Paul Beswick first joined Marsh McLennan in 1995 when he took a summer job at the insurance brokerage and management consulting firm. He has 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 delve into the details of the projects they’re doing,” says Beswick. “We have business unit managers who do that. They are much better at it than I am.’
For most of his career at Marsh McLennan, Beswick worked at management consultancy Oliver Wyman, specializing in the retail sector. He was a consultant for more than two decades, more than Beswick wanted because he enjoyed helping retailers implement technology solutions.
Beswick became CIO in January 2021 and has since focused on building a culture that fosters the sharing of the best ideas that can solve the technology needs of the company’s four business divisions: Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer and Oliver Wyman. Those firms include more than 85,000 colleagues who provide risk, strategy and talent management services, generating $23 billion in annual revenue, according to Marsh McLennan. 180 on the Fortune 500.
Every Friday morning, Beswick hosts an interview with a colleague to talk about their careers, what they do at Marsh McLennan and what they do in their spare time. The company hosts monthly technology conferences based on business topics such as cybersecurity and cloud FinOps, the latter an operational framework that helps companies manage cloud costs.
“It’s a fantastic way to access and personalize these small insights into different parts of a very large and diverse organization,” says Beswick. “Within technology, you tend to get a lot of introspection. A lot of very good things happen that no one talks about.”
A number of key projects kept him busy early in his tenure, including reorganizing technology teams to create more shared services for functions like infrastructure and cybersecurity to run across all divisions.
Beswick’s thinking also evolved in the cloud. The journey to the public cloud began in the mid-2010s and envisioned maintaining six global data centers, two each in the US, Europe and the APAC regions. They have since dropped to one in each market and are now working to exit data centers entirely.
Cloud migration has no fixed end date, says Beswick, with excessive costs and the risk of disrupting the entire enterprise if all systems are updated too quickly. Amazon Web Services is its main strategic partner, but Beswick hopes to go multi-cloud in the near future and works with Microsoft Azure, Google and Oracle.
“You’re always talking about picking a vendor, although I’d say AWS has been great because you feel locked in,” says Beswick.
Beswick also led the development of LenAI, the company’s internally developed creative AI tool used to summarize meetings, extract data from documents, and draft presentations and emails. Since its launch about 15 months ago, there have been 20 million requests from employees, about 500,000 every week. Large language models are leased, mostly 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 says he’s happy with the experience of building the solution, buying something off the shelf. The technology team has entered a cadence of developing new capabilities that are integrated into the tool every few weeks.
Marsh McLennan launched a creative AI “academy” to speed up training and speed up usage. About 25,000 employees use LenAI every week.
“If you want to use it, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too,” says Beswick. “There is no cost-saving target. It’s just a tool that can be useful.”
John Kell
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NEW PACKAGES
The Qualcomm-Intel merger looks shaky. Bloomberg reported Qualcomm’s interest in buying rival Intel has faded, with complications including an antitrust probe and Intel’s $50 billion in debt. Separately, the US Department of Commerce it provided nearly $7.9 billion The funding to Intel under the US CHIPS and Science Act will go toward projects at four Intel facilities in Arizona and New Mexico. Intel has said it plans to invest about $100 billion in domestic manufacturing, including new construction and renovations.
Software supply chain company hit by ransomware attack. Blue Yonder, an Arizona-based software company acquired by Panasonic in 2021, revealed that it was on due to a ransomware attack that affected a private cloud computing service that the company offers to some customers. Blue Yonder, which counts grocers and Fortune 500 companies in the US and UK as clients, has not disclosed how many of its 3,000 corporate clients were affected by the incident. However, some retailers including Starbucks and UK grocery chains Sainsbury’s and Morrisons have done so they said they had an impact and switched to security systems and in some cases manually calculating workers’ wages.
Amazon’s latest big AI bets include chips and anthropic investments. 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. as New York Times the reportsAnthropic is a customer of Amazon’s data centers, cloud computing platform and semiconductors, meaning that Anthropic puts some of its resources into Amazon as it pays for those services. Bloomberg this week has published a feature Amazon’s engineers focused on efforts to create the company’s first two generations of AI semiconductors, allowing it to compete with AI chip giant Nvidia and rely less on a market that the company is worth north of $100 billion.
THE ADOPTION CURVE
Desire to generate revenue from Gene AI beyond productivity gains. A quarterly survey A survey by Big Four accounting firm KPMG showed that while revenue generation remains the leading ROI metric for AI creation — hovering around 50% in the first three quarters of the year — productivity measures have become less emphasized, moving from 51%. in the first quarter to 36% in the third.
According to the survey, while 70% of leaders have received mandatory generative AI skills training, only 28% of the broader workforce has received the mandated training. This dual approach can fail, warns Per Edin, KPMG’s US AI leader and board member, “Organizations that don’t extend training to their broader workforce risk falling behind the adoption curve and missing out on value opportunities.”
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
– Central is looking for a field CTOin Redmond, Washington. Published Salary Range: $200K-$250K/yr.
– Jefferies is seeking a VP of health technology in investment bankingLocated in New York City. Posted Salary: $275K/yr.
– AlphaSense is Seeking a VP of IT and SecurityLocated in New York City. Published Salary Range: $250K-$299K/yr.
– TaylorMade Golf is Seeking an Associate VP of Global IT ApplicationsHeadquartered in Carlsbad, California. Published Salary Range: $215K-$275K/yr.
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