AI and the Future of Insurance with Travelers Chief Technology & Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre

On the 38th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP & Chief Technology and Operations Officer of Travelers. Travelers is a Fortune 500 insurance company offering a range of insurance products to customers across the globe. With over $41 billion in revenue and over 32,000 employees, Travelers is the second-largest writer of U.S. commercial property casualty insurance and the sixth-largest writer of U.S. personal insurance through independent agents. In this conversation, Mojgan joins the show to share her perspective on integrating emerging technology into enterprise operations, prioritizing the customer experience through data-driven insights, and the importance of culture for successful AI adoption.

00:00 Intro
00:23 About Mojgan Lefebvre
02:22 About Travelers Insurance
03:05 Leveraging Insights Through Data
05:21 How AI is Intersecting With Insurance
06:38 The Impact of Generative AI
09:00 Real AI Use Cases
12:00 How AI Can Improve the Customer Experience
14:01 Understanding Business Processes to Apply New Technology
15:42 The Role of Culture in Innovation
20:20 Lightning Round
23:09 Outro

Quick hits from Mojgan:

On what makes the insurance industry different from other businesses: “We don't manufacture anything and have no physical goods. Everything we do is based on data and information. And so insurance companies have had data in those systems for years, and how you leverage technology to get insights from that data is really core to how we do business.”

On the advantage of leveraging datasets with enterprise AI: “We think that [AI] can be huge for us, as a company that has so much data, so much of which is curated, whether it's our claim documents that we use to train our claim professionals or our underwriting standard operating procedures. The ability to bring all of that together and to leverage a technology that can go through that so quickly and put it at the fingertips of your employees [is powerful].”

On understanding business processes to create impact with AI: “It's very important how you ask questions and how you prompt your AI. It's going to become even more important for your IT organization to truly understand your business and your business processes and have the ability to think of where these technologies will actually make a difference. You can't really do that without understanding the business process and where you can inject the technology."

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