Director Sales Strategy - AI Innovation

Director, Sales Experience Strategy & Ai Innovation

At United Healthcare, we're simplifying the health care experience, creating healthier communities and removing barriers to quality care. The work you do here impacts the lives of millions of people for the better. Come build the health care system of tomorrow, making it more responsive, affordable and optimized. Ready to make a difference? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

As AI and modern digital capabilities reshape how consumers shop, agents sell, and employees work, United Healthcare is accelerating new ways to validate ideas, modernize the sales experience, and unlock productivity across Sales & Distribution.

The Director, Sales Experience Strategy & AI Innovation will establish and lead a Sales Innovation Studio focused on improving Agent, Broker, Telesales, Digital Acquisition, and Sales Operations experiences. This leader will partner across Sales, Product, Technology, Design, Research, Analytics, Compliance, and Enterprise AI to identify opportunities, rapidly prototype solutions, validate concepts, and enable responsible adoption of AI-powered capabilities.

The role serves as a bridge between business strategy and technology innovation, helping teams move from ideas to evidence, experimentation to execution, and isolated proofs of concept to reusable capabilities that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Strategic Mandate

• Sales Experience Strategy:
  Set a forward-looking strategy that simplifies experiences for agents, brokers, telesales representatives, sales leaders, consumers, and operational partners
• AI Enablement & Workforce Transformation:
  Build practical AI fluency and embed AI-assisted ways of working into high-value sales and operating workflows
• Innovation Studio Leadership:
  Create a repeatable pathway from opportunity framing through prototype, validation, recommendation, and transition
• Emerging Technology & Partnerships:
  Evaluate technologies and partnerships that can improve growth, experience, productivity, quality, or speed
• Organizational Capability Building:
  Develop reusable playbooks, communities, assets, and governance that build lasting capability rather than dependency

This role is based in the Minnetonka, MN office.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Sales Innovation & Transformation Leadership
  • Establish and lead the Sales Innovation Studio, including its operating model, intake and prioritization approach, engagement model, service offerings, team development, governance, funding approach, and measures of success
  • Partner with senior Sales & Distribution leaders to identify opportunities that improve agent productivity, consumer experience, sales effectiveness, operational efficiency, quality, and compliance
  • Build and manage an innovation portfolio aligned to Sales & Distribution priorities, with transparent decisions on what should be explored, advanced, transitioned, paused, or stopped
  • Serve as a strategic advisor on AI, emerging technologies, experience innovation, and future ways of working
  • Communicate impact through executive-ready demonstrations, business cases, metrics, portfolio reviews, recommendations, and storytelling
• Rapid Prototyping, Research & Concept Validation
  • Lead engagements that frame high-value business problems, surface critical assumptions, rapidly prototype ideas, and reduce uncertainty before significant investment
  • Facilitate human-centered design, co-creation, Jobs-to-Be-Done, and lean experimentation activities with business teams and end users
  • Leverage AI-assisted development, low-code capabilities, and modern prototyping methods to shorten idea-to-insight timelines
  • Use agent, broker, consumer, employee, and stakeholder research to evaluate desirability, feasibility, usability, business value, and operational readiness
  • Develop executive-ready prototypes, innovation briefs, evidence summaries, and investment recommendations
  • Partner with Product, Technology, and business owners to prepare validated concepts for formal delivery and long-term ownership when appropriate
• AI Strategy, Enablement & Adoption
  • Lead practical AI enablement across Sales & Distribution through workshops, coaching, office hours, innovation challenges, hackathons, and hands-on learning experiences
  • Establish and grow a Sales AI Champion network that scales knowledge, responsible practices, and adoption across business teams
  • Develop reusable playbooks, prompting frameworks, learning resources, use-case patterns, and operating guidance
  • Coach leaders and teams on opportunities to apply AI to productivity, decision support, research, content, workflow simplification, knowledge access, coaching, and customer engagement
  • Partner with Enterprise AI and technology teams to align sales-focused experimentation with enterprise platforms, standards, and governance
• Agent, Broker & Digital Sales Experience Innovation
  • Identify opportunities to simplify how agents and brokers learn, sell, support consumers, manage their business, and interact with UHC
  • Partner with…