As a baby rising up in Iran, Mojgan Lefebvre dreamed of turning into a health care provider. However turbulent occasions within the Center East nation led her to immigrate to the US, the place she took a realistic method to planning for her future. The associated fee to check drugs felt too prohibitive, particularly provided that Lefebvre would fund her personal training.
“Having a strong math background, everybody told me I should go into computers,” says Lefebvre. “I had never seen a computer before in my life, but I decided to take the advice.”
Lefebvre was a fast examine at Georgia Tech, the place she earned her diploma in laptop science. She started her profession as a software program engineer at BellSouth, now a part of telecommunications large AT&T, served as a guide at Bain & Firm, and took on know-how management roles with rising ranges of accountability. She served as chief info officer at three completely different corporations earlier than turning into the chief know-how and operations officer at Vacationers Corporations, the No. 99-ranked Fortune 500 insurer, in 2018.
“I would say in today’s world, the CTO and CIO titles have become interchangeable,” says Lefebvre. “I’m in charge of everything technology at Travelers, everything internal and external.”
Most just lately, her efforts have centered on strategically mapping out and deploying the insurance coverage large’s synthetic intelligence technique. A few of this work predates Lefebvre’s time at Vacationers, as the corporate had embedded machine studying and AI into its enterprise for properly over a decade. In 2020, Lefebvre created an AI-focused accelerator crew, an enterprise-wide heart of experience that centralizes efforts on the know-how.
After ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022, Vacationers wished to shortly put AI within the arms of its 30,000-plus workers. It launched TravAI, an in-house agentic AI platform meant to spice up worker productiveness, that integrates a number of generative AI instruments with inside methods. Each worker can entry TravAI after finishing a coaching program.
“It’s taken away that fear that AI is here to take away my job,” says Lefebvre.
However Lefebvre says she doesn’t wish to rack up quite a few, disparate AI use instances. The so-called “let a thousand flowers bloom” principle to permit dozens and even a whole lot of AI pilots proliferate throughout the enterprise has fallen out of favor. As know-how leaders hunt for a extra clear return on funding, which has confirmed to be elusive for a lot of, they’ve gotten much more centered.
CTOs and CIOs are specializing in fewer bets which have a larger potential to scale. At Vacationers, which means spending extra on AI instruments that may enhance claims, service administration, and bolster the corporate’s knowledge and analytics capabilities. “I don’t think a thousand little things will add up,” says Lefebvre.
Already in 2026, Lefebvre has launched two new AI instruments centered on these priorities. In January, Vacationers and Anthropic introduced that just about 10,000 of the insurer’s engineers, knowledge scientists, analysts, and product house owners would get entry to Anthropic’s customized AI assistants to hurry up software program, analytics, and ML mannequin improvement.
One month later, Vacationers debuted its AI Declare Assistant, an agentic AI software developed with OpenAI that may reply buyer declare submission questions in a “natural, friendly” tone much like what they’d anticipate from a human agent.
When Vacationers handles the primary discover of loss, which is the preliminary report a policyholder makes to an insurance coverage firm concerning an accident or different incident which will lead to compensation, round 50% have opted to go digital and file the declare within the Vacationers app. After they accomplish that, the default choice is for them to speak to the AI Declare Assistant and thus far, shoppers are exhibiting “tremendous acceptance” of those conversational AI capabilities.
To date, Lefebvre’s prime exterior companions on generative AI have been Anthropic and OpenAI. “It’s too early in the AI journey to do everything with one, so from the very beginning, we wanted to partner with the leaders in the area,” she says. “There are certainly other players, but you also don’t want to have ten different partners.”
With the conversational AI capabilities, Lefebvre felt that OpenAI was on the forefront, whereas Anthropic’s analytical, coding, and engineering capabilities are thought-about to be “absolutely ahead of others.”
Measurement of success varies throughout Lefebvre’s AI bets. For claims, for instance, Vacationers needs to cut back the time it takes to shut a declare. Monetary-related targets embrace effectivity features throughout engineering and price avoidance for any workflows that may be automated by AI. A 3rd metric that Vacationers tracks is adoption and “empowerment,” with the latter linked to the change administration that the corporate needs to see by way of embracing a brand new option to method work.
“Anything that you don’t measure can evaporate,” says Lefebvre. “You absolutely have to have some commitments in your budgets and your plans. And if you don’t do that, the benefits won’t necessarily be realized, whether it’s expense savings or growth.”
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
An enormous week for Meta. In its quest to catch as much as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google within the LLM race, Meta unveiled Musk Spark final week, the primary AI mannequin produced by its analysis unit Meta Superintelligence Labs. The Fb and Instagram mum or dad mentioned that the mannequin is aggressive with the main fashions from that trio, although it didn’t surpass them throughout the board, based on benchmark checks that Meta printed. Individually, Meta introduced a $21 billion dedication to cloud supplier CoreWeave, with new spending set to run from 2027 to 2032, as Meta has additionally been constructing out its personal AI infrastructure. The pair beforehand signed a $14.2 billion deal for computing energy in September.
Amazon’s annual shareholder letter once more focuses on AI. The Wall Road Journal notes that for 3 consecutive years, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s letter to traders has been a contemporary alternative to focus on the tech large’s imaginative and prescient on AI. He acknowledges the talk over whether or not AI’s know-how could also be over-hyped, whether or not the business is in a “bubble,” and if revenue margins and the return on invested capital shall be interesting. It gained’t shock anybody that his solutions to these questions are: no, no, and sure. Amazon, in spite of everything, has dedicated $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 alone. Different notable applied sciences that bought a shout out from Jassy embrace satellites, robotics, drone supply, and rural connectivity.
OpenAI-Elon Musk courtroom battle looms. Because the AI startup and tech entrepreneur gear as much as go to trial on April 27, OpenAI in a courtroom submitting on Friday objected to the altering targets that had been filed earlier within the week by Elon Musk’s authorized crew. Musk initially sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2024 over claims associated to the ChatGPT maker changing from a analysis nonprofit to a for-profit enterprise. However final week, Musk’s legal professionals mentioned that any cash he wins at trial ought to return to OpenAI as an alternative of him and that he needs the courtroom to unwind OpenAI’s conversion and power the ouster of CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI has mentioned that these late proposals had been “legally improper and factually unsupported.” The Monetary Occasions, in the meantime, has just lately reported that Musk has been shedding instances in courtroom.
All of the swirl round Anthropic’s new AI mannequin. Anthropic’s newest AI mannequin Mythos is making fairly the splash—greater than most—as cybersecurity consultants have warned that the brand new mannequin’s potential to take advantage of software program vulnerabilities may result in extra advanced cyberattacks on legacy banking methods. Fortune reported on the dangers from quite a lot of vantage factors: the focus of AI energy that’s within the arms of a single firm, how the U.S. authorities ought to take into consideration insurance policies to control these new capabilities, and the way different enterprises ought to react. The brand new mannequin additionally comes as Anthropic is having what appears to be like like, on paper, to be a reasonably stellar yr. The corporate has hit a $30 billion annual recurring income run charge and is reportedly planning to launch an preliminary public providing this yr.
ADOPTION CURVE
Belief boundaries are slowing AI adoption. Almost six in ten corporations acknowledge that they’ve stalled AI tasks, with the most important boundaries stopping adoption together with considerations about knowledge privateness and safety (34%), explainability (30%), mannequin transparency (28%), and regulatory uncertainty (27%), based on a current examine of two,000 leaders throughout the U.S. and U.Ok. commissioned by software program firm Gong.
Chris Peake, chief belief officer at Gong, tells Fortune that the examine discovered little or no variation in AI-related belief considerations throughout each areas. He suggested that enterprises and AI distributors must be extra communicative in the beginning of a brand new mission to set clear parameters about how knowledge is used, how massive language fashions work, and what safety protocols are in place. Assuaging these considerations is very crucial in extremely regulated industries like monetary companies and healthcare, Peake added.
“Rather than wait, just fuel the front end of exploration,” says Peake. “Let people dive in and use it.”
A few of the prime assurances that leaders had been on the lookout for, based on the examine, embrace explainability and the flexibility to articulate AI-derived outputs (26%), the flexibility to elucidate AI mannequin guardrails defending knowledge (25%), built-in safety ensures (23%), and third-party audits or certification (23%).
Courtesy of Gong
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
– Polsinelli is looking for a CIO, based mostly in Kansas Metropolis. Posted wage vary: $350K-$525K/yr.
– Nationwide Life Group is looking for a CTO, based mostly in Montpelier, Vermont. Posted wage vary: $300K-$440K/yr.
– SMX is looking for a SVP of know-how technique. Posted wage vary: $246.1K-$393.8K/yr.
– Goodr is looking for a VP of know-how, based mostly in Los Angeles. Posted wage vary: $195K-$220K/yr.
Employed:
– Autodesk appointed Mike Kelly as CIO, efficient April 13, main enterprise know-how technique, AI adoption, and the digital worker expertise for the design software program firm. Most just lately, Kelly served as working associate and the primary CIO on the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz. He additionally beforehand held CIO roles at Pink Hat and McKesson.
– Pep Boys introduced the appointment of Nik Umrani as CIO. Earlier than becoming a member of the automotive companies supplier, he served as world CIO at NSM Insurance coverage Group. Umrani has additionally held senior management roles at Comcast, ADT, and Verizon Communications.
– SailPoint appointed Levent Besik as chief product officer, the place he’ll lead the safety software program firm’s product group and report back to CTO Chandra Gnanasambandam. Most just lately, Besik served as VP of product administration for Microsoft’s identification division. He additionally held government product management roles at Okta and Google.
– TAP Actual Property named Jeff Jarrard as CTO, the place he’ll lead the buildout and improvement of the actual property firm’s web site, centered on home-owner reporting, property valuation, and cloud-based residence administration. Jarrard spent greater than 12 years at Microsoft in senior roles throughout utilized AI, knowledge science, and product administration. He additionally labored at Washington Mutual Financial institution.
– Wetour Robotics appointed Bin Lian as CTO, the place he’ll oversee the engineering crew and oversee improvement of the wearable robotics firm’s core merchandise. Till just lately, Lian had been centered on his tutorial profession and is a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at The College of Texas at Austin.
– AppLovin has introduced CTO Basil Shikin will transfer into the function of distinguished engineer, efficient July 1, and shall be succeeded by Giovanni Ge, the corporate’s present chief product and engineering officer. Ge has held numerous senior engineering roles since becoming a member of AppLovin in November 2022.
