Over the past year, French insurtech unicorn Alan has made it clear that its future would be built around AI.
Founded in 2016, the company's AI investments have driven remarkable growth, created new efficiencies, and enabled new products. The vision, as explained by CEO and co-founder Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, is to turn health insurance into a digital, AI-powered health companion. AI is no longer just a nice-to-have at Alan; it is at the very core of how the company operates, scales, and reshapes health care for its 400,000+ members.
At Alan's Spring Keynote earlier this month, the company rolled out its latest initiatives, including AI-driven features like its gamified “Alan Play” experience and updates to its “Mo” virtual health assistant.
As business leaders and investors debate whether AI can deliver real business advances to justify the immense hype, Alan appears determined to serve as a poster child for the ways it can reinvent products, services, customer support, and internal operations.
"To try to transform a mandatory expense into a company's most valuable investment, the health of its teams," Samuelian-Werve said. "For years, we have been trying to innovate every day in this direction."
AI-Powered Virtual Health Assistant “Mo”
One of Alan’s most visible AI implementations is “Mo,” the company’s virtual health assistant integrated into its app’s chat feature. Launched last November, Mo is designed to help members with medical questions and health guidance on demand.
The assistant uses generative AI to engage in medical Q&A conversations, providing users with instant, personalized information. Importantly, Alan has put guardrails in place to ensure Mo’s advice stays reliable – using the assistant is optional, and if a user opts in, Mo will answer their query, but a human doctor reviews the exchange within 15 minutes to verify the information or correct it if needed. The member then receives feedback from the doctor to confirm or clarify the AI’s advice. This human-in-the-loop approach helps prevent issues like “AI hallucinations” in a high-stakes domain like healthcare.
In the first few weeks after launch, Alan reported over 900 conversations between users and the AI assistant. By early 2025, usage had expanded into the thousands, with Samuelian-Werve noting that Mo had already handled more than 3,500 member conversations, all with remarkably high user satisfaction.
Given Alan’s member base of around 680,000 people, the company expects Mo to quickly become a widely used tool for health questions. Alan’s team is continuously refining the assistant’s capabilities: initially, Mo acts mainly as a Q&A chatbot, but the vision is to make it a proactive “health companion” that can remember a user’s context (with consent) and provide more personalized guidance over time, Samuelian-Werve said.
Personalized Health and Wellness Experiences
Alan is positioning itself as a holistic health partner, and AI is helping personalize the wellness journey for each member.
A major theme for Alan is prevention and healthy habits. The company has built features into its app that encourage members to take care of their physical and mental well-being on a daily basis. Now, with the help of AI, these features are becoming smarter and more tailored to individual users.
In November 2024, Alan launched Alan Walk, a gamified step-tracking program that rewards users for walking more. Members can opt in to have the app track their daily step count (via their smartphone or smartwatch) and earn virtual “berries” as they hit walking goals. These points can be exchanged for perks like charity donations, discounts on health products in the Alan Shop, or fun customization for the user’s avatar. There’s even a leaderboard to add a social, competitive element among coworkers. Initially, Alan Walk was a one-size-fits-all program (e.g. aiming for the classic 10,000 steps a day target). But as Alan collected data on how members engage with it, the team began to apply gamification and personalization more broadly.
At the April keynote, Alan announced a new “Alan Play” experience – essentially a revamp of the app’s interface to make all of health engagement feel like a motivating game.
"When you play a game you love, time flies, everything disappears, everything becomes fluid, natural, obvious," Samuelian-Werve said. "What if making health as captivating as the best games, as your favorite game, was the most serious way to take care of it?"
The idea is to learn from user behavior and preferences (what goals they meet, which challenges they skip, etc.) and then use that insight to adjust the experience. In practice, this means AI could adjust the difficulty of daily goals, suggest new mini-challenges, or recommend content that aligns with a member’s interests.
If one member is motivated by social competition, the app might emphasize the leaderboard; another who prefers solo challenges might see more personal streaks and records. By personalizing the wellness journey, Alan aims to keep members engaged and proactive about their health.
"Health is the most serious subject there is," said Alan product manager Antoine Moulet. "But what we have understood is that you don't have to be morose to take care of it. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The more enjoyable it is, the more fun it is, the more effective it is. And it's scientifically proven. The important concept to understand here is that our brains are programmed to seek instant gratification."
Some of this personalization is already built in. The Alan app features a preventive care section covering eight key health topics – from nutrition and exercise to mental health and back pain. Previously, members would mostly browse a library of articles or videos in these categories, or ask questions to human experts via chat.
Now, as Alan integrates AI, the app can proactively surface the most relevant preventive tips to each user. For instance, if the system knows you’ve been dealing with back pain (say you filled out a back-pain questionnaire or had a physio consultation via Alan), it might prioritize showing you the back care exercise program in your daily feed.
If you often use the meditation feature, the app might nudge you with mindfulness challenges during a stressful work week. This kind of recommendation engine is powered by analyzing user data and content usage patterns. Alan’s team has indicated that they are starting to deploy such personalization engines, and it aligns with their vision of making the app a contextual health companion.
Future plans for Mo (the AI assistant) include the ability to understand your context and health history in order to become more proactive with advice.
One notable innovation is Alan’s AI-powered journaling coach, which the company introduced as part of Alan Mind. This feature uses a conversational AI (akin to a therapy chatbot) to engage with users as they journal about their feelings and thoughts. Instead of just writing notes that no one reads, the user can opt to have the AI respond with supportive prompts and guiding questions.
"So this morning, as I had a rather important presentation and I was stressed, I opened my journaling with artificial intelligence," Moulet said. "It's not just a note-taking offer. It's like a personal coach, it answers, it asks the right questions, it helps me find the resources within me, to motivate myself, and to leave full of energy."
Mental Health Support and AI Integration
Mental health has been a pillar of Alan’s strategy since 2021, when the company made its first acquisition – a therapy and wellness journaling app called Jour – to launch the service now known as Alan Mind.
Alan Mind is offered as a B2B service to companies, giving their employees access to mental health resources and professionals. Initially, Alan Mind focused on providing educational content, self-care exercises, and quick access to human psychologists via in-app teleconsultations. What’s new in the past year is the infusion of AI to enhance these mental health offerings, particularly on the self-care side.
Alan Mind still offers human therapy on demand – users can book a session with a psychologist in just a few days, significantly reducing typical wait times for mental health care.
AI helps here too, albeit behind the scenes: by analyzing the anonymized usage data of Alan Mind (what topics are most common, how employees are feeling based on aggregated journal sentiment, etc.), Alan provides corporate clients with insights on prevalent issues in their workforce.
For example, if stress and sleep problems are trending high in the anonymized reports, the employer might organize a workshop or send out resources on sleep hygiene. These analytics rely on natural language processing to gauge themes from large sets of journal entries or self-assessments, all while preserving individual privacy. In this way, AI not only assists individual users but also informs broader mental health initiatives within organizations that use Alan Mind.
Streamlining Insurance Operations with AI
On the back end, Alan applies AI to make its insurance operations faster and more efficient.
A prime example is in claims processing and fraud detection. Alan’s platform automates reimbursement of health expenses as much as possible using computer vision and machine learning. When members submit a claim (for example, by uploading a photo of a medical invoice or prescription), Alan employs optical character recognition (OCR) to read the documents and extract the details.
This automated data extraction speeds up what would otherwise be a manual review process. The company also uses an in-house fraud detection engine – an AI model that flags unusual or suspect claims – to help catch errors or fraudulent submissions before they get paid out.
Thanks to these AI-driven processes (along with automated bank transfers for payouts), Alan is able to reimburse customers extremely quickly. Members often report reimbursement in a matter of days or even hours, since the system requires minimal human intervention for standard claims. By digitizing and automating claims, Alan not only improves customer satisfaction but also keeps costs down, which is crucial for a digital insurer operating at scale.
AI also plays a role in underwriting and risk management at Alan. As an insurer, Alan must assess the risk profiles of its individual and business clients to price policies appropriately. The company leverages data and machine learning models to analyze factors like member demographics, health data, and historical claim patterns. This helps Alan predict healthcare costs and set premiums or reserves accordingly.
While details are proprietary, the general approach is that AI algorithms assist Alan’s actuaries in spotting trends and making pricing adjustments based on predictive analytics. The end result is a more efficient insurance operation that can adapt to real-world data faster than traditional methods, according to Samuelian-Werve.
Enhancing Customer Support with AI
Beyond medical advice, Alan uses AI to augment its customer support and service teams. With over 350,000 contracts and a growing membership across multiple countries, Alan receives a high volume of inquiries ranging from policy coverage questions to technical help with the app. To maintain its signature fast, friendly service, Alan’s support team relies on AI tools that optimize interactions and automate routine tasks.
In fact, virtually all of Alan’s teams now leverage AI in some form, and the company reports that every employee is about 40% more productive on average thanks to these tools.
For customer support specifically, Alan uses AI to triage incoming queries and assist human agents in crafting responses. Simple or frequently asked questions can be answered by an AI-driven chatbot or FAQ automation, allowing members to get instant answers anytime. When a question is complex or unique, the system will route it to a human support representative – but even then, AI can help by suggesting answer templates or pulling up relevant information from the knowledge base.
Alan has integrated generative AI to summarize context (like a member’s recent claims or prior questions) so that support agents immediately see the key details to resolve the issue. Many customer interactions are now handled or prepared with AI assistance in this way. This reduces wait times and ensures consistent quality in responses.
The result: high customer satisfaction and a lean support operation even as the user base grows. This AI-augmented support approach mirrors what many tech-forward companies are doing, but Alan’s health focus makes speed and accuracy especially vital. Thanks to AI, Alan has maintained a customer satisfaction rate above 90% in key client segments, reflecting the effectiveness of these support enhancements, Samuelian-Werve said.
AI-Driven Automation in Alan’s Workplace
Alan not only embeds AI in its member-facing products but also uses it internally to boost its own productivity and operations.
In Alan's Q4 2024 shareholder letter released in February, the company highlighted how AI is part of the company’s culture and workflows. All teams leverage artificial intelligence in one way or another, which has led to impressive gains in employee output and efficiency. This internal adoption of AI ranges from engineering to administration, exemplifying how the startup runs as a modern, AI-enabled organization.
"In 2024, we achieved a step-change in operational efficiency by deploying AI across our entire value chain, delivering both cost savings and enhanced member experience," the letter said.
In 2024, Alan leveraged AI to boost marketing productivity by 50%, create over 225 pieces of content (15% fully AI-generated), and achieve a 4.7x improvement in Meta ad conversions. On the operations side, AI-driven service automation reached a 17.5% auto-resolution rate, maintained a 4.6/5 member satisfaction score, saved €518k annually, and enabled industry-leading document processing across France and Belgium, according to the shareholder letter.
One area of impact is routine office tasks and knowledge management. Alan’s staff benefit from automatic speech-to-text transcription and summarization for their meetings. The company also uses a platform called Dust to interface with AI assistants on internal data. And developers at Alan use AI coding copilots (such as GitHub Copilot or similar AI assistants) to write and review code more efficiently.
Such AI-driven optimizations are a key part of reaching profitability, he says. Indeed, after years of rapid growth, Alan expects to break even by improving operational efficiency through AI rather than by cutting core services, Samuelian-Werve says.
Even at the leadership level, Alan’s embrace of AI is notable.
Samuelian-Werve is deeply involved in the AI community – he is a co-founder and board member of Mistral AI, the French startup developing large language models. This connection not only keeps Alan at the cutting edge of AI developments but also signals internally that the company values AI adoption.
While the CEO’s role at Mistral is separate, Alan as a whole benefits from this mindset by being an early adopter of new AI tech. The company is pragmatic about using the best tools available – whether external APIs or custom models – to improve efficiency.
"These innovations are intended to improve the health of our members and businesses," Samuelian-Werve said at the keynote. "Our mission is to help as many people as possible live in very good health, until the end of their lives, while allowing employers to be proud of it. Yes, it's a little crazy, it's very ambitious, but to get there, we have to make this the new norm for everyone. And that's really our big challenge. Also, to rethink access to care. Make it simpler. That's what we've been doing since the beginning at Alan."
