Hims & Hers to launch an AI agent focused on the weight-loss journey amid strategic shifts related to GLP-1s
Hims & Hers is betting on artificial intelligence to help steer the company through its next phase of growth as it navigates shifts in drug availability, especially amid the GLP-1 boom.
During its first-quarter earnings call on Monday, the telehealth company brought on its chief technology officer, Mo Elshenawy, to talk up the company’s AI investments.
Overall, Hims & Hers’ AI strategy is centered on using AI to build a technology platform that can handle a variety of patient conditions, as well as shifts in the issues or medications most top-of-mind for people at any given time.
The company has acquired a large swath of new customers in recent years due to the GLP-1 boom. So, during the earnings call, Elshenawy said the company will “soon” launch an AI companion designed to support Hims & Hers users on their weight-loss journey. Hims & Hers did not share a specific date for when this will launch. The company also recently launched Labs AI, “an agent that explains biomarker results in the fully unique context of each customer [and] flags what matters,” Elshenawy said.
“The labs companion and the upcoming weight-loss companion are really the first iteration in what I would expect eventually becomes multiple agents that are supporting each stage of the customer’s journey across every specialty we serve,” Hims & Hers CEO Andrew Dudum added during the earnings call.
It all points to how Hims & Hers is refining its AI strategy, especially since Elshenawy joined the company last year. Elshenawy stressed multiple times during the earnings call that Hims & Hers wants to build a platform that can handle the “end-to-end” patient experience. At the same time, it is focused on building AI agents for specific conditions. And, Elshenawy also stressed, the healthcare providers that Hims & Hers work with are still in control of clinical decision-making and deciding which drugs to prescribe.
Overall, Hims & Hers is in a time of transition. Its revenue grew nearly 69% in 2024. That year, the company started selling compounded GLP-1 injections, which are essentially cheaper, off-brand versions of the drug, while there was a shortage of the name-brand drugs.
New customers flocked to Hims & Hers as a result. But over the past couple of years, the FDA has begun resolving these shortages, and major pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk have put significant legal pressure on Hims & Hers to stop selling these compound injections now that the shortage is over. In February, Novo Nordisk sued Hims & Hers. John Kuckelman, Novo’s group general counsel of global, legal, intellectual property and security, told CNBC in an interview at the time that it was a “complete sham” that Hims & Hers continued to sell compounded GLP-1 drugs, despite the shortage being over.
But since then, Hims & Hers and Novo Nordisk have reached an agreement. Hims & Hers struck a deal to sell the branded Wegovy and Ozempic through its platform, and Novo Nordisk dropped its lawsuit.
Against this backdrop, Hims & Hers disclosed during its first-quarter earnings that revenue grew 4% year-over-year to $608.1 million — a far cry from the 69% revenue growth it reported in 2024.
So, Hims & Hers is increasingly betting on AI to help it create a differentiated, personalized telehealth experience that will keep customers coming back to its platform and help the company respond to shifts in the conditions patients are most interested in addressing at any given moment.
Elshenawy said that Hims & Hers now has roughly 40 members in its AI team. He’s been particularly focused on building “a platform that can support greater complexity while also making the customer and provider experience more approachable,” he said during the earnings call. “Over the past year, we’ve been re-architecting the platform around reusable, modular capabilities.”
Some of the changes Hims & Hers has made to its tech stack include a “new no-code commercial engine, easily configurable clinical workflows, a modernized mobile and messaging experience, and a more complete view of each customer’s entire health journey,” he added.
The goal is to ultimately build a platform that can adapt as Hims & Hers expands into new geographies, or offers new solutions to treat new conditions, and handle all the pricing, promotional and messaging shifts that may come with that.
Elshenawy said that while Hims & Hers wants AI embedded at every step of the customer journey, the platform is “keeping independent providers responsible for all clinical decision making.” For example, Hims & Hers has an AI agent embedded on the provider side of its platform that can draft a contextual answer to a patient question, but the provider still has to review it before it goes live.
On the patient side, Hims & Hers is focused on launching agents focused on specific conditions. Elshenawy said that, in addition to Labs AI, Hims & Hers will launch “an AI weight-loss companion that will support customers along their journey, proactively reach out at the right moment to help customers hit their desired outcomes and prompt clinician engagement when their expertise is needed.”
Dudum said during the earnings call that the company continues to see adoption in its weight-loss drugs at “near record levels, even beyond the demand we saw following this year’s New Year’s and Super Bowl campaign.”
He said within six weeks of introducing direct access to Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 products, “we have fulfilled more than 125,000 shipments for Wegovy products.”
Overall, Elshenawy said the common thread across Hims & Hers’ various AI tools is that “guardrails and evaluation frameworks are built into the architecture.” He added, “Each AI-enabled workflow is designed with clear guardrails on what it can handle automatically and what should be escalated.”