John Doyle, president and CEO of global insurance and reinsurance brokerage group Marsh Group, said he expects the company to be an “artificial intelligence winner” as it leverages its scale and capabilities in investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to drive greater value from its proprietary data assets to its role as a trusted advisor to clients.
During the company’s most recent earnings call, Doyle outlined Marsh’s AI strategy as focusing on three core pillars: growth, productivity and efficiency.
He said: “The first pillar is growth. We are building AI applications and services that are creating new revenue streams and enhancing world-class capabilities and data-driven insights in insurance, health, human capital and investments. Examples of these products include ADA, Centris, Euclid and GC Quote Box, with many more such applications in development.
“We also see huge growth opportunities in AI in the consulting space. Oliver Wyman’s AI Quotient team is designed to help clients deploy their own AI strategies, which is our fastest-growing practice. We are advising clients on AI and workforce transformation in multiple industries, including banking, energy, government and manufacturing. We have advised on more than $50 billion in capital investments for AI deployment, and as AI becomes integrated into the way work is done, Mercer is working with clients to assess and inventory skills to redesign work.”
Its second pillar is productivity, which focuses on deploying artificial intelligence capabilities to improve the performance of colleagues, Doyle noted.
“A great example of our work is embedding AI into our account management tools and developing AI agents to help colleagues find and pre-qualify prospects to support sales productivity,” he explains.
Doyle continued: “The final pillar is efficiency. Across our business, we are starting to see the impact of AI automation. A key reason for creating the Business and Customer Service segment (BCS) was to exploit the efficiency potential of AI. By consolidating our back-office operations and technology into a scalable hub, BCS is accelerating the pace of AI-driven automation and process redesign.
“For example, our document ingestion capabilities now process thousands of documents per week, already increasing the efficiency of these processes by 20% and increasing the quality and availability of data to further provide valuable insights to our customers. We are starting to reduce the cost and time associated with upgrading code to modernize applications. For example, we recently used artificial intelligence to transform legacy tools into a newly designed broker workbench in days, saving months of team effort. We in IT Deploying agent AI in the help desk has significantly reduced inquiries, improved the colleague experience, and created downstream AI in our policy update center, allowing us to transform a traditional manual, email-heavy process into a streamlined digital solution in a matter of weeks, saving months of time on a project that would otherwise have required AI support. This will drive additional investment in growth, including investment in producer talent and new capabilities, increasing our confidence in continued margin improvement.”
Doyle stressed that AI will help Marsh better serve clients with customized and complex needs, but it will not replace the trusted advice, expertise and capabilities it provides.
During the call, business leaders from across the Marsh organization also shared insights into how the company is investing in AI and improving the value it delivers.
Commenting on its proprietary AI-driven tool, Claims IQ, Marsh Risk President and CEO Nick Studer noted that the firm now has thousands of colleagues using AI to analyze nearly $200 billion in loss information, which helps them provide better client advice, decision-making and advocacy.
Studer commented: “Investments in AI are a huge boost to growth, productivity and efficiency. So we are investing heavily in our digital program experience. We have a suite of tools, as you’ve seen with Blue over the years[i] At Centris we have developed these into what we call the Marsh Risk Companion, which will help clients understand and analyze their risks and options across a wider range of activities. But what’s really important about this suite of tools is that they’re now all based on a new analytics engine, and it’s been built from the ground up to leverage artificial intelligence at scale. One of the things here is you’re able to go beyond artificial intelligence, which we call Marsh Risk Cortex, which really brings together everything we need from our massive data sets and our state-of-the-art models. The key is not what features we have, but the speed and flexibility with which we can roll out new applications because our customers’ needs are changing rapidly and new requirements are emerging. “
Guy Carpenter President and CEO Dean Klisura mentioned how GC Quote Box, its AI-powered document extraction tool, is a game-changer for the company.
“We receive a lot of unstructured data from our clients. This tool helps us take all that data and match it to risk and capital more effectively, which will improve turnaround times, make our team and brokers more efficient, and deliver better results for our clients,” Klisura said.
Mercer President and CEO Pat Tomlinson noted that Mercer Fiber is a valuable tool that leverages Marsh’s broader AI stack to further enhance its existing digital tools.
Tomlinson explains: “So health advisors utilize Fiber when they work directly with clients. It allows them to have real-time, iterative discussions on every aspect of their benefit plan and provides extremely powerful scenario planning and modeling during strategy sessions. What we do is we use Fiber year-round. to help with budget tracking, updating, benchmarking and program management activities. What it does is it allows us to visualize those insights and the data from our health and benefits practice and then align that with the client’s. This allows us to understand and display geographic differences in healthcare costs and quality directly based on the client’s actual data, which allows us to differentiate ourselves in the market by demonstrating our ability to make the platform very client-specific and targeted, making it highly client-centric.”
Ted Moynihan, who was recently named president and CEO of Oliver Wyman, pointed to its AI Quotient platform as its fastest-growing feature. He emphasized that as a consulting firm focused on strategy and transformation, artificial intelligence is bringing huge opportunities to the company.
“Artificial intelligence is helping us deliver more value to clients. For example, in our private capital practice, Quotient Due Diligence is changing the way we help clients invest in businesses, using very sophisticated tools to do market analysis, competitive analysis and growth opportunity analysis. This enables our clients to make better and faster investment decisions in the private capital space, if they choose to do so,” Moynihan said.
