare services environments (preferred).
• Familiarity with clinical workflows, claims, utilization management, prior authorization, care management, provider operations, or member engagement (preferred).
• Deep expertise in leveraging AI to solve problems at a root cause level (preferred).
• Experience with Responsible AI, privacy, or regulatory considerations (preferred).
• Experience managing or advising an innovation or digital portfolio (preferred).
• Experience partnering with product, technology, and delivery teams without owning their work (preferred).

Benefits

• Comprehensive range of benefits focused on supporting your whole health.
• Health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs.
• 401(k) and company paid life insurance.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• A minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year.
• Paid holidays and leaves of absence.