John Kreul, Chief Information Officer at Jewelers Mutual Group, said the company's AI experiments and investments will revolve around personalizing customer experiences. Kreul also said the company is building a data strategy and architecture that can adapt to new technologies.
Jewelers Mutual provides insurance for the jeweler industry for everything from personal policies to shipping and services for jewelers.
I caught up with BT150 member Kreul to talk shop. Here's a look at the takeaways.
Customer experience. Kreul said the company looks at customer experience through multiple lenses. The first is personal insurance policies for consumers, which have a different view than agents. Kreul said the employee experience is critical because they need as little friction as possible to process claims and handle calls. "The experience is very personalized based on the type of need you have," he said.
AI and how it applies to experiences. "When I think of AI, the ultimate vision is to use it for personalization and to make decisions at the point of interaction," said Kreul. "We believe AI will provide us with the information we need to personalize the experience and meet customers where they want to be met. AI is a key enabler of our strategy to create personalized, differentiated experiences for our customers."
Productivity use cases for AI. Jewelers Mutual has experiments for improving efficiency and automating multiple processes including claims. "We're doing experiments today and AI is going to be a key component of operational efficiency."
Prioritization. "Investing and experimenting in AI doesn't necessarily start with prioritization," said Kreul. "It starts with looking at the risks and opportunities and then conducting experiments. That's where we are right now. We're learning to understand the value."
He added:
"From those experiments, we'll prioritize depending on how they go. We're not putting 50 things up on the wall and saying, 'What's the perfect AI use case.' Let’s start experimenting, grow, and then evolve to create value."
Buy vs build? Kreul said the company is looking to do a little of both. For cloud computing, data processing, and large language models the plan is to buy. "What we have is our own proprietary data that we need to feed and train the models," said Kreul. "We're going to leverage capabilities from very large tech companies and then we're going to make it work within our environment and manage our data. Things that create the most value for our customers will be built. As we get closer to the customer we will differentiate with customer software."
Most valuable metrics. Jewelers Mutual focuses heavily on Net Promoter Score. "We want to understand if a customer is a promoter of our company and make sure we are investing to continue to get our score up," said Kreul.
Returns on AI projects. Kreul said it's early in the AI experiment process, but "we believe strongly that we're going to get returns on this." "Automation is absolutely going to be a return on cycle time," he said. "A key return is going to be around personalization and tailoring experiences so customers will want to use our products and services. It could lead to more growth, upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Our customers will engage and create lifetime value for our company."
Modeling risk. Kreul said the company has a team focused on modeling volatility and the effects of hurricanes and other events. "We have retail jewelers and customers that can be impacted by volatile events," he said. "We have a team that's looking at analytics and trying to predict where and when we'll need to help customers."
Budgeting for 2025 and beyond. Jewelers Mutual puts projects in three buckets: Innovation, experimentation, and investments. Augmented reality is more innovative and there's a small team doing experiments. AI is in the experiment stage, but quickly becoming an investment. "We look at different areas of the company where we want to do investments and experiments in AI," said Kreul. "We are investing heavily in preparing our data and getting it ready to train models and that'll be a foundational investment to enable experiments in AI."
Future-proofing. According to Kreul, future-proofing needs to go beyond AI. He said:
"We are architecting our environment to be microservice-based, open, and agile so we can rapidly swap components out. We have an end-to-end thought process about how we architect our systems from data to technology as well as software engineering, models, and embedding models. We're spending a ton of time to make sure we are future-ready and able to take advantage of new things because they're coming out very fast."
The human element with AI. Kreul said CxOs need to think about the human element to AI and automation and change the way they work overall. "You're not just automating the things you do today," he said. "I think you have to take a step back and really think about disrupting your processes. The people element is a key component. Change management and culture are also critical. We believe our people are our differentiators. We spend a lot of time with our teams and stakeholders on the importance of talent and how it's all going to work together.
More:
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- BT150's Ashwin Rangan on CIO evolution, technology curves and what it means for genAI deployments
- BT150 Spotlight: Sunitha Ray on the difference between enterprise AI and genAI
- How leaders need to think about AI, genAI
