Executive Conversations

Scaling AI in Healthcare: A Conversation with Simon Birch, Asia-Pacific CIO, Bupa

“You don’t need to solve all your underlying infrastructure problems to get the first glimpse of value.”

By Lucy d'Arville and Chris Bell

min read


When it comes to transformation, Simon Birch has a simple philosophy: Start small, but start now. As chief information officer at Bupa Asia Pacific, he is responsible for the technology platforms of one of the world’s largest health insurance and healthcare companies, serving more than 50 million customers globally. And with a background spanning more than two decades in financial services, he brings a commercially disciplined and customer-first mindset to digital transformation in healthcare. In this conversation with Lucy D’Arville, leader of our Australian Healthcare & Life Sciences practice, Simon shares his experience scaling AI and digital capabilities within a highly regulated, legacy-laden industry—from the applications that excite him to how he redesigns teams to secure customer trust. Q: Could you describe Bupa’s AI and digital transformation journey and your main areas of focus? Birch: Our main priority is digital-first health insurance and healthcare. Whether it’s booking an appointment, getting your prescription delivered, preparing for an operation, or dealing with post-operative recovery, we want the whole experience to be digital-first, by which we mean app-based and mobile. To achieve that, we also need to prioritize data and technology modernization. Data fuels AI-enabled tools and provides highly contextualized and personalized healthcare experiences. Lastly, there is modernization. Ninety-five percent of our company is in the cloud. While that’s not a bad number, it’s the remaining 5% that is the stubborn core, causing challenges and delays. If we're going to deliver great customer experiences in days and weeks rather than months and quarters, we’ve got to modernize that 5%. Q: AI has transformative potential across almost every area of an organization. How did you decide where to focus your efforts? Birch: There’s a lot of noise in the AI tsunami that you need to filter out before thinking about the really impactful opportunities in your setting. We started out by identifying the areas of friction and frustration for customers via Net Promoter Score^℠ analysis. We used AI agents in unattended chats to solve these known issues and pain points. Claims is another example—how to make one quickly, how to get answers. These are not necessarily new things, but with AI, we now have the tooling that helps us get at some of those problems a bit quicker, at greater scale, and more imaginatively than we perhaps have in the past. So, we’re embracing it. We’ve got 60 or 70 use cases live in in Australia with a similar number in Hong Kong as well. But the area that I’m more excited about is how AI-enabled health offerings can drive engagement. For example, we have a musculoskeletal tool in Hong Kong where you mimic a stick figure on screen in completing daily exercise routines. And the tool can tell you, with a pretty good degree of accuracy that you might have a rotator cuff issue, for example. People are curious about their health, their well-being, sleep, movement, exercise, breathing, heart rate, etc. AI can engage people more with their health. And of course, we want them to also engage with Bupa and increase the potential for better outcomes—obviously within the parameters of confidentiality, anonymity, and other guidelines in managing the data. Q: How willing have customers been to engage with these AI-enabled health tools? Is there any hesitancy or resistance? Birch: We see greater uptake in some markets than others. Our Hong Kong business, for example, sees exceptionally high take-up. But ultimately, it comes down to an exchange of value. Customers are asking themselves: Is this worth it for me? Will it help me prepare for an operation? Recover better? Live healthier? If you can clearly articulate genuine value, not just efficiency gains or discounts, then I think, over time, people will take it up. For us as a business, it means constantly putting ourselves in customers’ shoes. This might be a little easier in healthcare since we all access healthcare and have health issues. Be constantly curious. What’s it like to use this product? What am I getting? Q: How do you drive the shared vision and alignment needed for such significant transformation? Particularly between tech and the business? Birch: A couple of things I would call out. One is modernizing our ways of working by moving away from lots of handoffs and waterfalls to product-oriented teams. No more “business vs. technology”—just commingled teams that come together around a customer problem or product and decide collectively on priorities. We’ve also moved toward smaller prototypes and smaller experiments. You experiment, prove the value, and then grow from there rather than trying to create big project teams with three-year plans and then chewing up capital convincing the company about why you need that for the next three years. There’s more joy, less admin, and better outcomes in being structured around solving a problem rather than an organizational chart, function, or title. We’re not there yet; we have a long way to go. But we’ve seen some very promising results. We trialed a beta program in our data teams that was around 60 people. After 9 or 10 months, we saw an eight-fold increase in work throughput and around a 20-point increase in employee engagement. Q: What advice would you give to a chief information officer or chief technology officer who is embarking on the journey to value creation through data and generative AI? Birch: Start small. Focus on the achievable rather than the grand. Look at the number of moving parts that are in your problem. Experiment. Be curious. Learn the space. Listen to others who know better—because most of the company does! And don’t let perfection be the enemy of value. You don’t need to solve all your underlying infrastructure problems to get the first glimpse of value. I think there is an old CIO mindset of “let me modernize the tech, then I’ll show value.” Flip that. Show value now, even if it’s a little clunky, and then you can clean things up.

When it comes to transformation, Simon Birch has a simple philosophy: Start small, but start now. As chief information officer at Bupa Asia Pacific, he is responsible for the technology platforms of one of the world’s largest health insurance and healthcare companies, serving more than 50 million customers globally. And with a background spanning more than two decades in financial services, he brings a commercially disciplined and customer-first mindset to digital transformation in healthcare.

In this conversation with Lucy D’Arville, leader of our Australian Healthcare & Life Sciences practice, Simon shares his experience scaling AI and digital capabilities within a highly regulated, legacy-laden industry—from the applications that excite him to how he redesigns teams to secure customer trust.

Q: Could you describe Bupa’s AI and digital transformation journey and your main areas of focus?

Birch: Our main priority is digital-first health insurance and healthcare. Whether it’s booking an appointment, getting your prescription delivered, preparing for an operation, or dealing with post-operative recovery, we want the whole experience to be digital-first, by which we mean app-based and mobile.

To achieve that, we also need to prioritize data and technology modernization. Data fuels AI-enabled tools and provides highly contextualized and personalized healthcare experiences.

Lastly, there is modernization. Ninety-five percent of our company is in the cloud. While that’s not a bad number, it’s the remaining 5% that is the stubborn core, causing challenges and delays. If we're going to deliver great customer experiences in days and weeks rather than months and quarters, we’ve got to modernize that 5%.

Q: AI has transformative potential across almost every area of an organization. How did you decide where to focus your efforts?

Birch: There’s a lot of noise in the AI tsunami that you need to filter out before thinking about the really impactful opportunities in your setting.

We started out by identifying the areas of friction and frustration for customers via Net Promoter Score^℠ analysis. We used AI agents in unattended chats to solve these known issues and pain points. Claims is another example—how to make one quickly, how to get answers.

These are not necessarily new things, but with AI, we now have the tooling that helps us get at some of those problems a bit quicker, at greater scale, and more imaginatively than we perhaps have in the past. So, we’re embracing it. We’ve got 60 or 70 use cases live in in Australia with a similar number in Hong Kong as well.

But the area that I’m more excited about is how AI-enabled health offerings can drive engagement. For example, we have a musculoskeletal tool in Hong Kong where you mimic a stick figure on screen in completing daily exercise routines. And the tool can tell you, with a pretty good degree of accuracy that you might have a rotator cuff issue, for example.

People are curious about their health, their well-being, sleep, movement, exercise, breathing, heart rate, etc. AI can engage people more with their health. And of course, we want them to also engage with Bupa and increase the potential for better outcomes—obviously within the parameters of confidentiality, anonymity, and other guidelines in managing the data.

Q: How willing have customers been to engage with these AI-enabled health tools? Is there any hesitancy or resistance?

Birch: We see greater uptake in some markets than others. Our Hong Kong business, for example, sees exceptionally high take-up. But ultimately, it comes down to an exchange of value. Customers are asking themselves: Is this worth it for me? Will it help me prepare for an operation? Recover better? Live healthier? If you can clearly articulate genuine value, not just efficiency gains or discounts, then I think, over time, people will take it up.

For us as a business, it means constantly putting ourselves in customers’ shoes. This might be a little easier in healthcare since we all access healthcare and have health issues. Be constantly curious. What’s it like to use this product? What am I getting?

Q: How do you drive the shared vision and alignment needed for such significant transformation? Particularly between tech and the business?

Birch: A couple of things I would call out. One is modernizing our ways of working by moving away from lots of handoffs and waterfalls to product-oriented teams. No more “business vs. technology”—just commingled teams that come together around a customer problem or product and decide collectively on priorities.

We’ve also moved toward smaller prototypes and smaller experiments. You experiment, prove the value, and then grow from there rather than trying to create big project teams with three-year plans and then chewing up capital convincing the company about why you need that for the next three years. There’s more joy, less admin, and better outcomes in being structured around solving a problem rather than an organizational chart, function, or title.

We’re not there yet; we have a long way to go. But we’ve seen some very promising results. We trialed a beta program in our data teams that was around 60 people. After 9 or 10 months, we saw an eight-fold increase in work throughput and around a 20-point increase in employee engagement.

Q: What advice would you give to a chief information officer or chief technology officer who is embarking on the journey to value creation through data and generative AI?

Birch: Start small. Focus on the achievable rather than the grand. Look at the number of moving parts that are in your problem. Experiment. Be curious. Learn the space. Listen to others who know better—because most of the company does!

And don’t let perfection be the enemy of value. You don’t need to solve all your underlying infrastructure problems to get the first glimpse of value. I think there is an old CIO mindset of “let me modernize the tech, then I’ll show value.” Flip that. Show value now, even if it’s a little clunky, and then you can clean things up.