AWS Financial Services Symposium 2026 | Abhi Bakre, IBM & Kristina Welke, New York Life

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Abhi Bakre

Partner, Strategy & Transformation, Life & Annuities

IBM Consulting

Kristina Welke

Vice President, Head of Strategy, Solutions, and Marketing

New York Life

play_circle_outline IBM, AWS Partner with New York Life to Reimagine Insurance Through People-Centered Transformation

play_circle_outline From Fragmented Data to AI-Ready Culture: Treating AI Adoption as an Operating-Model Transformation

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Abhi Bakre, IBM & Kristina Welke, New York Life

AB

Abhi Bakre

Partner, Strategy & Transformation, Life & Annuities IBM Consulting

Kristina Welke

Vice President, Head of Strategy, Solutions, and Marketing New York Life

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this next segment. I would like to welcome Abhi Bakre. He is the Lead Client Partner Strategy and Transformation at IBM. Welcome.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Kristina Welke, Vice President at New York Life. Welcome.

>> Great. Thanks for having us.

>> Thanks .

Rebecca Knight

>> So why don't we start by giving our viewers a quick sense of how this collaboration between IBM, AWS, and New York Life came together. Kristina?

>> Great. Well, at New York Life, we've really been focused on service excellence and providing a different level of service for our clients, customers, and brokers. And really felt like it was a great opportunity for us to think about how do we transform the experience, really reimagine insurance. At that point, we had went out and started looking at a handful of consulting partners, and IBM was selected. What we appreciated most about their presentation and their approach was the focus on our people. At New York Life, we're very much a people first approach, not only for our employees, but also for the people we serve. And IBM brought forward a very thoughtful recommendation of how we would care for that, while re-imagining our business.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Abhi, you work across the insurance industry and you're talking to executives every day. Can you talk a little bit about the biggest challenges you're hearing from them right now when it comes to modernizing for AI?

Rebecca Knight

>> Sure, sure. So I've been serving life and annuity and group carriers for two decades. And with any other sort of technology change over the years, insurers are not really short of ideas when it comes to AI or whether it was blockchain in the past, or in the future you talk about quantum. It's really how do you take those ideas and isolate it in the use cases and really design it at scale. But more broadly, the three key areas, if you have to pin me down, one is around fragmentation of data, having that trusted source available, the people aspect and readiness around it. And then truly, how do you treat this as a broader operating model change rather than a technology transformation? Scott Berlin, President of New York Life GBS, he was at Pink yesterday giving a keynote and he made a very interesting point that buzzed across the room. It's like it's not really a technology transformation project. It's really a people transformation project. And that's been fascinating, to Kristina's point.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So those are the challenges. What are the opportunities on the flip side?

Rebecca Knight

>> The biggest opportunity, and we were very deliberate about it, everyone talks about productivity and cost takeout where the industry is focused on. We took a very growth-centric approach around how do you leverage AI to really drive our top line growth? How do you use that to drive better broker experiences, faster onboarding cycles for case setup? And then ultimately, how do you drive better servicing and claims experiences on some of the radical capabilities we are thinking about bringing to the market jointly?

Rebecca Knight

>> Kristina, you started this by talking about the goal to reimagine insurance. What were the priorities that drove the decision to pursue an AI first transformation?

Rebecca Knight

>> We believe that there's an opportunity to deliver really a streamlined insurance experience, really putting clients and customers at the front of everything we do. And that really drove a lot of our approach, our prioritization. I also mentioned before our people first approach, we believe our biggest differentiation is our people and how they serve our customers. And we really felt there was a lot of opportunity to support them, remove the manual work they do every day, enable them to provide that consultative support, be proactive versus reactive. That's what our employees were telling us. And so going into this with those two priorities, it really helped us very quickly prioritize what are the opportunities. And then to Abhi's point, really thinking about what is the benefits. And the benefits are the experience, the growth, and really better supporting the people we serve and the people that work at New York Life every day.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. So it's helping the people who, as you say, work for you, but also that your customers, your end customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> One thing that stands out about New York Life is this ambition to innovate without ripping out core systems. Can you talk a little bit about that balance, moving toward cloud native capabilities and data modernization while also keeping what is working?

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, I feel very lucky to sit here and say that we've been on our transformation journey, from a technology perspective, the last 10 years. And so we've been consolidating our systems actually moving to the cloud. We have a very large percentage, over 95% of our applications are already in the cloud. We have a centralized data hub. And so that allowed us to kind of have an advantage when we got into this work. But to your point, the technology is an enabler as is agentic. And so really balancing what are the capabilities, how do they work together? What are the investments we want to make for agentic? But then also what are additional enabler technologies that are important really helped us balance that. But we did start from a position of strength and we're able to expand from there.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we close out, I want to look at the big picture and what the future looks like for both New York Life as agentic AI and digital workers become part of how the business runs. Do you want to start, Abhi?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, sure. So I think the future is bright in the sense that I think the carriers that are truly not going to treat this as a technology transformation, like I mentioned earlier, and truly just treating it as any other automation project, but really treating this as an operating model change. And as digital workers come on board, how do you truly have responsible AI guardrails around it? How do you have better human in the loop or over the loop or around the loop? Sort of making those decisions, checking those decisions. And as you start seeing organizations move in that direction, what does that really matter in terms of transformation and outcomes that they're looking to deliver to the end customer's end of the day? Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Kristina?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. For us, we remain a people first organization that cares deeply for our consumers and clients. And to Abhi's point, we leverage that to really deliver stronger experiences, faster turnaround times, quality output. All of us like to operate in a quick, fast-paced world. And so we're able to meet that in a thoughtful way and really exceed those expectations, which in turn supports our growth and our persistency of our clients at the end of the day.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Kristina and Abhi, thank you both so much for coming on the show.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you, Rebecca.

>> Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium.

Abhi Bakre, IBM & Kristina Welke, New York Life

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this next segment. I would like to welcome Abhi Bakre. He is the Lead Client Partner Strategy and Transformation at IBM. Welcome.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> And Kristina Welke, Vice President at New York Life. Welcome.

>> Great. Thanks for having us.

>> Thanks .

Rebecca Knight

>> So why don't we start by giving our viewers a quick sense of how this collaboration between IBM, AWS, and New York Life came together. Kristina?

>> Great. Well, at New York Life, we've really been focused on service excellence and providing a different level of service for our clients, customers, and brokers. And really felt like it was a great opportunity for us to think about how do we transform the experience, really reimagine insurance. At that point, we had went out and started looking at a handful of consulting partners, and IBM was selected. What we appreciated most about their presentation and their approach was the focus on our people. At New York Life, we're very much a people first approach, not only for our employees, but also for the people we serve. And IBM brought forward a very thoughtful recommendation of how we would care for that, while re-imagining our business.

Rebecca Knight

>> So Abhi, you work across the insurance industry and you're talking to executives every day. Can you talk a little bit about the biggest challenges you're hearing from them right now when it comes to modernizing for AI?

Rebecca Knight

>> Sure, sure. So I've been serving life and annuity and group carriers for two decades. And with any other sort of technology change over the years, insurers are not really short of ideas when it comes to AI or whether it was blockchain in the past, or in the future you talk about quantum. It's really how do you take those ideas and isolate it in the use cases and really design it at scale. But more broadly, the three key areas, if you have to pin me down, one is around fragmentation of data, having that trusted source available, the people aspect and readiness around it. And then truly, how do you treat this as a broader operating model change rather than a technology transformation? Scott Berlin, President of New York Life GBS, he was at Pink yesterday giving a keynote and he made a very interesting point that buzzed across the room. It's like it's not really a technology transformation project. It's really a people transformation project. And that's been fascinating, to Kristina's point.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. So those are the challenges. What are the opportunities on the flip side?

Rebecca Knight

>> The biggest opportunity, and we were very deliberate about it, everyone talks about productivity and cost takeout where the industry is focused on. We took a very growth-centric approach around how do you leverage AI to really drive our top line growth? How do you use that to drive better broker experiences, faster onboarding cycles for case setup? And then ultimately, how do you drive better servicing and claims experiences on some of the radical capabilities we are thinking about bringing to the market jointly?

Rebecca Knight

>> Kristina, you started this by talking about the goal to reimagine insurance. What were the priorities that drove the decision to pursue an AI first transformation?

Rebecca Knight

>> We believe that there's an opportunity to deliver really a streamlined insurance experience, really putting clients and customers at the front of everything we do. And that really drove a lot of our approach, our prioritization. I also mentioned before our people first approach, we believe our biggest differentiation is our people and how they serve our customers. And we really felt there was a lot of opportunity to support them, remove the manual work they do every day, enable them to provide that consultative support, be proactive versus reactive. That's what our employees were telling us. And so going into this with those two priorities, it really helped us very quickly prioritize what are the opportunities. And then to Abhi's point, really thinking about what is the benefits. And the benefits are the experience, the growth, and really better supporting the people we serve and the people that work at New York Life every day.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. So it's helping the people who, as you say, work for you, but also that your customers, your end customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right. Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> One thing that stands out about New York Life is this ambition to innovate without ripping out core systems. Can you talk a little bit about that balance, moving toward cloud native capabilities and data modernization while also keeping what is working?

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, I feel very lucky to sit here and say that we've been on our transformation journey, from a technology perspective, the last 10 years. And so we've been consolidating our systems actually moving to the cloud. We have a very large percentage, over 95% of our applications are already in the cloud. We have a centralized data hub. And so that allowed us to kind of have an advantage when we got into this work. But to your point, the technology is an enabler as is agentic. And so really balancing what are the capabilities, how do they work together? What are the investments we want to make for agentic? But then also what are additional enabler technologies that are important really helped us balance that. But we did start from a position of strength and we're able to expand from there.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we close out, I want to look at the big picture and what the future looks like for both New York Life as agentic AI and digital workers become part of how the business runs. Do you want to start, Abhi?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, sure. So I think the future is bright in the sense that I think the carriers that are truly not going to treat this as a technology transformation, like I mentioned earlier, and truly just treating it as any other automation project, but really treating this as an operating model change. And as digital workers come on board, how do you truly have responsible AI guardrails around it? How do you have better human in the loop or over the loop or around the loop? Sort of making those decisions, checking those decisions. And as you start seeing organizations move in that direction, what does that really matter in terms of transformation and outcomes that they're looking to deliver to the end customer's end of the day? Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> Kristina?

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah. For us, we remain a people first organization that cares deeply for our consumers and clients. And to Abhi's point, we leverage that to really deliver stronger experiences, faster turnaround times, quality output. All of us like to operate in a quick, fast-paced world. And so we're able to meet that in a thoughtful way and really exceed those expectations, which in turn supports our growth and our persistency of our clients at the end of the day.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Kristina and Abhi, thank you both so much for coming on the show.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you, Rebecca.

>> Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium.