AI Strategy Senior Principal
Cigna
- Location
- United States Work at Home
- Work model
- Remote
- Level
- Principal
- Posted
- Sep 3, 2026
About this role
Role
Purpose 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 a organizational thought leader to our company's leadership in order 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, and 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, (i.e. not just problems that need process , policy, data, or operating -model change), 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, not a list of use cases. 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 (in partnership with product and technology colleagues), risk, cost, and speed to value, developing a robust and rigorous scoring methodology aligned to our organization's strategic needs. Develop business cases, investment theses, value realization models, and roadmaps that a business owner have data to stand behind. Assess buy, build, partner, and hybrid paths as business choices, and flag duplicate investment across teams. Explore non-traditional investment routes to solving problems, such as exploration of venture investment, incubation, or even M&A discussion, alongside colleagues from these areas. Define success metrics and measurement instrumentation before work is staffed, including adoption, productivity, financial impact , quality, customer experience, and clinical outcomes. Revisit the AI portfolio as evidence arrives, and retire or reframe work that is not earning the next increment of investment, seeking to drive an "innovation rate of return" on the total body of work. 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, and name the owner who will be accountable if the work scales. Identify the workflow, operating -model, and organizational changes required for value to show up, not only the technology change. Use results from live work to refine what the enterprise should fund next. Partner with the DD&AI program function and technology partners, including the AI Enablement team, on portfolio tracking and value reporting. Note that this role does not