AWS Financial Services Symposium | John Napoli | The Guardian Life Insurance Company & Brian Jakovich

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John Napoli

Head of Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, and Delivery

The Guardian Life Insurance Company

Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium

Cloud spending in the financial services industry has been on a growth curve, and Amazon Web Services Inc. has gained momentum in this sector. For financial services companies, broader cloud adoption has led to a heightened focus on data and new ways to organize and manage vast amounts of information to create intelligent solutions using AI.How the financial world is leveraging data to transform operations and increase customer value was a central focus of theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Financial Services Symposium. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, provided insights through interviews with company executives, customers and partners. (* Disclosure below

Guardian Life’s digital leap: AI Factory and the power of cloud integration

The financial services industry is undergoing a significant transformation driven by the integration of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence. These technologies are reshaping traditional sectors such as insurance by enhancing operational efficiency, enabling rapid innovation, and fostering a data-driven culture.Initially rooted in traditional insurance practices, Guardian Life Insurance Co. has made significant strides in embracing digital transformation

play_circle_outline The partnership between Guardian and Vertical Relevance

play_circle_outline The challenges and opportunities of adopting AI in the insurance industry

play_circle_outline The strategy for generative AI at Guardian

play_circle_outline The cultural change and education needed for AI adoption at Guardian

Info

John Napoli | The Guardian Life Insurance Company & Brian Jakovich | Vertical Relevance

John Napoli

Head of Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, and Delivery The Guardian Life Insurance Company

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

>> Good evening AWS fans and welcome back to New York City. We are here at AWS Financial Services Symposium. My name's Savannah Peterson here for theCUBE, but very delighted to be joined by John and Brian. Thank you both for coming to hang out with me this evening.

>> Thank you. Appreciate you having us.

>> Thanks for having us.

>> How's the day been for you?

>> Pretty fantastic. So, came about noon. We had a nice little lunch with some other insurance clients, then saw some of the great sessions. Saw some good ideas.

>> I feel like I've learned a lot today, which is awesome. Tell me a little bit about Guardian.

>> Okay, yeah, so I work for a company, Guardian Life Insurance, Fortune 250 insurance company. We have about $800 billion in life insurance in force.

>> Which is an incredible amount.

>> It is. So, if you think about life insurance, a quick tangent, life insurance in the US pays out about $800 billion a year actually in benefits, whereas social security is about $1.2 trillion, so it's kind of on that comparable kind of size.

>> Wow.

>> Really critical to the economy, but people don't think about that a lot.

>> Well, now I'm going to be thinking about it, thanks to you.

>> Sure.

>> Wow, that's actually really cool. Vertical Relevance, in case the audience isn't aware, give us the breakdown.

>> So, we're a boutique business and technology consulting firm, where we really focus on half of our business is financial services advisory and then their other half is AWS consultant. So, the idea is to take those two, combine them, and then work with large financial services customers, like Guardian, help them work on their AWS cloud and what they want to build to enable their business.

>> So, you really sit at the epicenter of everything that we've been talking about today?

>> Pretty much.

>> This is kind of your day.

>> Yeah, this in my day.

>> I love it. Well, I'm glad we could share it. Tell me a little bit about the partnership, John, how did you all end up working together?

>> Yeah, so we are about 160 year old company and so we have a lot of technology that-

>> Wow, I didn't realize Guardian was-

>> Yeah, a little older. It was started by a German banker on Wall Street actually, but-

>> Something about that really lines up.

>> Yep, over drinks or something.

>> There's something in that that really makes sense.

>> By Hugo. So, we have a lot of technology that powers a lot of what we do. We are all across the United States, and so we have a lot of heritage technology and a lot of very modern technology. So, in 2018, fun fact that the CIO of the organization for Guardian, actually the keynote at AWS re:Invent, because we had moved about 80% of our technology onto the cloud or 80% of our apps onto the cloud. So, partners like Vertical Relevance really helped give us extra capacity and also some really good industry knowledge to help us do things like that.

>> Yeah, to make that transition. I would imagine that's a bit of a lift.

>> Yeah. Yes.

>> Yeah. I mean Guardian's a great company, you guys are really leading on the forefront of AWS, certainly for the insurance industry, probably a lot of financial services. So, as you guys are getting more involved in let's say generative AI and other areas, that's where we're helping and accelerating the efforts. So, it's been a great partnership.

>> I think that was the longest we've gotten in an interview today without saying AI, and I just want to say I'm proud of us. That was great.

>> I focus on Guardian's a great company and so give them a little bit of money on the side after the fact, but it's fine.

>> So, when I think of life insurance, well, I think of a couple of things, but I don't necessarily think of insurance companies, and I say this with absolute love, as being on the crest of the wave of technology adoption. We have nothing else because of regulation and a lot of other things and compliance. What's your strategy for generative AI and were you even thinking about it before November of '22?

>> Yeah, so I actually spent my entire career in banking, last 10 years at JPMorgan Chase. And so, I moved to about nine, 10 months ago to Guardians. So, similar to you, I wasn't sure what to expect. What I came into was a real business and I think maybe different than a lot of other insurance companies, maybe not. I came into an organization that really wanted to transform, so you can do nothing in some of these industries and really have good returns over a long period of time. What's good about Guardian, they want to cannibalize what they're doing. They want to invest more. And so, overall, my AI strategy is to one, we want to make this organization be a data and an AI-driven company. So, you think about a company that's 160 plus years old, how did they get there? Because they do so well on the business side of things. So, the reason we're doing that is because we think that AI and data can power kind of our overall objectives despite AI. And so if you think about the Fortune 500 companies 20 years ago, it's companies like Exxon and Walmart and others. Look at it now, it's Amazon, it's Google.

>> It's changed a little bit. Yeah.

>> It's very different. So, we want to be along the lines of that. There are certain areas we're investing in very heavily, so around the sales cycle and the front of what I call the funnel, sales and distribution, that's where we're going to spend a lot of time on AI. And the way we're going about it is we're building what I call an AI factory. So, picture you have a Twinkle in your eye, it goes into the factory, it has all the capabilities and things you need and things like responsible AI to do the right thing and spit out good results very quickly. So, that's how we think about it at the organization.

>> I think that's particularly critical when we're talking about something like life insurance because rates depend on a lot of factors, and I mean obviously there's the investment aspect of that, but there's multiple components. And I think making sure you can trust that AI factory has got to be critical, especially for a-

>> 100%. And part of it is, like I said, we do so well as a business, how do you not break what exists while you're actually also innovative is really important.

>> Right. Yeah, I mean there's a healthy and interesting tension there. I imagine you get to see a lot of that healthy tension, Brian. What was your strategy? Were you anticipating this gen AI push before it happened or was it a little bit of a whiplash, like it kind of was for all of us?

>> Yeah, so I mean AI has certainly been very prevalent all through financial services, it's been cornerstone in trading and the rest of these parts of other industries. But for us, generative AI popped up very quickly. Went from nothing to ChatGPT coming out, and then that kind of accelerated everything. So, ever since then a lot of our customers have really been focused in on that, how they can take certain parts of their business and then look to accelerate with generative AI, more so typically in marketing and sales efforts of how to basically generate revenue. And then, slowly moving into more customer-facing type of activities. So, it's certainly been a very fast-paced year to say the least and it's very exciting.

>> Yeah, it must be very exciting. Are you noticing a lot of... What's the attitude around it? You're implementing with a lot of different people. Is everyone excited? Are they overwhelmed? Are they nervous? What's it like working with John? Was he nervous? No, I'm kidding.

>> John was a cool character, but everybody else just going crazy. Yeah, just the speed in which... The boards are saying, "Hey, what are you doing about generative AI?" To every single executive that's out there. And then, they're trying to think about, "Okay, how do I implement this? How do I put the foundations in place? How do I put the factory in place? And then, how do I start to look through the business use cases of something that's actually going to be relevant to my customers rather than just another toy?" So, it's really trying to balance between the science experiments and the things that actually generate revenue. And then, also how to deal with the compliance aspects, which I know John certainly has to deal with as well. So, it's all those difficulties of moving it together and how do you make continual progress in something that matters. So, we're seeing a lot of movement and there's a lot of interesting stuff being built, and I think Guardian is ahead of the curve as usual.

>> So, one of the things I'd add to that is it's such a catalyst for change. AI is a tool that is really driving a lot of conversations that I've never had before. So, I kind of use the analogy, you have more power in your hands than you've ever had before and you'll have more tomorrow. But by the Apple kind of bad commercial, that kind of crunches everything into your phone.

>> The commercial that broke every creative. Sorry.

>> It's fine.

>> All at once. But they've done it in reverse, should have done it in reverse, it would have been amazing.

>> Exactly.

>> Simple fix on editing.

>> But the reality is, so when you think about an organization like ours, you look at every aspect of the organization from, yes, technology, but from marketing, sales, legal, risk, HR, compliance, front office, how are you using that technology to do things differently? Are you or are you doing the same thing you were doing 20 years ago? And so, it's created all these conversations. Whether you're not using AI or not, we're talking about transformation now. Whereas in the past it was, "Okay, here's my business and technology is kind of empowering that." It's totally different conversations because there's a little bit of magic in it so people are like, I don't have to worry about implementing it, it'll just happen. So, it's an interesting time right now.

>> Right. It is a really interesting time. You're bringing up a really good point. I used to work in 3D printing. And when I started in 3D printing, my boss at the time mentioned how when we get computers and what did we do with them? We did what we had done before, which was write letters. We just called it email. So, I feel like we're in that era right now a little bit with AI where it's like, oh, we're prompting it something that we could have asked Google to do, but we're not getting that Z access, that kind of bigger picture of everything else that's going on. What's the culture of adoption in terms of AI literacy within Guardian?

>> So, to your point, I mean, so what we're talking about is it's a cultural change. And so, when you think about an organization of let's say even 10,000 people, you have to think about everybody's kind of moving at a little bit different pace, but it is definitely a multi-year kind of a thing. So, if you look at an organization like Amazon or Google or Microsoft, where AI is in their DNA, so that's kind of the hammer they hit every single nail with. If you look at an older insurance company, it's not. So, you have to start saying, "Okay, if I'm a technologist, how do I start my solutions? How do I start using AI?" If I'm in the business, how do I start thinking differently to say, "Oh wow, maybe I don't need to write that myself. I can actually use generative to build it for me." So, we're going about now those education of everybody and it's a multi-year thing to say, okay, everybody needs to know the basics of AI, data scientists needs to know much more, engineers might need to know even more. We're being very thoughtful about how to do that. So, it's kind of a three-phase thing. This year is about laying the foundation data foundation was kind of laid ideally previously, AI foundation this year, next year scaling pretty fast. And then, hopefully, two years from now we're kind of more of that core data and AI's in our blood.

>> Right. It's really interesting when I'll ask parents on the desk sometimes, "What's the conversation like about AI at the dinner table with your family?" And they're like, it's not AI to them, it's just built in. And to AI natives, it's a wild thing to think about, honestly. I am curious from your perspective, Brian, when you're thinking about how to best able or empower your team to be successful with all of your customers, how are you deciding which of these new technologies is worth investing time and resources and energy into versus not?

>> It's tough. It's very tough. There's new either commercial or open source technologies that are coming out every day. There's a new model. The latest, greatest model comes out every other week. You have to keep track of what are you using now and how does it fit into the overall grand scheme of things. So, really the way that we looked at is to come up with some core, let's say patterns in which you would develop an architecture. And then, where do you start flipping out the different technologies? So, one of the core concepts that we build all the time is what they call is RAG or retrieval of generation. So, as long as you operate in that confines, at least for a generative, maybe not all, but a decent amount of generative AI solutions, you can start to move in the models in and out. And that's where we can say, "Okay, as long as we understand RAG, then we can start to keep track of what the latest model is to start training up the team." So, we invested very heavily in building X number of training programs. So, we put our teams through, whether it's to say, "Here's how you can code faster using productivity type of generative AI," or, "Here's how you can use the models to make yourself successful." So, it's hard keeping up, but we focus on the patterns and that's been-

>> That makes a lot of sense, and it strategically is probably exactly why you're where you are, which is also is no wonder... All right, last question for both of you because this has been fun and flown by. What do you hope to be able to say next time I have the luxury of interviewing you at this event, a year from now, that you can't yet say today?

>> Interesting. So, I guess when I look at this space, specifically generative AI, so first of all, we talked about the data and AI culture and being AI and data first, but what I would say is generative AI specifically is a very immature technology that's being rolled out at scale. So, what I want to be able to say next time is that we have plenty of use cases that are driving real business value, that we have the underlying capabilities in place that are repeatable as part of that factory to say, "We now feel very comfortable that you want to do something," you're able to do it very fast. You're able to do it in a very meaningful way that actually impacts real business value. The other thing I'd love to say is that is democratized or empowering the whole organization, so that's just not, I have to call a technology to have them go build something from me on AI. It's I, as a marketing team, a legal team, a HR team, feel that on a daily basis my job has changed and has empowered me to do my job much easier and much more effectively than a year or two or three ago.

>> That's awesome. All right. Well, I look forward to hearing you say that next June. My gosh, I almost just called it May, which would've been missed the second today. Time is moving so fast.

>> .

>> I appreciate that.

>> Fake.

>> We're losing track.

>> I think the guest thought I was insane. That's all that is says, right? Anyway, Brian, what about you?

>> Well, I'd like John to be able to say exactly and that we helped him do it. But overall, we want to be a leader in the generative AI space and really focusing on the financial services customers. Going from not having science project type of use cases to real use cases that generate revenue and that we're driving that. And kind of looking past what's currently capable right now and what could be done that generative AI opens up in the future. So, that's our focus.

>> I love it.

>> Also, happy to tell you that if Vertical Relevance gave us a 20% discount a year from now.

>> I love it. Oh, man.

>> We'll see. We'll see.

>> That is the end .

>> .

>> And when this is the most popular video that comes out of either of your companies this year, we'll all get a nice little bonus. So, win-win for everyone.

>> Done. Sounds like a plan.

>> I love it. We're all winning and hopefully, you're all winning at home. John and Brian, thank you so much for being here with me.

>> Thank you.

>> This has been absolutely fantastic.

>> Appreciate it, Savannah.

>> And thank all of you for tuning into our 15 fabulous segments here in New York City at AWS Financial Services Symposium. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

John Napoli | The Guardian Life Insurance Company & Brian Jakovich | Vertical Relevance

>> The AWS Financial Services Symposium, presented by theCUBE.

>> Thank you. Appreciate you having us.

>> Thanks for having us.

>> How's the day been for you?

>> Pretty fantastic. So, came about noon. We had a nice little lunch with some other insurance clients, then saw some of the great sessions. Saw some good ideas.

>> I feel like I've learned a lot today, which is awesome. Tell me a little bit about Guardian.

>> Okay, yeah, so I work for a company, Guardian Life Insurance, Fortune 250 insurance company. We have about $800 billion in life insurance in force.

>> Which is an incredible amount.

>> Wow.

>> Really critical to the economy, but people don't think about that a lot.

>> Well, now I'm going to be thinking about it, thanks to you.

>> Sure.

>> Wow, that's actually really cool. Vertical Relevance, in case the audience isn't aware, give us the breakdown.

>> So, you really sit at the epicenter of everything that we've been talking about today?

>> Pretty much.

>> This is kind of your day.

>> Yeah, this in my day.

>> I love it. Well, I'm glad we could share it. Tell me a little bit about the partnership, John, how did you all end up working together?

>> Yeah, so we are about 160 year old company and so we have a lot of technology that-

>> Wow, I didn't realize Guardian was-

>> Yeah, a little older. It was started by a German banker on Wall Street actually, but-

>> Something about that really lines up.

>> Yep, over drinks or something.

>> There's something in that that really makes sense.

>> Yeah, to make that transition. I would imagine that's a bit of a lift.

>> Yeah. Yes.

>> I think that was the longest we've gotten in an interview today without saying AI, and I just want to say I'm proud of us. That was great.

>> I focus on Guardian's a great company and so give them a little bit of money on the side after the fact, but it's fine.

>> It's changed a little bit. Yeah.

>> 100%. And part of it is, like I said, we do so well as a business, how do you not break what exists while you're actually also innovative is really important.

>> The commercial that broke every creative. Sorry.

>> It's fine.

>> All at once. But they've done it in reverse, should have done it in reverse, it would have been amazing.

>> Exactly.

>> Simple fix on editing.

>> That's awesome. All right. Well, I look forward to hearing you say that next June. My gosh, I almost just called it May, which would've been missed the second today. Time is moving so fast.

>> .

>> I appreciate that.

>> Fake.

>> We're losing track.

>> I think the guest thought I was insane. That's all that is says, right? Anyway, Brian, what about you?

>> I love it.

>> Also, happy to tell you that if Vertical Relevance gave us a 20% discount a year from now.

>> I love it. Oh, man.

>> We'll see. We'll see.

>> That is the end .

>> .

>> And when this is the most popular video that comes out of either of your companies this year, we'll all get a nice little bonus. So, win-win for everyone.

>> Done. Sounds like a plan.

>> I love it. We're all winning and hopefully, you're all winning at home. John and Brian, thank you so much for being here with me.

>> Thank you.

>> This has been absolutely fantastic.

>> Appreciate it, Savannah.