Katya Andresen, Chief Digital and Analytics Officer, The Cigna Group

Describe your career to date

My career has been nontraditional, spanning several industries and continents, but at the heart of it has been a consistently humble reckoning with the complexity of how people and technology come together in good ways and bad. I am thrilled to currently be part of Cigna’s mission to change health care for the better and improve the vitality of those we serve. It is such an important moment to harness data, advanced analytics, and digital innovation for the good of all.  

Prior to joining Cigna, I drove data-informed experience innovation in financial services as a Senior Vice President at Capital One, focusing on creating and delivering an integrated, end-to-end experience for customers across all touchpoints. 

Before joining Capital One, I served in executive roles for mission-focused technology companies, as CEO of the education technology company Cricket Media and COO and CSO of Network for Good, a payments platform and SaaS enterprise solution for digital giving and social actions that was founded by AOL, Yahoo! and Cisco, and I have served on several nonprofit boards.  

I guest lecture at Georgetown University’s business school and have served as an adjunct professor at the American University Key Executive Leadership Program.  

Earlier in my career, I was a foreign correspondent for Reuters News and Television in Asia and for Associated Press and major US newspapers in Africa. I remain an active writer as a Top Voice on LinkedIn, and you can also find my work on Medium.  

This has been a curvy career path for sure, but there is a simple throughline: everything starts and ends with understanding people and their needs – as a journalist, as a marketer, as a teacher, as a technology executive, and above all as a people leader. We can harness data and technology to deepen that understanding and act on that knowledge, but we must constantly ask ourselves if we’re solving the right problems in the right ways with the right outcomes. Something like generative AI (genAI) mostly likely will not kill us or save us, but how humans use it will determine how much help or harm we bring to the world. It is the people, not the technology, that proves to be the trickiest challenge – wherever you are and whatever you do.