Peter Durlach

Chief Strategy Officer Zelis

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Peter Durlach is Chief Strategy Officer of Zelis, the healthcare payments company, appointed in April 2026 and sitting on its Operating Committee. He arrives with an unusually coherent thirty-year specialism: the application of speech and language technology to the administrative burden of medicine. He co-founded a speech-recognition company in the industry’s earliest commercial days, ran healthcare business development at Lernout & Hauspie, founded his own conversational technology company, and then spent the bulk of his career at Nuance Communications, where he helped create the healthcare division and grew it from early-stage revenue to roughly a billion dollars across clinical documentation, imaging, revenue cycle, and compliance. That business was the principal asset in Microsoft’s 2022 acquisition of Nuance, after which Durlach became Corporate Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft. At Zelis he applies the same instinct to a different bottleneck: not the clinical note but the payment, in a US system where the movement of money between payers and providers is its own considerable source of waste.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Strategy Officer of Zelis on 20 April 2026, joining the Operating Committee to build an enterprise-wide strategy and innovation function and advance the company’s AI capabilities.
• Grew Nuance Communications’ healthcare division from early-stage revenue to approximately one billion dollars, covering clinical documentation, medical imaging, revenue cycle, and compliance.
• Served as Corporate Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, directing strategic direction and portfolio integration across healthcare after the 2022 Nuance acquisition.
• Rose at Nuance from Senior Vice President for Healthcare Strategy and New Business Development to Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, with a remit spanning healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, retail, and government.
• Founder and President of Unveil Technologies and co-founder of Articulate Systems, and previously Vice President of Healthcare Marketing and Business Development at Lernout & Hauspie.
• Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
• Graduated summa cum laude and first in his business class from the University of Vermont, earning the Wall Street Journal Award for Academic Excellence.

Professional Journey

Durlach took a Bachelor of Science in business administration at the University of Vermont, graduating summa cum laude and first in his business class with the Wall Street Journal Award for Academic Excellence, and went into speech technology at the point when it was still a research curiosity rather than a product category. He was a co-founder of Articulate Systems, one of the early commercial speech-recognition companies, and later became Vice President of Healthcare Marketing and Business Development at Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgian speech company that briefly dominated the field. He then founded and served as President of Unveil Technologies, working on conversational systems, and spent a period as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which put him inside a large academic health system at close range.

The defining stretch of his career was at Nuance Communications. He joined as the company was assembling what would become the dominant position in medical speech recognition, and he helped create its healthcare division, driving its growth through the period in which clinical documentation moved from dictation-and-transcription to direct speech capture and then toward ambient intelligence, in which the system listens to the clinical encounter itself and drafts the note. As Senior Vice President for Healthcare Strategy and New Business Development and subsequently Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, he was responsible for advancing Nuance’s overall strategic direction and portfolio, not only in healthcare but across financial services, telecommunications, retail, and government. Under that arc the healthcare business reached roughly a billion dollars in revenue spanning documentation, medical imaging, revenue cycle, and compliance.

When Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022, in what remains one of its largest acquisitions, Durlach moved across as Corporate Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Health and Life Sciences. The task there was integration in the strategic sense rather than the operational one: deciding how Nuance’s clinical products, Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform, and the rest of the Health and Life Sciences portfolio should fit together, at precisely the moment when large language models made ambient clinical documentation a mainstream expectation rather than a differentiator.

On 20 April 2026 Zelis announced him as Chief Strategy Officer, promoting Matthew Krawse to Chief Revenue Officer in the same announcement. Zelis operates in healthcare payments, sitting between payers and providers on claims pricing, payment integrity, and the mechanics of actually settling and communicating about medical bills. It is a different corner of the same structural problem Durlach has worked on throughout his career, which is that a very large share of the cost of American healthcare is not care but the friction around it. His remit is to build an enterprise-wide strategy and innovation function, accelerate long-term growth, strengthen the company’s market position, and advance its AI-driven capabilities, and on taking the role he described Zelis as having built a strong foundation and reputation for tackling healthcare’s biggest challenges.

Education

University of Vermont

BS, Business Administration, summa cum laude and first in his business class, with the Wall Street Journal Award for Academic Excellence