An AI Negotiator Helped Curative Go From 100 Contracts a Week to 100 a Day
At health insurer Curative, an agent named Gwen handles small clinics entirely by email, while people focus on big hospitals.
20VC with Harry Stebbings · We Built Our Own Salesforce in Months. Here's Why We're Cancelling the $600K Contract | Curative CEOThe lead is nothing fancy, just the address of a small family doctor's office that Curative wants in its insurance network. A person drops it into a queue, and Gwen picks it up.
Gwen looks the practice up on Google to learn about it, checks public payment records to see what other insurers pay it, finds the office email address through ZoomInfo, a database of business contacts, and sends a note tailored to that clinic. If no one answers, she writes again, with a fresh, customized nudge, until someone replies.
Gwen is not a new hire. She is an email-only artificial intelligence agent built by Curative, the health insurer led by chief executive Fred Turner. She exists to do the grinding work of signing up doctors, therapists, and clinics, a job that matters because a new insurer must assemble 60,000 to 70,000 contracts from scratch, work that took older insurers decades to build.
When a clinic bites, Gwen haggles. She goes back and forth over payment rates, often through several rounds, and then turns to the contract language. The AI is bad at editing Word documents directly, so it writes computer code to make the edits for it, redlining the agreement inside the guardrails Curative set.
The starting point is a standard template written by a law firm. No human lawyer reviews each deal. Turner said Gwen just revises the document and then signs it, and the signature on the page is his.
She opens the electronic signature link and clicks sign, making a legally binding agreement in his name. Letting an agent commit the company in that way took many rounds of persuasion inside Curative, Turner said. He and his co-founder and technology chief had "trusted the agents faster than most of the team," Turner said, and they pushed to give Gwen the authority to act.
The payoff is speed. Curative went from doing "about a 100 contracts a week to about 100 contracts a day," Turner said. In the last year, Turner's 45-person network team signed 2,300 contracts. In about eight weeks, Gwen alone signed 3,500.
The people have not gone away. They now spend their time on big hospital systems and large doctor groups that want phone calls, in-person meetings, and relationships. Gwen takes the small family doctor, the solo therapist, and the behavioral health practice that is happy to do the whole negotiation over email, often wrapping up a deal within hours.
Questions people ask
Is a contract still valid if an AI clicks the signature button?
Yes, if a person authorized it. In the United States, electronic signatures are generally valid under federal and state laws, and what matters is that the company intended to sign. Here the CEO gave the agent permission to sign his name within set limits, so the company is bound the same way as if he had clicked himself.
Why does a health insurer need tens of thousands of contracts?
An insurer sells access to doctors and hospitals, and it can only do that by agreeing on prices with each practice, clinic, and system. Without a signed contract, a doctor is out of network and visits cost members much more. Building that web is one reason established insurers are hard to displace.
What stops the AI from giving away too much money or agreeing to bad terms?
Curative says Gwen works from a law firm template with written guardrails on rates and language she can accept. Anything outside those limits would need a different path. The risk is not zero, but the control is the template plus the limits, not a lawyer reading every small clinic deal.