Marsh McLennan IT reorg lays foundation for gen AI

“This is for people in the organization who have data and want to drive insights for the business and for their clients,” Beswick says. “I want to provide an easy and secure outlet that’s genuinely production-ready and scalable. The biggest challenge is data. It’s very fragmented, ownership is often unclear, quality is a variable, but we have teams really working on that and generating data faster than we can possibly catalog and clean up.”

Marsh McLennan has been using ML algorithms for several years for forecasting, anomaly detection, and image recognition in claims processing. With Databricks, the firm has also begun its journey into generative AI. The company started piloting a gen AI Assistant roughly 18 months ago that is now available to 90,000 employees globally, Beswick says, noting that the assistant now runs about 2 million requests per month.

Beswick is also preparing for extensive generative AI activity within the company based on Microsoft’s implementation of OpenAI, which offers security to his liking. The CIO is quick to point out that Marsh McLennan’s gen AI platform — like its development and analytics platforms — uses industry-standard products but its interface, tooling, core services, and enhanced capabilities, which go “beyond what the model can do on its own,” were built by MMTech at the company’s innovation center in Dublin, Ireland.