Will the recent surge in AI-powered health tools help the UK make the shift from knowing about health, to being motivated to improve it? The hope is that it will incentivise us to turn small, positive behaviours into lasting habits that can help extend lives, prevent disease, and make societies more resilient. But questions remain as to whether this will just be adding to the noise around health and wellbeing without delivering results.
So far, 2026 has brought us two new, big-name AI-powered health tools: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Health. Both promise to help people make sense of health information by connecting health and fitness data from various sources, detecting patterns, and summarising everything from test results to an individual’s entire medical history.
This is important for awareness, but experience suggests that awareness alone doesn’t cure apathy and low motivation, which are arguably the biggest barriers to health management and improvement.
It may feel like we are inundated with information about what we should eat, how much we should exercise and sleep, and the importance of mental health. But there remains a chasm between what we know and what we do. The key to bridging this gap lies in a deeper understanding of the habits that shape our daily lives, how such habits are formed and sustained, and how this ultimately affects health outcomes.
Both ChatGPT Health and Claude for Health are powerful tools. But they rely on a key requirement: individuals bringing the right data to them at the right time. Because they depend on what people input, so much hinges on individuals recognising symptoms, seeking help, uploading the correct information, and asking the right questions.
As a result, their usefulness is strongest when the right data is shared, or when this information is interpreted by a clinician. Essentially, this is a reactive model, and it can’t address many of the factors driving a person’s long-term health, which need to be tackled proactively, long before symptoms appear.
These systems don’t directly influence what most shapes real-world health outcomes: daily behaviour and sustained habits in areas such as navigating the healthcare system, attending screenings, seeking care, and engaging in wellness activities like exercise, nutrition, and sleep.
AI can suggest, but it can’t incentivise, so it may not drive significant change at scale. It can answer questions when asked, but it can’t provide timely, relevant, and personalised interventions or direction when people most need it.
Healthy habit formation demands a fundamentally different approach. Much of our daily lives are controlled by habits, which are remarkably persistent. Once formed, a habit tends to stick, whether good or bad. In harnessing the power of good habits, we can create significant benefits for our health and wellbeing.
Vitality’s data shows that people who formed and sustained a habit of doing physical activity three or more times a week for three years saw a 27% reduction in mortality risk. They also reduced their healthcare costs by up to 13%, and if sustained for two years, this can add up to three years of additional life expectancy. This effect increases with age. For those over 45, going from no exercise to exercising four or more times a week reduces mortality risk by close to 60%, provided the habit is sustained.
Information and awareness have a role to play here, but the more significant opportunity comes from coupling this with targeted short-term incentivisation programmes that encourage gradual habit formation with measurable health impact.
It’s why we partnered with Google, bringing together our large dataset with sophisticated machine learning to uncover causal links between behaviour—such as physical activity and sleep—and health outcomes in a way that general AI models cannot, and to incentivise behaviour change in a highly personalised way.
Generative AI has taken a bold step into healthcare. But the most transformative impact won’t come from answering medical questions; it will come from empowering people to take small, consistent steps to create and sustain good habits. The future is not about replacing doctors or diagnosing conditions. It is about prevention—helping millions of people live healthier, longer lives through personalised and sustained behaviour change.
