Paul Beswick on AI development costs
From AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick · · Enterprise AI Innovators
“Increasingly the cost of the meeting to discuss what you're going to build is more than the cost of building the thing. And one of the things that's even higher cost in a lot of companies is the months of negotiation to get budget to even start thinking about doing anything at all.”
On , Paul Beswick, SVP, Chief Information & Operations Officer at Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., spoke about AI development costs during AI Beyond Enterprise Speed with Marsh SVP & Chief Information and Operations Officer Paul Beswick on Enterprise AI Innovators.
About Paul Beswick
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.