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Paul Beswick on AI project management

From AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick · · Enterprise AI Innovators

“I think my main advice would be break those three into 20 each and do them sequentially one at a time. We've got to break these big projects. They are designed to fail. You can't show momentum that way. It doesn't fit with what people want to see and they create a dynamic that accumulates risk and drag and increases the odds of it's an it adds cost and risk at the same time.”

Paul Beswick
SVP, Chief Information & Operations Officer, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.
AI project managementinnovation strategyrisk management

On , Paul Beswick, SVP, Chief Information & Operations Officer at Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., spoke about AI project management during AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick on Enterprise AI Innovators.

AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick
Watch on YouTube at 20:48
AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick
Watch on YouTube at 20:48
On the 68th episode of Enterprise AI Innovators, host Saam Motamedi (General Partner, Greylock Partners) talks with Paul Beswick, SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer at Marsh, about building production-grade AI tooling in days, why a portfolio of twenty small sequential projects beats three big flagship ones, and what the scaffolding around the firm's internal LenAI tool taught Marsh about agent harnesses and operational AI. 00:00 Introduction / title animation 00:47 Three interesting things 01:45 Paul’s career / background 02:35 Marsh scope and scale 0:3:33 Voice crowdsourcing at Marsh 05:45 Small AI hacks, compound impact 09:10 Building LenAI before MCP 13:25 Document AI in insurance 16:03 Rethinking AI ROI and budgets 19:55 Lightning round 23:48 Outro / closing remarks Quick Hits from Paul: On staying current as a CIOO: "I code probably weekly if not more." On building scrappy versus buying commercial: "We only lag by a few months, and it costs a lot less to do it this way." On a new CIO's first three AI projects: "Break those three into 20 each and do them sequentially, one at a time." Book Recommendation: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Paul Beswick

About Paul Beswick

SVP, Chief Information & Operations Officer · Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.

Paul Beswick, SVP and Chief Information and Operations Officer at Marsh, discussed the firm's approach to AI deployment in a May 2026 episode of the Enterprise AI Innovators podcast. He described the rapid development of Marsh's internal AI tool, LenAI, which was built in a few days and rolled out firm-wide. Beswick said the tool led to the creation of document processing, translation, and summarization capabilities, as well as connectors to data and office software. He characterized this infrastructure as "scaffolding" that could support future commercial tools or industrialized use cases. Beswick also commented on organizational dynamics around AI projects. He stated that "the cost of the meeting to discuss what you're going to build is more than the cost of building the thing" and criticized "multimonth negotiation processes" for budget approval. He advised breaking large projects into smaller sequential ones, saying "break those three into 20 each and do them sequentially one at a time." Beswick noted that the insurance industry is "document heavy" and that Marsh is focused on document ingestion and automated routing of information.

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