Nationwide’s Jim Fowler on reshaping business and the future workforce

For over 20 years, Jim Fowler has built an impressive leadership track record across multiple industries, countries, and companies, turning his love of technology into a powerful driver of business growth. During his six years at Nationwide, where he serves as executive vice president and CTO, the company has grown from $42 billion to $60 billion in revenue, and Fowler’s technology organization has played a critical role in that trajectory.

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Fowler shared leadership stories and lessons from his career that can help IT leaders at all levels achieve greatness. I was excited to continue our dialog after the podcast where he described the ways technology is reshaping business and how to develop and inspire the digital workforce of the future. The following captures more of Fowler’s leadership acumen.

Dan Roberts: How does technology enable business strategy at Nationwide, and what do you foresee being key game-changers in terms technology supporting the company’s growth going forward?

Jim Fowler: Our business strategy is based on being the preferred partner to a smaller number of larger intermediaries. We know that being a preferred partner requires a frictionless way to do business with us. And we know that requires technology. So the technology is critical to being able to serve those partners.

As I look forward, there are four categories of technology that are going to change everything. The first is obvious — artificial intelligence. The ability to take out the clerical side of what we do so that we can focus on the extraordinary part of what we do is going to change the way our industry works. Number two is the ubiquitous connectivity of data. Whether it be telematics, smart home technology, or how we think about market data coming in and being dealt with, this ubiquitousness of data moving at near real-time speed changes the industry.

The third is the digital workforce. I think this idea of humans plus machines instead of machines is how we see it playing out. We’re really focused on our workforce and getting them the training and development to adapt and adopt the technology, not as a replacement for them. You’ll hear me talk about the fact that our growth has been without adding more people. We’ve grown the top line by letting our employees do more work, which means we’re taking the clerical work out.

The last one is around advanced compute, with the biggest part of that being quantum and the ability to exponentially increase the number of models that we can look at simultaneously to predict risk, to think about financial growth, to be able to map out performance of the market. Those four areas of technology are going to reshape our industry.

You mentioned the digital workforce. When you envision the workforce of the future, what does that look like and how are you helping your 25,000 Nationwide associates get there?

The workforce of the future will be made up of people who can adopt technology that helps them do their job faster, quicker, with better quality, and without a lot of guidance.

We’ve rolled out a generative AI product called Chat With Your Data to all of our associates, and I’ve been watching the top 10 users. Two of our top 10 users are underwriters within our property and casualty business. For me, they’re the model of what the future worker looks like. We didn’t tell them how to use the technology. We didn’t tell them how to be a better underwriter. But when you look at what these two underwriters are doing, they’ve figured out that these tools take away a tedious part of the job, one they don’t enjoy. This allows them to deal with underwriting new policies faster at the same time. So I think that’s what it looks like. It’s this adaptable workforce of people who are more tech mavens.

The way we’re helping them get there is we mandate over eight hours of technical training for every associate inside the company today. Just in the last year alone, we’ve delivered over 70,000 hours of AI-related training to our associates. There is an expectation that we think this is what the workforce of the future looks like, and if you want to be part of that workforce, we’re going to give you every opportunity to build the skills you need to be part of that workforce — because we need you. We want you. And we want you to be part of what that’s going to look like.

Can you talk more about your generative AI vision for Nationwide and any other examples of how gen AI is making a difference today?

We talk about digitizing the ordinary things our workers do so we can humanize the extraordinary things they do. A great example is something called Claims Log Notes. When you call in and have a complex claim, there could be 50 or 60 entries in the notes about your claim that have come in from you, your builder, your adjuster. When you call in and have a question, step one is, the claims call representative has to read through all of those notes to understand the status of your claim and where things are at. It can take 15 to 20 minutes for them to come up to speed while you’re just sitting there the whole time.

We’ve rolled out Claims Log Notes to all of our claims representatives. It’s a combination of an AI job that runs at night and generative AI that runs in the moment that will take all the claims log notes in a claim and summarize them in one or two paragraphs about what the latest issues and actions are and some prediction about what we think you’re calling about. So the claims representative can get into the extraordinary human experience of listening to you, empathizing with your situation, and judging actions that we can take instead of spending 20 minutes coming up to speed on everything that’s already happened.

How do you rapidly adopt emerging technology without falling into the age-old IT trap of getting distracted by chasing the latest shiny object?

We’re going to be required to put more of it in the hands of non-technologists, so I think the first part is not being afraid to have guardrails and to give up some control. The other part is being able to stop fast. Blockchain is a great example for us. Blockchain is a fantastic technology, and it’s a bright and shiny object that has zero to no use. So stop investing in it. We talk about it not as stopping it but putting it on the shelf and saying, ‘Okay, we’ve gone as far as we need to at this point.’ We understand it. We understand the prospects and the opportunity. We understand why it’s not being taken up. Let’s put it on the shelf, and every year we’ll revisit to see if something changed.

You’ve got to have a good process for shelving things that don’t have a purpose or use today so that you can pull it back quickly if it does. But at the same time, you stop investing in things that aren’t going to have a return.

Looking back over a great leadership career like yours, we think about the wins and successes. Are there any regrets?

That’s a great question. If I look back on my career, my biggest regrets are the sacrifices, number one that my wife made, and number two that my family made. We moved as a family nine times. My wife and I have been married for 27 years. We’ve had 19 addresses. Her name is Adrienne, and she’s a saint, and she had to give up her career for my career. She was a teacher, and she’s a fantastic teacher, and as we moved around, that just didn’t become plausible. My kids went to multiple different schools.

If I have a regret — and I say this because if I’d known what I know now when I started this, I might have made other choices — it’s the toll that sometimes these jobs can put on family. That’s another piece of advice that I give to people when they’re coming up in their career: Don’t forget that this is a family affair, not just an individual affair.

Your daughter Joey, who was one of the mystery questioners on the podcast, told us, ‘My dad is the best dad on the planet because of his huge heart. He will move heaven and earth to make me, my siblings, and my amazing mother happy.’ You published an article on LinkedIn inspired by her experiences as a college lacrosse player, ‘Lessons in Leadership from 18 Women on the Lacrosse Field.’ The fourth of those five leadership lessons is ‘Greatness Requires Challenge.’ Tell us a bit about that one.

My daughter was part of a Division 2 college lacrosse team that won their conference four years, and one year they won the whole NCAA. What’s unique about that is, they went through three coaches. That was hard. They lost parts of the team when a coach left. People would go to other schools. Those women that stayed for all four years were faced with adversity, and they were better leaders because of it. They learned how to work through really tough situations. They learned how to lead themselves.

I’ll give you one example. In their junior year, they were in a really tough game, and they were behind, and there was a rain delay. It would have been easy, with two minutes left, to have come back out and just been defeated by the fact that they were losing. We’re all standing under an awning, and I watched two or three of the women come out. They were talking to two of the players that were kind of struggling with their defenders, and in that rain delay, they took the opportunity to share with them how they would address the other players. And they came out and came from behind to win the game.

It would have been easy just to sit in the locker room and wait the rain delay out. That’s not who these women were. They said, ‘Okay, we had adversity in the first part of this game. We have an opportunity now to overcome it. We’re all going to come together to fix it.’ When you have coaching staffs that turn over that quickly, you wouldn’t have expected to see that. But that’s not who these women were.

And this is who Jim Fowler is. As they say, ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’

For more from Jim Fowler on the CIO’s journey from good to great, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.

See also:

• Principal Financial’s Kathy Kay on customer-centric IT leadership
• How Kimberly-Clark’s Zack Hicks heeds the call for innovation
• Tractor Supply’s Rob Mills on the CIO as chief growth officer