SA’s biggest health and life insurer, Discovery, has entered into a global partnership with Google that will use AI to provide individuals with personalised recommendations to improve their health and help drive down the cost of cover.
Discovery’s subsidiary Vitality pioneered an incentive scheme that rewards members with discounted gym membership, free movies and shopping vouchers for making healthy choices, such as exercising or buying fruit and vegetables.
It has now turned its sights on the potential offered by AI, combining its extensive data sets and behavioural change expertise with Google Cloud’s data analytics capabilities.
The new initiative, Vitality AI, builds on the Personalised Health Pathways programme launched by Vitality in SA earlier in 2025, which provides members with recommendations tied to their unique risks and lifestyle choices, ranging from suggestions to exercise more to getting a check-up for a chronic condition.
Early results showed high take-up among chronically ill people and a dramatic increase in screening, detection and management of chronic diseases, said Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore.
The idea behind this kind of intervention is to “get people to do the right thing, in the right quantity, at the right time” and disrupt the insurance industry, he said.
The health insurance industry currently uses disease management programmes that have limited impact because they take a “one size fits all” approach that results in low take-up and retention rates. In the life insurance industry, flat premiums based on one-off underwriting pooled controllable risk in an ineffective and inequitable manner, he said.
“If we get this right, we make people healthier and make the [insurance] industry more profitable and sustainable,” he said.
The partnership aims to improve customer engagement, lower operational costs for insurers and improve loss ratios. It typically takes between seven and 15 weeks for behavioural change to be sustained, he said.
Vitality operates in 40 markets around the world and has partnerships with several large reinsurers, including Swiss Re, Scor, Pacific Life Re and Hannover.
Vitality’s AI platform will integrate Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and Gemini models with Vitality’s deidentified dataset, which includes information on health, lifestyle behaviour, clinical risk and an individual’s propensity for the incentives that drive behavioural change. It does not, however, contain genetic information, as this is expensive and not widely available, said Gore.
The potential of AI in healthcare was profound, said Maureen Costello, Google Cloud vice-president for the UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa. It could accelerate the pace of scientific progress, improve the detection and treatment of diseases, and give people the right tools and information to live healthier lives, she said.
“This partnership poses an exciting opportunity to deliver hyper-relevant healthcare at scale.”
The scheme could potentially be used by the state, said Gore. “If the government were to offer incentives, it could get a massive effect,” he said.
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