AI in the cloud pays dividends for Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual is one of the most experienced and advanced cloud adopters in the nation. And that is in no small part thanks to the vision of James McGlennon, who in his role as CIO of Liberty Mutual for past 17 years has led the charge to the cloud, analytics, and AI with a budget north of $2 billion. Eight years ago, McGlennon hosted an off-site think tank with his staff and came up with a “technology manifesto document” that defined in those early days the importance of exploiting cloud-based services, becoming more agile, and instituting cultural changes to drive the company’s digital transformation. Today, Liberty Mutual, which has 45,000 employees across 29 countries, has a robust hybrid cloud infrastructure built primarily on Amazon Web Services but with specific uses of Microsoft Azure and, lesser so, Google Cloud Platform. Liberty Mutual’s cloud infrastructure runs an array of business applications and analytics dashboards that yield real-time insights and predictions, as well as machine learning models that streamline claims processing. As the Boston-based insurance company’s journey to the cloud has unfolded, it has also maintained a select set of datacenters from which to run legacy applications more economically than they would on the cloud, as well as software from vendors that make licensing on the cloud less attractive. And while McGlennon believes that will change over time, he is far more focused on technologies that will define the next generation of applications. “We’re really trying to understand the metaverse and what it might mean for us,” says McGlennon, whose mild Irish brogue bares his Galway, Ireland, upbringing. “We’re focused on augmented reality and virtual reality. We’re doing a lot on AI and machine learning and robotics. We’ve already built up blockchain and we’ll continue with all those.”