Discovery reported that it made a R299 million operaing loss on Vitality AI, the Google-backed AI health platform it launched in 2025.
Discovery has reported a normalised operating loss of R299 million in its Vitality AI segment. Vitality AI is a platform that Discovery launched in 2025, in partnership with Google and the UK-based Vitality.
The AI system uses Vitality’s vast datasets to provide South Africans with hyper-personalised health recommendations, including advising Vitality members whether to visit a doctor.
Discovery posted the loss in its annual results for the year ended 30 June 2026, where it said that the loss also included “other Vitality central costs.”
Its losses in the segment have widened year-on-year. In 2025, the company reported a R89 million loss. Therefore, the loss worsened by 236%.
Vitality AI is built on Discovery Health’s Personal Health Pathways (PHP) system, which itself is integrated with Vitality.
“This homegrown solution has already transformed the health and lifestyle journeys of hundreds of thousands of South Africans,” Discovery said at the launch of Vitality AI in 2025.
“PHP has delivered hyper-personalised health recommendations to over 433,000 members, driving more than 2.7 million exercise actions, 460,000 health actions, and over R35 million in rewards.”
Google said that the partnership would see its AI tools applied to Vitality’s diverse range of health and lifestyle data to provide a more accurate understanding of an individual’s health.
“Through this, Vitality’s customers will receive personalised, actionable insights, which are tailored to each individual’s unique health, lifestyle, and key risk factors,” Google said.
“Vitality’s AI platform will use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform and Gemini models, integrating them with Vitality’s extensive health and lifestyle dataset.”
It said that these datasets comprised more than 2,800 dimensions, such as lifestyle behaviours, health data, clinical risk and propensity for incentives that drive behaviour change.
The company said that PHP is primarily used by customers who need it most, with 65% of activations in 2025 coming from members with chronic conditions.
At the time of Vitality AI’s official launch, Discovery shared that early usage data showed a 5.7× increase in cancer screenings, a 2.3× rise in GP visits, and a 17.3× uplift in digital health actions.
“This is clear evidence of PHP’s power to close care gaps and enable early detection and prevention,” the company said.
“It’s a South African innovation now being exported to the world, with the potential to extend healthy life expectancy by up to eight years and reshape the global health and insurance landscape.”
Discovery has continued to invest in Vitality AI, driving the loss in the platform, which has yet to produce a normalised profit for the group.
“Investment spend in Vitality AI accelerated over the year, with growing applications across customer engagement, healthcare, underwriting and operational processes,” it said in its results.
It said that investment applied to all its markets, including the US, where Vitality Health USA has been cautiously expanding.
Discovery said that revenue from its Vitality Health USA business increased by 22% in the year as it continued to deploy Vitality AI-enabled engagement solutions.
Adrian Gore, founder and group CEO of Discovery, said that the launch of Vitality AI would be transformational for the insurance market as a whole.
“Bringing together Google’s tech and AI, and our unique data sets and understanding of behaviour change, we will have a never-before-seen capability and understanding of a person’s health,” he said.
Across its broader results, Discovery reported that its banking arm, Discovery Bank, has made its first annual profit, with normalised profit from operations increasing 600% to R370 million.
Groupwide, Discovery reported normalised profit from operations growing 17% to R17.75 billion, while headline earnings grew 34% to R12.9 billion.
“Broader economic conditions remained somewhat constrained in many global economies, the structural trends underpinning Discovery’s opportunity set continued to strengthen,” it said.
“Advances in behavioural science, data and artificial intelligence (AI) are fundamentally changing how risk can be understood, managed and influenced.”
