Paul Beswick first joined Marsh McLennan in 1995 when he took a summer job at the insurance brokerage and management consulting firm. He never left and for the past five years has led a team of more than 5,000 technologists as global chief information officer.
“My job is not really to get into the details of what projects are being worked on,” Beswick said. “We have business unit CIOs doing that. They are much better at it than I am.”
For most of his career at Marsh McLennan, Beswick worked for management consulting business Oliver Wyman, specializing in the retail sector. He has been a consultant for more than two decades, longer than Beswick intended because he enjoys helping retailers implement technology solutions.
Beswick became CIO in January 2021 and has since focused on building a culture that encourages sharing of the best ideas that can solve technology needs for all four of the company’s businesses, including Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer and Oliver Wyman. These businesses bring together more than 85,000 colleagues providing talent, strategy and risk management services, generating $23 billion in annual revenue, puts Marsh McLennan at position 180 on the Fortune 500.
Every Friday morning, Beswick hosts a conversation with a colleague to talk about their professional history, the work they do at Marsh McLennan and what they do in their free time. The company hosts monthly technology talks focused on business topics such as cybersecurity and cloud FinOps, a framework that helps companies manage costs in the cloud. their clouds.
“It’s a great way to bring these little perspectives into different parts of a very large business and diverse organization and personalize it,” Beswick said. “In tech, you tend to have a lot of introverts. There are a lot of really good things happening that no one talks about.”
Some of the key projects that kept him busy early in his tenure as CIO included reorganizing technology teams to create more shared services, for functions like infrastructure and cybersecurity. , to work on all the different parts.
Beswick’s thinking also grew in the clouds. The journey towards public cloud began in the mid-2010s and is expected to retain six global data centers, two each in the US, Europe and APAC regions. They have since reduced it to one in each market and are now working to eliminate data centers altogether.
Beswick said the migration to the cloud has no firm end date. He is wary of overspending and the risk of disrupting the entire business if every system is updated too quickly. Amazon Web Services is his main strategic partner, but Beswick expects to become multi-cloud in the near future and partner with Microsoft Azure, Google and Oracle.
“You always frankly choose a provider—even though I’d say AWS is great—just because you feel like you’re in a bind,” Beswick says.
Beswick also led the development of LenAI, the company’s internally developed general AI tool used to summarize meetings, pull data from documents, and write drafts of presentations and emails. Since launching about 15 months ago, there have been 20 million requests from employees, at a rate of about 500,000 per week. Large language models are rented, primarily from OpenAI via Microsoft Azure, but everything else is built by Marsh McLennan.
It took the company less than two days to build the first version of LenAI, and Beswick said he was excited about the experience of building the solution versus buying something off the shelf. Since then, the technology team has been on a rhythm of developing new capabilities that are built into the tool every few weeks.
Marsh McLennan has created an innovative AI “academy” to speed up training and speed up adoption. About 25,000 employees use LenAI every week.
“If you want to use it, great. If you don’t, that’s okay,” Beswick said. “There is no cost savings target. It’s just a tool that can be helpful.”
John Kell
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NEWS PACKAGE
The Qualcomm-Intel merger looks unstable. Bloomberg reported that Qualcomm’s interest in buying rival Intel has faded, with a number of complications including antitrust scrutiny and Intel’s $50 billion debt. Separately, U.S. Department of Commerce was awarded nearly 7.9 billion USD to Intel under the US Science and CHIPS Act, the funding will be for projects at Intel facilities in four states including Arizona and New Mexico. Intel said it plans to invest about $100 billion in domestic manufacturing, including new construction and refurbishments.
Software supply chain company attacked by ransomware. Blue Yonder, an Arizona-based software company acquired by Panasonic in 2021, revealed that it had been stung by a ransomware attack that affected the private cloud computing service the company provides to some customers. Blue Yonder, which counts grocery stores in the US and UK as well as Fortune 500 companies as customers, has not disclosed how many of its 3,000 business customers are affected by the incident. However, some retailers, including Starbucks and British grocery chains Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, have said they were affected and switching to backup systems and, in some cases, manually calculating employee salaries.
Amazon’s latest big AI bets include chips, a human investment. Amazon will invest another $4 billion in startup Anthropic, adding to the more than $8 billion the tech giant has poured into rival OpenAI over the past 14 months. Like New York Times reportAnthropic is a customer of Amazon’s data centers, cloud computing platforms, and semiconductors, which means Anthropic puts some of its resources back into Amazon when it pays for those services. Bloomberg this week published a feature focuses on Amazon’s engineers’ efforts to create the company’s first two generations of AI semiconductors, allowing the company to better compete with AI chipmaking giant Nvidia and become less dependent on that company’s grip on a $100 billion market.
PARTICIPATION ROAD
The desire to generate revenue from AI generation goes beyond productivity gains. ONE Quarterly survey by Big Four accounting firm KPMG found that while revenue generation continued to be the top ROI measure for generative AI—hovering at around 50% in the first three quarters of the year—performance measures Yields became less important, falling from 51% in the first quarter to 36% in the third quarter.
The survey also found that while 70% of leaders have received mandatory training in general AI skills, only 28% of the broader workforce have received mandatory training. That bifurcated approach could be a mistake, warns Per Edin, AI leader and KPMG US board member, warning that “organizations are not expanding training across their workforce.” Their broader workforce risks falling behind in adoption and missing out on valuable opportunities.”
EMPLOYMENT RADAR
Recruitment:
– center To be looking for a field CTOheadquartered in Redmond, Washington. Posted salary: $200K-$250K/year.
– Jefferies To be is seeking a vice president of investment banking in healthcare technologyheadquartered in New York City. Posted salary: $275K/year.
– AlphaSense To be is seeking a vice president of IT and securityheadquartered in New York City. Posted salary: $250K-$299K/year.
– Golf TaylorMade To be is seeking a vice president of global IT applicationsheadquartered in Carlsbad, California. Posted salary: $215K-$275K/year.
Hired:
