John Doyle, President and CEO of global insurance and reinsurance broking group Marsh, said he expects the firm to be an “AI winner,” as it leverages its scale and capacity to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) to drive even greater value, from its proprietary data assets to its role as a trusted advisor to clients.
John Doyle MarshDuring the firm’s recent earnings call, Doyle outlined that Marsh’s AI strategy is focused on three core pillars: growth, productivity, and efficiency.
He said, “The first pillar is growth. We are building AI-enabled applications and services that are generating new revenue streams, as well as enhancing world-class capabilities and data-driven insights in insurance, health, human capital, and investments. Examples of these products include ADA, Centris, Euclid, and GC Quote Box, and many more of these applications are in development.
“We also see significant AI growth opportunities in consulting. Oliver Wyman’s AI Quotient team, created to help clients deploy their own AI strategies, is our fastest-growing practice. We’re advising clients in multiple sectors such as banking, energy, government, and manufacturing, on AI and workforce transformation. We’ve already advised on more than $50 billion of capital investment in AI deployment, and Mercer is working with clients to assess and inventory skills, redesign jobs, as AI is integrated into ways of working.”
Doyle noted that its second pillar, productivity, is focused on deploying AI capabilities to enhance colleague performance.
“A good example of our work is embedding AI in our client management tools and developing AI agents to help colleagues source and pre-qualify leads to support sales productivity,” he explained.
Doyle continued, “The final pillar is efficiency. Across our business, we are starting to see the impact of AI automation. A critical reason for creating our Business and Client Services Unit, or BCS, is to exploit the efficiency potential of AI. By consolidating our back-office operations and technology into scalable centres, BCS is accelerating the pace of AI-driven automation and process re-engineering.
“For instance, our document ingestion capability is now handling thousands of documents weekly, already improving efficiency in these processes by 20% and enhancing the quality of the data and its usability to further support clients with valuable insights. We are beginning to reduce the cost and time associated with upgrading code to modernise applications. For example, we recently used AI to turn a legacy tool into a newly designed broker workbench in days, saving months of team effort. We have deployed agentic AI in our IT help desk, significantly reducing inquiries, improving colleague experience, and creating downstream efficiencies in our support centres. In our policy renewal centre, AI has enabled us to transform a traditionally manual, email-heavy process into a streamlined digital solution in weeks, a project that otherwise would have taken many months. AI-enabled savings will fuel additional growth investments, including in producer talent and new capabilities, building our confidence in continued margin improvement.”
Doyle emphasised that AI will help Marsh serve clients with bespoke and complex needs even better, but it will not replace the trusted advice, expertise, and capabilities it delivers.
During the call, business leaders from across the wider Marsh organisation also shared insights into how the firm is investing in AI and how this is enhancing the value it delivers.
Nick Studer, President & CEO of Marsh Risk, commented on Claims IQ, its proprietary AI-driven tool, noting that the firm has several thousand colleagues now drawing on AI-enabled analysis of almost $200 billion of loss information, which helps them provide better client advice, decision-making, and advocacy.
Studer commented, “AI investments are massively enabling growth, productivity and efficiency. So we’re investing heavily in our digital plan experience. We have a suite of tools, as you may have seen for many years in Blue[i] and in Centris, we’re evolving these into what we call the Marsh Risk Companion, which will help clients understand and analyse their risks and their options across a wider range of their activities. But what’s really crucial about the suite of tools is they’re now all feeding off a new analytics engine, and it’s built from the ground up to leverage AI at scale. One of the things here is you’re able to leapfrog AI, and we call it the Marsh Risk Cortex, it really pulls together everything we need, from our massive data sets and our most advanced models. And the crucial thing is not what features we have got, but it’s the speed and the flexibility with which we can launch new applications, because our clients’ needs are evolving rapidly and new needs are emerging.”
Dean Klisura, President and CEO of Guy Carpenter, mentioned how GC Quote Box, its AI-driven document ingestion tool, is a game changer for the firm.
“We receive huge quantities of unstructured data from our clients. This tool helps us ingest all of that data and makes it more efficient to match risk and capital, which will improve turnaround times, make our teams and brokers more efficient, and deliver better outcomes for our clients,” said Klisura.
Pat Tomlinson, President and CEO of Mercer, pointed out that Mercer Fiber is a valuable tool leveraging the broader AI stack at Marsh to further enhance its existing digital tools.
Tomlinson explained, “So health consultants leverage Fiber when they’re working directly with a client. It enables them to have these real-time, iterative discussions on all aspects of their benefit programs, with incredibly powerful scenario planning and modelling during strategy sessions. What we do is we use Fiber throughout the year as well to help with budget tracking, updates, benchmarking, and plan management activities. And what it does is it allows us to visually display these insights and the data from across our health and benefits practice, and then it combines it with the client’s actual population and their actual claims data. And that allows us to understand and show clients directly the geographic differences in healthcare costs and quality based on their actual data, and we can do that live. It allows us to identify the most effective healthcare options for a specific population. This is differentiating us in the market by showcasing our capabilities. We’ve got the insights in a single, integrated platform that is very client-specific and targeted, making it highly client-centric.”
Ted Moynihan, recently appointed President and CEO of Oliver Wyman, noted that its AI Quotient platform is its fastest-growing capability. He highlighted that AI is developing into a very large opportunity for the firm as a consulting business focused on strategy and transformation.
“AI is helping us deliver more value to clients. Just to give you one example, in our private capital business, where Quotient diligence is changing the way we help our clients invest in businesses, we’re using very sophisticated tools to do market analysis, competitive analysis, and growth opportunity analysis. That allows our clients to make better—and, if they want to, quicker—investment decisions in the private capital world,” said Moynihan.
