Paul Beswick first joined Marsh McLennan in 1995 when he took a summer job at the insurance brokerage and management consulting firm. He’s never left and for the past five years has led a team of over 5,000 technologists as global chief information officer.
“My job has not really been to get deep into the details of what projects are being done,” says Beswick. “We have business unit CIOs who do that. They're much better at it than I would be.”
For most of his career at Marsh McLennan, Beswick worked for the management consulting business Oliver Wyman, specializing in the retail sector. He was a consultant for more than two decades, longer than Beswick intended, because he enjoyed helping retailers implement technology solutions.
Beswick became CIO in January 2021 and since then has focused on building a culture that promotes sharing the best ideas that can solve technology needs for all four of the company’s business divisions, which include Marsh, Guy Carpenter, Mercer, and Oliver Wyman. Those businesses bring together more than 85,000 colleagues that offer risk, strategy, and talent management services, generating $23 billion in annual revenue, placing Marsh McLennan at 180 on the Fortune 500.
Each Friday morning, Beswick hosts a conversation with a colleague to talk about their career history, what work they are doing at Marsh McLennan, and what they do during their free time. The company hosts monthly tech talks centered on business themes like cybersecurity and cloud FinOps, the latter an operational framework that helps companies manage their cloud costs.
“It’s a fantastic way to get these little views into different parts of a very big business and diverse organization and personalize it,” says Beswick. “Within technology, you tend to get a lot of introverts. There’s a lot of really good stuff that happens that no one talks about.”
A few key projects that kept him busy early in his tenure as CIO included reorganizing the technology teams to create more shared services, for functions like infrastructure and cybersecurity, to run across all the various divisions.
Beswick’s thinking also evolved on cloud. The journey to the public cloud began in the middle of the 2010s and envisioned retaining six global data centers, two apiece in the U.S., Europe, and APAC regions. They’ve since dropped down to one in each market and are now working to exit data centers entirely.
The migration to cloud has no firm end date, says Beswick, who is wary of overspending and of the risk of disrupting the full enterprise if every system is updated too quickly. Amazon Web Services is his main strategic partner, but Beswick expects to be multi-cloud for the foreseeable future and works with Microsoft Azure, Google, and Oracle.
”You're always squarely about picking one vendor—although I'd say AWS has been great—just because you feel sort of locked in,” says Beswick.
Beswick also led the development of LenAI, the company’s internally developed generative AI tool that’s used to summarize meetings, pull data from documents, and write drafts of presentations and emails. Since it rolled out roughly 15 months ago, 20 million requests have come in from employees, at a rate of about 500,000 each week. The large language models are rented, 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 about the experience of building the solution versus buying something off the shelf. The technology team has since gotten into a cadence of developing new capabilities that are built into the tool every few weeks.
Marsh McLennan launched a generative AI “academy” to speed up training and accelerate usage. Around 25,000 employees use LenAI each week.
“If you want to use it, great. If you don’t, that’s fine too,” says Beswick. "There's no cost savings target. It's just a tool that could be useful.”
John Kell
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