From AI Activity to Real Impact with Jay Bell from Zurich North America.

0:00James Benham: Hey, we train 2 ,000 people. Okay, great. What can they do today that they couldn't do before?

0:04Jay Bell: Because you have this thing that threatens to either be our best friend or the destroyer of all worlds.

0:10James Benham: We did that with no mandate, no money, and we got to over 1 ,400 members within like a three-month period.

0:15Jay Bell: A goat does not care about your strategy. It doesn't.

0:18James Benham: Why were you expecting something different when we've done all these similar efforts over the last 20 years? The only thing different now is the tooling.

0:26Jay Bell: On this episode of the InsureTech Geek Podcast, live from ITC Las Vegas, we explore AI insurance transformation and how to turn technology into measurable impact with Jay Bell, COO and Head of Business Transformation, Global Construction Insurity at Zurich, North America.

0:53Jay Bell: the insure tech geek podcast is all about insurance and how it's being transformed by technology

0:59James Benham: join us on a disruptive journey interviewing the leading voices of the insurance industry from all around the world so enjoy the ride and geek out Tara. This week's episode sponsor is revolutionizing the world of workers' compensation claims and policy management. Tara's cutting-edge platform empowers insurers with comprehensive benchmarking tools, robust management systems, and an integrated ancillary services marketplace. Discover how Tara is driving innovation and efficiency in workers' comp at tara.insure.

1:33Jay Bell: Jay, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on. Thank you so much.

1:36James Benham: Appreciate it.

1:37Jay Bell: Yeah, so we're here in beautiful Las Vegas. I'm guessing this is not your first time in Las Vegas. It is not. Is it your 200th time?

1:45James Benham: It's probably close, yeah. I mean, I've been to this conference alone probably at least 10 times, and then I've been here to Vegas a few other times as well.

1:51Jay Bell: If you're in global construction and surety, you're here a lot, because I was telling you before that I spend a lot of time in construction. I started a construction bidding and pre-qualification product to satisfy surety requirements that came around in 07, 06, when all the subs were defaulting on things. And it ended up being a big network. It's called SmartBid. And it was for pre-calling subs and then bidding to them and then distributing plans. And, I mean, holy hell, the number of construction conferences in Las Vegas was staggering, right?

2:22James Benham: Yeah, absolutely. So to be candid, I'm relatively new to the surety space, although I've been around it for a number of years. I've been involved in the construction industry for the bulk of my 20-plus year career. But the surety role is a new addition for me that I'm excited to dig into.

2:34Jay Bell: Well, I was just talking about construction. Builders love coming to Vegas.

2:38James Benham: They certainly do.

2:39Jay Bell: So we're here at ITC. I've been here a bunch of times. You've been here a bunch of times. There's always really similar themes. Sometimes it feels a little bit like Groundhog Day because we keep talking about some of the same things over and over again. Although the last 12 months have been a bit of a wild west in true implementations into production of stuff that has been promised for a long time, but now is actually real. Before we jump completely in, I just wanted to have a quick background. You're from the Connecticut area. Is that right? I am. And you went to Albertus Magnus College for a master's.

3:18Jay Bell: You went to Central Connecticut for your undergrad. Is that right?

3:22James Benham: I actually finished my undergrad at Albertus Magnus as well. It was a long-sorted story. I started at Ohio State before I joined the Marine Corps, spent some time going to Central Connecticut, and then finished while working full-time for a local telephone company and finished at Albertus Magnus and then went back and got my master's there as well.

3:36Jay Bell: Oh, nice. And, you know, probably got your best education at the United States Marine Corps, maybe at, I don't know, Pendleton or Parris Island. There we go, Parris Island.

3:46James Benham: 100 % Parris Island.

3:48Jay Bell: Okay. So I was telling you before we started recording, I was in the Aggie Corps of Cadets as a Navy Marine ROTC midshipman. Not the same. I did not deploy, did not commission. But I fell in love with the Marine Corps. I mean, I fell in love with the Marine Corps hard. I wanted to be a Marine. It was not the right time for me or the Marine Corps for me to be in the Marine Corps. But what a great education. What did you do in the Marines?

4:15James Benham: So I was a small gunner, right? So O351, right? So O351, O3 designates infantry and small is really, it's an antiquated weapon system at this point. I think they've actually retired my MOS, but it was basically a shoulder-fired missile assault system that would allow you to take out bunkers, lightly armored vehicles, etc.

4:32Jay Bell: And that's just stuff in movies that they joke about a guy's got a shoulder-fired RPG or they shoot it the wrong way. I mean, a lot of things can go wrong with shoulder-fired weapons, but a lot of things can go absolutely right with them as well. So, uh... If you like big boobs... It depends on your perspective. It depends on which end the sender or the receiver. If you're the one with the weapon system, it usually goes pretty well.

4:57James Benham: If you're the one who's receiving the weapon system, not a good day.

5:00Jay Bell: Usually not a good day. 100%. So Marine Corps for four years? Six years, from 93 to 99. Nice. Enlisted. Enlisted. And then college, and then you jump in. I'd love to know, I always like to know what path got you from U.S. Marine Corps, then undergrad, grad school, into the insurance industry.

5:21James Benham: Yeah, fair question. So I was working for a local telephone company doing installation repair. And then I was one of the first DSL installers in the country. And then I was doing business service tech work.

5:29Jay Bell: Oh, that would be digital subscriber line for those of you who are noobs and don't remember that era. We had ISDNs, DSL. We had dial-up before that. I ran an internet service provider that was all dial-up. DSL was a dream.

5:42James Benham: So I actually finished my degree while working for the phone company. I was thinking about going into management. But we went on strike so many times around that period. So I was like, I need to do something else. And then I was trying to debate whether I wanted to go to law school or whether I wanted to go to business school. I live in the Hartford area, so you could throw a rock and hit an insurance person like every five feet. And so someone suggested, hey, maybe check out claims. And so I started at the age of 29, right, making about a third of what I did my last year at the phone company.

6:06James Benham: And I started off as a work comp claims adjuster at the local Hartford claims office.

6:10Jay Bell: Hell yes. Work comp is actually my baby in insurance. So complicated claims can last a lifetime. not an easy way to enter the industry so that's really interesting so what took you like what were the different steps because you had you know you had quite a few steps right you had work comp level three team leader then you had a director of strategic design program director director of underwriting operations so you actually worked your way through being like a rank-and-file adjuster all the way up to then over to underwriting yes sir so I ended up

6:45James Benham: becoming a team leader in about a year and a half, which was a started a little bit of a trend for me. So managing people that are technically significantly more experienced and possibly adept than myself. So I remember the first time I had a claims adjuster with about 15 years of experience that had to come to me to get their reserves approved. It was a somewhat uncomfortable experience at best. Decided that I wanted to eventually get to the side of the business where money was coming in the door versus out the door. At that time, the Hartford, if you want to be an underwriter, you had to go to one of three locations and you were going to be there six months.

7:13James Benham: It was either New Hartford or San Antonio or Charlotte, North Carolina. My wife made it abundantly clear that relocation was not an option for me. So then I was like, okay, well, we had recently gone through some Six Sigma programs and different projects on the claim side. I'd also been exposed to it in business school. So I thought, okay, well, if I can learn Six Sigma because they're getting ready to do some underwriting engagements, then perhaps I can do a trade. So I can bring something of value to the underwriting organization and they can train me on underwriting. And that's exactly what happened.

7:42James Benham: It took another stop in a strategy role where I supported construction programs and captives, got offered a couple of different roles, chose construction between you and me because it was my view, the closest I could stay to a blue collar role within a white collar world. And then I've stayed relatively close to construction the entire time, although I did work in programs from about 2016 to 2022, culminating in leading the Hartford's Middle and Large Commercial Program Group.

8:06Jay Bell: That's cool. I mean, I wish I had your resume, to be honest with you, because I've spent 25 years building software for insurance companies. And I wish I could have come up through the ranks in insurance first before I solved technology problems. I've been building software since I was 11. I mean, I'm a lifelong nerd. I mean, I started writing code in 1991. That's awesome. Got involved in the internet the year it commercialized. Had a Dellop ISP, I mean, 95. I mean, early. The cool thing is I got to play with all the technology the year it came out. That continues to be a theme in my life. Fell in love with the technology.

8:44Jay Bell: But you really do need to understand the problem to be able to solve the problem. And there's no better way to understand the problem than actually do the thing that you're trying to automate or disrupt.

8:55James Benham: It helps. I'll give you a perfect example. So one of the things that we're trying to do now within our operations organization is we have a preference. I'm not saying it's a mandatory issue, but we have a strong preference to bring people in operations that have an underwriting background. Because operations serves underwriting, and it's incredibly difficult to understand how to serve them best if you've never walked a mile in their shoes.

9:13Jay Bell: Yeah, very difficult. Yeah, it's very difficult to understand anything. Actually, about the Marine Corps, one of the things I loved is you had NDOC, and everybody went through the Crucible, right?

9:25James Benham: Crucible was a little bit after my time, but yeah, heard about it. Well, now. Yeah, there you go. Right? But everybody went through it. We had our own version.

9:32Jay Bell: I'm sure you had a more hellacious version of whatever went on. It's like when I talk to cadets in the Aggie Corps now, and they're like, oh, yeah, we got crapped out. We had to hit our face to 25. I'm like, that's cute. I mean, I was getting beaten my first week when I was there. I mean, our role model was full metal jacket. Oh, yeah, 100%.

9:55James Benham: Yeah, 100%. There was a little bit more accuracy to do that than some people care to admit.

9:59Jay Bell: five, five, six, full metal jacket. You know, I was like, I mean, that was, we, we, we idolized that movie and we made it happen. You know, it was, it was a different time 30 years ago. Or in your, in your case, 40 years ago, you know, it's a, it's, it's, uh, so for, you know, side note, respect for everything you've done, both serving the country and in the insurance business, because, uh, you're probably one of the top 10 most qualified people here to talk about the problem because you've done the jobs. and that certainly helps. You're actually talking here and I'm glad that they had you speak about claims transformation without claims chaos.

10:37Jay Bell: There is a ton of chaos and I've been part of, unfortunately, some big transformation projects that led to mass chaos where the business side of it that was not under control we had some coordination issues there or some training issues and we had to kind of rein it back in. What does that mean to you?

10:55James Benham: I mean, maybe I'll back up for a second. So the first part is I'm not a technologist, right? So I've never worked in IT. I've never worked in tech. My path to getting involved with AI, getting involved with some of this stuff was maybe a little different. And candidly, it was all really predicated on empowering the individual. When I looked at what we were doing in our industry, everybody was rolling out efficiency-focused initiatives. And candidly, they were rolling out those efficiency-focused initiatives in the same area we've been pouring efficiency initiatives to for the last 20 years. intake on the claim side, intake on the submission side for underwriting, and then we're expecting different results.

11:29James Benham: So now you have people saying, okay, well, where's my real ROI? And I guess my thought process is why were you expecting something different when we've done all of these similar efforts over the last 20 years? The only thing different now is the tooling. So my belief is that the true and lasting path to a competitive advantage does not have anything to do with your tech stack, does not have anything to do with your vendor selection criteria. It's all about empowering the people. and so my focus relative to AI is through driving AI literacy and helping individuals achieve greater impact and greater outcomes.

12:00Jay Bell: And then technology is a tool that helps. 100%, 100%. It's a tool. AI is also a tool, not the tool.

12:06James Benham: And so I've started to get more relentlessly focused on the difference between activity and impact. And so think of how many different meetings you've been in where there's a lovely presentation up on the wall. There's usually accompanied by a chart going up and to the right. And you'll hear something like, hey, we train 2 ,000 people. Okay, great. What can they do today that they couldn't do before? It's a very simple question. And if we think about it ahead of time, we can put things in place to figure out what the measurement calibration is going to be, figure out what a baseline is. It's not that difficult to do, but we're just continuing to do the same things we've always been doing.

12:41James Benham: And I think in today's environment with the tools that we have available to us, like now's the time. Yeah.

12:46Jay Bell: And there's a lot of things we do in general and process improvement. Now you're a lean Six Sigma. I'm not a Six Sigma, but I have spent years reading books, studying and implementing lean practices alongside technology, because if you don't, you really are hosed. Um, my favorite book on lean is not Toyota way. It's, it's, it's actually six second lean or two second lean sorry and he argues that if you can shave two seconds off every little transaction uh you can you can achieve what you really want to achieve which was um you know the three s's sweep short standardized you know he really drives into a lot of the core lean principles uh the author of that book flew to japan and really studied it i feel like we should have a whole curriculum here just on lean and that would help us a lot with implementation?

13:35Jay Bell: Because there's a lot of shiny objects here that don't solve actual real problems.

13:42James Benham: The challenge with Six Sigma, and don't get me wrong, I love Six Sigma and candidly, and I'm doing this now in a public forum, everything I do, Six Sigma is at the root of it. But you almost have to detangle or uncouple Six Sigma and the actual Demaic methodology and the tools and keep it behind the scenes. Because I learned very, very quickly back in 2005, 2006, where I was first engaged in Six Sigma and working with underwriters, that the more I leaned into the tooling, unless I had the right audience, the more they started pulling back. And so I absolutely agree that we need more lean. We need to drive more of that more effectively.

14:14James Benham: We have to do it in a way where it doesn't feel like it's this robotic science because underwriters have this natural aversion to that. And then they go into that immediate, you know, it's not, you know, it's an art and a science. And they love to hear that when I heard that in overabundance in the early days when I was in Six Sigma.

14:29Jay Bell: Yeah, I can see that. You don't want it to turn into a bureaucracy under its own right. And that has happened in many manufacturing companies that implemented Lean Six Sigma. Then being a black belt, it becomes almost about worshiping the process and less about the core two tenets, improving efficiency and eliminating waste, which is really what my last 25 years has been about is how do we improve efficiency at our client organizations? How do we eliminate waste? That's challenging. So now we have this amazing multi-tool, AI, that promises to change everything. The reality at most of the claims organizations I work in, a lot of them are work comp claims organizations.

15:08Jay Bell: We can solve most of their problems without even using AI. But AI is a pretty remarkable tool. How does this new multi-tool factor in to all the work you're doing in transformation and enabling people, elevating work, evolving the organization? Because you have this thing that threatens to either be our best friend or the destroyer of all worlds.

15:29James Benham: So, I mean, for me, it starts with the individual again. So it starts with driving AI literacy. So one of the things that we've done at Zurich is we stood up a special interest group called Daily. So driving AI literacy for you. And we did that with no mandate, no money. And we got to over 1 ,400 members within like a three-month period. And now we're seeing individuals that are leaders of that group starting to take on much more influential roles and helping to shape the way we think about AI, shape the way we think about AI implementation. And we're turning regular folks into real citizen builders.

16:00James Benham: And I've seen individuals that were just casual users at best of AI. In fact, a gentleman by the name is Miles Wemkin, phenomenal individual, one of the guys who works on my team. I would say six to eight months ago, he was a casual user. He would use it occasionally to improve emails, make it a little bit faster. And then we had a situation where we needed to either go out and do some time studies or figure out a way to utilize AI to help us do those time studies in a more effective, more efficient manner. He spent like 60 hours over a couple week period on his own time trying to dig in and create an agent.

16:31James Benham: And this is somebody who had barely used AI. He figured it out. It's now being utilized and adopted in various areas across Zurich more broadly, even in some of our international markets. And that one individual has become one of the top citizen builders that we have in our organization who's gone on to create some amazing tooling. And again, all of that started from an AI literacy perspective and just giving him the opportunity to have his own epiphanous moment. They built it with Copilot? He did, as a matter of fact. And so you know how much more challenging it could be when you're going to Copilot.

16:58James Benham: And that was like six to eight months ago, right? So not even the Copilot of today. Exactly right, yeah.

17:03Jay Bell: Yeah. So have you all rolled out premium to all of your users across the org?

17:08James Benham: Yeah, so Barry Perkins, the COO of Zurich North America. Still appreciate him for making this decision. They rolled out Copilot premium to everyone across Zurich North America. and there's been a small select few of us that have access to co-work as well. Obviously, that's a usage-based tool, so it's been a little bit much more tightly constrained, but a phenomenal tool. And just the capability improvements that we've seen through Copilot and now obviously Copilot Studio and now Co-Work have absolutely been phenomenal.

17:32Jay Bell: It's interesting in Claude. Like, Claude just converged all their products into one last week, so there's no such thing as Co-Work or Chat anymore. It's just Claude. And it is ridiculous. I mean, and Copilot's catching up very quickly. ChatGPT Astro, which is either in Copilot or will be very soon, has capabilities I never would have imagined AI would have. The videos that are coming off it are crazy.

17:57James Benham: I'm a little surprised with Gemini, though, aren't you? Like, you know, for a while there, Gemini was doing some amazing things. And I still love Notebook LM, but I'm a little surprised that Gemini is not keeping pace in that frontier level along with Anthropic and Cloud.

18:09Jay Bell: I wouldn't rule them out. I wouldn't rule them out. If you didn't know this, the founders of all the major AI companies worked together 10 years ago at Google in the same lab. And all this started with one paper, one research paper 10 years ago on the transformer architecture. So it's kind of wild. They originated it. I wouldn't rule them out. But you're right. I don't use Gemini anymore. And I used it a lot for a short period of time. And then Claude just came along and kicked his butt. And then Chad Gbt came along for the same. Let's close with this book you wrote. So this is The Goat and the Machine.

18:40Jay Bell: And a goat does not care about your strategy. It doesn't.

18:44James Benham: I can promise you that.

18:45Jay Bell: So this does not stand for greatest of all time? It does not.

18:47James Benham: It stands for a goat. Yeah. The goat on the cover there, her name is Jellybean. That's my goat. And the goat on the back is named Peanut, also my goat. And they are featured throughout the boat. How many goats do you have? I have seven currently. I also have three sheep. You're a citizen farmer. Yeah, I have a livestock guardian dog. I have chickens, guinea fowl, the whole nine yards. Was this your idea or your wife's? No, it was mine.

19:10Jay Bell: Okay. All right. Always wanted to do this.

19:13James Benham: I mean, again, when my folks grew up when I was younger, my dad was surrounded by animals and grew up basically on farms, etc. And then I'd go back to Connecticut in more of a suburban environment. So I told my wife, as soon as we get some land, I want goats. So we had already had chickens. We only had a third of an acre. We moved to a new spot, I would say probably right before the pandemic. We got goats. I didn't plan on turning it into a business opportunity or kind of doing that whole thing. It just kind of happened naturally. I'll tell you, I started posting on LinkedIn a little bit with some of my thoughts or ideas.

19:43James Benham: And the reality, nobody cared. And then I reached out to a friend of mine. I'm like, what am I doing wrong? I think these are good ideas. She's like, they are good ideas, but nobody knows who you are. And she's like, listen, I say this with the most respect. Jay, you're a weird person. You have all sorts of weird interests. Lead with some of your weirdness. And who knows, people will be interested. So I was trying to go through. I have a lot of choices. But the two I kind of landed on was that I've been doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for like 30 years. But that seemed a little overplayed in the business world.

20:07James Benham: And plus, I didn't want it to seem like I was like, you know, some badass trying to tell people how to do things. I'm more of a self-deprecating style. So I'm like, I've actually learned things and been humbled repeatedly by the animals that I'm in charge of taking care of. And there's some commonality there. And I started linking some of those on LinkedIn and posting it. And people found it interesting. Didn't initially intend to write a book. Was really initially going to do like a coffee table book for my friends and family. And as I started getting into it, I was like, oh, wait a second. I think I'm actually writing a book.

20:35James Benham: And I was like, you know what? Let me scale it back a little bit and build a little bit more of an audience. This is intended to be a field guide. Yeah, you can buy it on Amazon, but I'll also give it to you for free. A field guide to what? A field guide to turning AI activity into measurable impact. Like that's the thesis. I introduced a couple of frameworks in there. I actually have a nine question assessment that people can run with their team. I had the opportunity to do that at a GDS event recently where I was facilitating a talk track with a room full of CIOs and CTOs. I had basically four 90 minute sessions with them over two days and walked them through that assessment and the feedback I got was very positive.

21:06James Benham: So I want to give this away, have people run it with their teams, come back to me and say, here's what worked, here's what didn't. Because just like everything in there, when I'm trying to tell people that you need to have real measurable impact, don't just assume something's going to work. I want to hold myself to the same standard and have people run it with their teams, give me the feedback, and I'm going to use that content to help build out the broader book and figure out what we can do better next time. Amazing.

21:29Jay Bell: I have a weird genre of videos on Instagram I like to watch of goats, clearing land.

21:35James Benham: I mean, I see that every day. So yeah, it's awesome.

21:38Jay Bell: It's incredible. So especially in the South where there's a lot of kudzu, they'll unleash goats on a few acres of land. And there's guys that just rent their goats out to do this. And the goats spend a few days there and will clear cut. And I mean, well, you see it. I had no comprehension all the stuff they would eat.

21:58James Benham: Yeah. Well, the property that we had originally, there was a large section of almost three acres which is heavily overgrown it is no longer overgrown in any way shape or form i could see through it no problem whatsoever they have absolutely maintained that area for me to uh to

22:10Jay Bell: a very high degree of proficiency and so all your all your land they have they have free access to

22:14James Benham: all of it i move them from area to area so i basically have like three sections one more grassy area one that's a mixture of woods and grass and then one that's really more wooded area has a little bit of a field in it has multiple streams that cross it and everything So they got a little bit of everything.

22:28Jay Bell: You are a good dude. So I have too many hobbies as well. Too many for us to talk about today. But as a fellow hobbyist, good on you. Life's more fun with things to do outside of work, right? Great conversation. We are at time. But I want to encourage everybody to go check this out. Where can they get this book?

22:47James Benham: So they can actually buy that on Amazon if they want to, or they can go to the goat in the machine dot net and get a free copy. The only thing I would ask if you get a free copy is run it with your team. Give me some feedback.

22:57Jay Bell: I think that's a reasonable request I'll be reading this thank you for giving me a copy appreciate it thank you all our listeners out in listener land for joining today again this is ITC 2026 here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada this has been an interview with J-Bell from Zurich appreciate you thanks

23:38We'll be right back.