How Nationwide CTO Michael Carrel Is Building an AI-Ready Workforce

0:00It's never just about AI or just about the person. It's about how do you kind of work in ways that make people more effective while preserving judgment, accountability, and the human relationship that we know that matters in our business.

0:14Peter High: Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, president of Metastrategy. My guest today is Michael Carrel. Michael is the executive vice president and chief technology officer of Nationwide, a role he took on at the end of 2025. Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the United States with roughly$73 billion in annual revenue. And this year, the company is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Michael's own history with Nationwide spans more than three decades. During that time, he's held leadership roles across property and casualty insurance, financial services, digital innovation, and technology strategy.

0:46Peter High: And most recently, he served as chief technology officer of Nationwide Financial before becoming the chief technology officer at the global level. Michael assumes that responsibility at an especially consequential moment, as Nationwide is investing$1.5 billion in technology through 2028, including significant investments in artificial intelligence, as it looks to modernize its foundations, reinvent how work gets done, and create better experiences for customers and partners. In today's conversation, we'll discuss what Michael has learned from more than 30 years of technology change, how Nationwide is moving AI from experimentation to enterprise scale, the implications for its workforce and customers, and how technology can help position a 100-year-old company for its second century, among other topics we'll cover together.

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2:41Peter High: And now on to the interview. I've been looking forward to this. Let's begin, Michael, if you don't mind, with an overview of your business, one that you've been with for roughly three decades now nationwide. Certainly a well-known brand across the nation, but maybe you can take a moment and give us a little bit more detail as to the business you're in. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll say this has been a big year for Nationwide. We celebrated our centennial, so 100 years. So our roots extend back to 1926 when we were just a small regional mutual insurer, helping farmers get the best value they could for auto insurance.

3:18And now Nationwide is a Fortune 69 company. So one of the largest, most diversified insurance and financial service organizations. And most people will think of us as insurance. And most people know that Nationwide is on your side, Jingle. And they'll think about, you know, your traditional auto and home and commercial insurance. And yes, we do all those things. But we are a financial services powerhouse. So when you think about annuities and life insurance and retirement and corporate-owned life and institutional kind of life insurance, as well as group benefits, you know, we're pretty big on the financial services side as well.

3:52In fact, we rank them on the top 10 in many categories. So if you think about our public sector retirement plans, business, life insurance and annuities, agricultural and pet insurance, we also have a big excess and surplus insurance business, among many others. And last year, we had total sales of more than 73 billion. And that's an increase of 21 billion over the last five years. And that's important because I'll talk about technology's role in achieving those results as we get through our broadcast today. And our growth has really been fueled by the commitment to stay true to our company's mission, right?

4:28We were a mutual, which we exist then to protect people, businesses, and futures with extraordinary care. And we've never lost that focus as a company.

4:37Peter High: Can you take a moment more, if you would? Great overview, of course, Michael. And thank you so much for covering the diversity. Congratulations on 100 years of business, what a milestone to reach, needless to say. Talk a bit about the mutual as a structure for an organization, different from most, obviously. And perhaps for some listeners, viewers, esoteric. Help us understand that a little bit further, if you would. Absolutely. So for us as a mutual, we are owned by our members. So we are not a public company. So you're not going to be nestrated on the stock exchange. We are owned as what we call our customers, we call them members because they own the organization.

5:14And that allows us, we even refer to ourselves as a modern mutual, taking the discipline that comes with a public company in terms of our financial management, our capital management strategies with that relentless care for our customers.

5:32Peter High: Fascinating. And you were the chief technology officer, which is the top technology role within the organization, a role you took on late last year. Describe your role as CTO, if you would, in your purview. Yeah. And as CTO, I know a lot of folks will refer to either CIO or CTO. Here, we use the CTO term, which is very similar to CIO because I run all of technology. We don't use the CIO term because we manage more than information. We manage technology. So just kind of I'll put that out there. But I'm the enterprise CTO for Nationwide. So we have a team of over 7 ,000 full-time technologists and contractors driving transformation across both sides of our business, our insurance and our financial services businesses.

6:13And then within technology, we have a wide-ranging set of solutions that we develop. We also have responsibility for corporate real estate and protective services. And let me give you some rationale on why. We believe that within technology today, we have all the digital security, and we also have all the technology that supports the workplace environment today. So having corporate real estate and protective services allows us to be able to take the physical, our physical security, our physical buildings, and be able to take that and work together with technology to make sure that we're coordinated and that we're aligned.

6:54And we harness the best of both our physical presence and our digital presence. And so that's kind of a reason why we have corporate real estate and protective services as part of our technology organization. I also have procurement. And as you can imagine, we have lots of contracts in technology. And having the procurement team as part of our organization just helps us increase our connections. It helps us think about how we can leverage technology to make them more efficient. In fact, it's one of our great AI stories that we have here at Nationwide. So that also sits within our organization.

7:27You know, within technology, we say our purpose is to deliver extraordinary care that you heard me talk about even earlier with our company mission. Through digital innovation, data intelligence and resilient systems that really allow us to empower every member and every partner every day when they're working with Nationwide. And a couple of factoids when you think about just how big we are. I mentioned 7 ,000 associates and contractors, but we have on an annual basis, and this is, as of last year, about 34 billion annual API transactions. We have about 21 petabytes of data, and we also have about 4 ,000 active applications within our portfolio.

8:10So that helps you give a little bit about the size of the technology that we have here at Nationwide.

8:16Peter High: Extraordinary. Yeah. Wonderful ways to present the scale and breadth of this organization, while also acknowledging a remarkable breadth to your set of responsibilities as well. Thank you for that, Michael. I mentioned at the outset, you mentioned, of course, the 100th anniversary. You've been with the company for almost a third of that time. And I wonder, what's kept you at Nationwide for such a healthy tenure? Oh, that's a great question. I tell someone, you know, I never really intended to be at Nationwide for 30 years. I said it's kind of company that you kind of started dating and you kind of fell in love with it.

8:50And a lot of it is the culture, right? And it's the people. I love technology, consider myself a technologist at heart, but this company has heart. And when I think about our commitment to our associates, we think a commitment to our members, the commitment to the communities in which we work and that we have members, That is what has kept me here at Nationwide. And I mentioned before, we have 7 ,000 associates and contractors working. The ability to manage a career, not just a role, with the Nationwide has been huge for me. The types of experiences that I've been able to take a part in. I've been on property and casualty set.

9:29I've been on a Nationwide financial services business. I've been in enterprise roles. The breadth of technology skills that I've been able to develop here. the commitment of the company to my own learning, the type of educational opportunities that they've afforded me, and the fact that I can do it in a company with heart that also cares about me as a person and cares about the communities in which we live and work and cares about my family. That is an incredibly powerful combination that has led to 31 years at Nationwide.

10:00Peter High: Incredible. Thank you for that reflection. It's recently announced that the company will invest a billion and a half dollars in technology through 2028, Michael. And I'd love to have you share at least some of the highlights of where you see that investment making a big impact for the organization and ultimately, of course, for your customers. Yeah. And I'm going to talk about some of our maybe our recent accomplishments and the innovations because that's part of that investment. And if I were to kind of start off by even talking about that 1.5 billion, And we've invested$5 billion over the last five years, five to 10 years, for modernizing our core.

10:40So really driving a lot of investment in our core systems modernization, which is a strong digital foundation that we have in place across all of our businesses. Many people talk about these legacy systems that they're trying to work around when they're trying to deliver these digital experiences. We've already done the investment. We've done the heavy lifting, and now we're seeing the fruits of that labor. And it really goes to the first one that I'm going to talk about. In fact, we just recently won a CIO 100 award for our partner integration hub. And this gives us a scalable way to connect with our external partners more quickly, securely, and consistently across all areas of our business.

11:18And so what we've done is we've taken all this digitized core that we've had, right, new modern core systems that support our business. And then what we've done is we've productized connections around those modern integration patterns that allow us to be able to co-create new experiences with our partners to be able to deliver new experiences faster and better, more real time than they have ever have been before. And so that's been a key investment for us as this partner integration hub. And we have a lot more to do as we continue to take this modern core that we have and continue to find consistent ways to be able to deliver more value to our partners and our members through that.

11:58The next one is AI. And of that$1.5 billion that you've talked about, 20 % of that going to AI. And we've done a lot of work on this. And so I'll highlight some of these investments and work to come. So we've separated our investments here into several categories. One of them is called what we call everyday AI. And we have deployed everyday AI capabilities. So these are capabilities that allow associates to be able to search, find, summarize, create new content, Word documents, presentations, all that type. We rolled that out to every associate nationwide, including the ability to also create agents within our personal productivity platform.

12:40And this is every associate. So think about like more individual kind of like personal productivity. So that's one area. The second area is where I call flagship AI work. And this is transformational initiatives that we're building with the customer in mind. And these are we've been doing I do want to say we've been doing AI at Nationwide for over 15 years. And I partnered with our chief analytics officer years ago in a previous role to be able to put this digital core around models that we have we've created that help run our business today. But now with generative and agentic, right, we we see new opportunity that we never had before.

13:19And a lot of it sits around unstructured data. So if you think about in our space areas such as underwriting, you think we think about areas such as claims. We think about areas such as like post-issue transactions on our business. These are some very key areas that we're focusing on to be able to transform these domains within nationwide with significant investment. And of course, another one I probably should have added in there is even just technology. Technology is on the forefront of AI with changing how we work. And so we're also investing a lot in reengineering how we work with our AI DLC.

13:56So we have obviously been leveraging AI and the software engineering and continue to roll additional capabilities out there to every technology associate that we have within Nationwide. Example, going a little bit deeper, right, if you think about the underwriting example, right, many of our underwriting processes in this space, you know, have traditionally been, you know, we've done as much automation as we can, but they've been still manual, right? Many of, especially in our large farm and commercial agribusiness, businesses, you can have like 50 documents, 24 data sources, you know, hundreds of data fields of information you're trying to collect in the underwriting.

14:34So our new approach combines this unified interface with your traditional models, predictive models, but then Gen.AI and then Gen.Tik to be able to really reduce the amount of time that we're to get faster answers, easier process for our partners in underwriting. You know, the other thing I want to note out is some other areas, and this has to do with our culture of innovation we build at Nationwide. You know, in fact, over the last 14 years, Nationwide has presented an enterprise hackathon that we've leveraged to kind of spark like bold thinking, collaboration, and other skills, and skills growth in an environment where it's safe to experiment.

15:12In fact, this summer, we had our largest event ever. We had 172 teams and close to 900 associates that were participating. And it's our first global hackathon, including our nationwide India office. And so we and you know what's most impressive about that is I had 120 of those associates weren't even part of technology. They're business partners coming in to be able to be part of this hackathon experience for us. And so we leverage that to be able to even fuel new ideas, new business cases, to be able to harness new technology within our business. And many of those will be funded out of some of that investment that we talked about.

15:52We also have a lot of AI that just happens on a regular basis that is part of our portfolios. We call that more localized AI, where it's driving transformation on a smaller scale within our individual businesses. that's happening and has been happening like for years. The most important thing around all this though is the people. I am so incredibly proud of the, how we're rolling out AI with a focus on people because everyone has access to the technology, but I think where you have people and where you have the right culture, it just magnifies it. So we've, we've got a very expansive people strategy at Nationwide focusing on how do we kind of develop the skills within our associates and how do we have vast learning experiences for them and both on the leadership level as well as on individual and contributor devices.

16:46I'd love to have you double click on that a little bit further if you would, Michael.

16:51Peter High: Fascinating examples all across the board there, certainly. But you began with the broad accessibility of artificial intelligence and making sure this is not just a technology undertaking, but something that incorporates all associates. And what a powerful exemplification of this with the 128 associates outside of technology who participate in the hackathon, innovating with technologists. Talk a little bit about how you've thought about a curriculum, perhaps for lack of a better way of framing it, or a means of ensuring that, especially for the non-technologists, they're raising their game to the point of understanding the power of these tools, how best to leverage them, of course, how best to leverage them safely and so on?

17:32Yeah, it's a great question. And I'm probably a point that I'm really proud of. And I want to give a lot of credit to my chief HR officer and our whole entire HR team because they have been great partners in this. And quite frankly, I believe have been really leading in this space as compared to what I see other companies doing, focusing on the learning. And I'll start off by one key statement that I talk to people about around everyday AI. I tell people, unless you can transform how you individually work with AI and how it transforms how you work, we don't have a chance at associates being able to rethink how a team can work, how a business can work.

18:12So you must have to go through that individual transformation. And that's why rolling out everyday AI to every one of our associates has been so critical. But here's what we've kind of wrapped around this on the people side at Nationwide. So we have a future work center. And what we have done is we have curated learning for associates, leaders, executives around AI. And we've taken content that we have at Nationwide. These could be articles. This could be digital learning experiences. And we've harvested them in individual training opportunities for associates. In addition to that, we layered on top of that what we call learning sprints, future ready sprints.

18:55And these are shared learning experiences where we can take that digital curriculum, and then you can do it, you can do it on your own, self guided. You can be with a group of associates that maybe you want to be with. Let's say you want to take your team through a sprint together. That's great. You can take them through a sprint and then you meet. And then there are things that a team can work through to discuss the content. Or you can be part of a group with associates across nationwide that will get together on a regular basis and discuss the content that they're learning during these learning sprints.

19:26So I like the reflection time that comes with these future-ready sprints that sit on top of just the curriculum. And then we have a lot of other things that are available to people. We have specific manager certifications for AI within Nationwide. We have very focused skill assessments for people to understand here's how your role is going to change with AI. Here are the types of skills you're going to need to accentuate, given how AI is going to be transforming your specific role. And that takes it down to a specific person, a specific role. And so I could not be happier about how we've approached this on the people side.

20:10We also measure our engagement with AI at Nationwide. We measure how associates are feeling about AI. And we've had a huge 9 % increase improvement recently in our, what we call our Entune survey or something, an engagement type survey that we do with our associates twice a year. And we're doing even a lot more things I could probably spend a whole podcast, quite frankly, on talking about around our approach to that. And I was just recently at a conference, actually, you and I were there together, Peter. And I was talking to somebody around this human element of AI, and not just the technology.

20:51And he's like, man, he's like, the work that you're doing is really leading in this space. So a big thanks to our entire HR team for all the great ideas and change management that we're focusing on around this. And then that goes as just an example to why I love working for Nationwide is because of this commitment to associates. And this is a great example of that.

21:13Peter High: Yeah, fascinating. And by the way, I also love I need to acknowledge the fantastic insights you shared a moment ago about the modernization practices and major activities that you've undertaken that have been an extraordinary boon, a better foundation upon which to build. No doubt you do so with a much greater confidence as a result of that. As we talk about foundational elements though, Michael, I want to talk about governance, ensuring that the organization has sound governance in place such that people can experiment and do so safely. And they have the guardrails in place to make sure that the organization and your most important assets remain safe.

21:49Peter High: You talked, of course, earlier about your cybersecurity and broader security mandate as part of your team's responsibilities. Talk a bit about your approach to governance, if you would. Yeah, that's a great question. And of course, for us, governance, we put this in place years ago. And of course, we're a company that manages risk for a living. So this is a key to what we do. And so we have a very disciplined risk framework within Nationwide that identifies, we have principles, we have guidelines that we expect people to follow. We have an approval process. So as people are looking to leverage AI within our business, they leverage these guidelines, they leverage the kind of perspective that we have around what are we willing to do, What are we not willing to do?

22:38And everything is risk, is looked at from a risk lens. So if a team wants to leverage AI for a part of our business process, it goes through a very rigorous process through risk committees that will assess the data. Because it all kind of comes from the data, right? They'll assess the data. They will assess the use case. They will also make sure that even if we do go forward, that it has you build, you make sure that you manage the right hygiene, the things around it, to make sure that you can continue to manage it going forward. So it continues to produce reliable results on an ongoing basis.

23:17And then cyber is part of that. So our cyber team that reports into me is part of that. Our enterprise risk committee is part of that. And this, so we have a very elaborate governance process because you want to do the right thing for the right reasons. And Nationwide has always been about that. And the risk process that we have makes sure that, you know, we're doing it the right way. And much of our risk is a legal environment too, right? We have to be compliant with the legal environment. And so our legal team is part of that risk assessment as well. And as we continue to kind of evolve legal practices, the legal environment continues to mature with our state departments of insurance, putting perspectives out there.

23:56We comply with those. And so this this risk process is is pretty it's it's well defined and it's not meant to slow things down, like be really slow. It's just meant to actually speed things up, right? Make sure we can get quick yeses, quick no's to things. Make sure that you're also giving guidance as part of this risk process. So it's been something that we've had in place for years and continue to mature, but it's guided us well. And because it has existed for 15 years since we've been doing AI models, the same thing that we've done with how we develop models, we use that same risk framework as we're thinking about generative and agentic.

24:37Peter High: Yeah, let's talk about Agentic a little bit further, Michael. You mentioned it a couple of times already. You've already developed, as I recall, multiple thousands of custom AI agents. And I wonder what you've learned from operating Agentic AI at such scale so far. Yeah, and I would say we're still growing in Agentic here. You know, we've done a lot of personal productivity agents. We have agents running, like, in all of our businesses. I think the biggest learning is, aren't probably like new learning specific to Agentic as much as just continuing to grow in AI, right? When you get to Agentic, a lot of it we had to put, there's a lot more technology foundation elements that you have to kind of put in place.

25:17And we have, we've put those in place to make sure that, again, you can manage the control environment around it. But I think the biggest thing is this whole human and machine kind of working together, right? It gets even more so with Agentic, where you have to be really clear on, like many of these cases, we're making sure that a human is part of assessing that work. And so how do you get the human and machine interaction? In fact, it's one of our four key tenets of our technology strategy here with this human-machine collaboration, because it's never just about AI or just about the person. It's about how do you kind of work in ways that make people more effective while preserving judgment, accountability, and the human relationship that we know that matters in our business.

26:03And part of that then also goes into the agentic is, you know, where do we know that customers want to communicate, interact with us on a human basis and not a machine basis, right? So we're very careful in agentic applying it in the right way. That is how customers prefer. So there are certain elements, for example, certain claim situations, right, where we want to talk to our customer, person to person. Could be a death claim, could be a claim that has significant damage because people will get some confidence talking to a person. So we're very clear in our treatment of leveraging AI on when do customers really want to interact with technology and where a person is key.

26:51Peter High: Yeah, very well articulated. Thank you so much for sharing that as well. I wanted to also ask you, insurance has interactions, I'm sure where customers are happy to have sort of automated, if you will, but they also have moments of insecurity or need where having another human being is very important. And I wonder, how do you think about the balance between those, where automation is effective and appropriate and additive, even for customer experience, versus those areas where human empathy remains an essential part of the experience? Yeah, that's a great question. I'll tell you, too, not all customers are the same, right?

27:33So sometimes even the limits for me as a technologist, for instance, might be different as maybe like my parents, for instance, right? They may have maybe a little bit lower threshold for maybe where they're allowing machine interaction as compared to maybe where I am. So one thing we want to realize is that sometimes we know that our customers are different. And having an easy connection, what we call an off-ramp from a digital experience, whether that's AI or not, quite frankly, right? We've had digital experiences that we've delivered to our customers for decades, right? Whether you're interacting with an application like a mobile app, you're on our website, or you're interacting with a chat bot, right?

28:19That your off-ramp to a person needs to be really easy and seamless. And that's something we have a whole user experience team here at Nationwide that makes sure as we're developing those experiences that we provide that kind of easy off-ramp to a person. There are some areas, though, in the company that we just happen to know that where it might be in the customer's best interest to talk to a person, that we make sure that maybe we start with that. So a great example of that could be a death claim, right? Life insurance, right? Where we really want to make sure that we're talking to the family of an insured who has passed away.

28:56There are elements in think about, we've had a lot of storms recently in the Midwest. If you think about maybe a situation where a customer, they have a home that's not livable, right? Because of significant damage, maybe a tree went through the middle. Those are situations where we want to make sure that they get comfort from talking to a person, knowing that they're going to be guided through the process. And so we realize there are some events like that where customers have told us they want to rely on a person, and we are there to deliver those. The thing that's key is that we will always allow our customers to be able to connect with a person.

29:35And so having those easy off ramps where maybe, you know what, I was good with starting the process here, but, you know, something emerges in the conversation. And if it's a digital one that says, you know what, I think I want to talk to a person, right? Well, then great. You can easily pick up from right where you were when you when you contact someone at Nationwide that can help you through that, that we're going to have it seamlessly integrate directly into that human conversation. So that's how we kind of make sure that we provide this good integration with the human and the digital, at the same time allow flexibility where maybe someone wants to stay and contain themselves within one channel or the other.

30:16Peter High: Yeah. Yours is a highly regulated business, Michael. Obviously, you maintain sensitive information in a variety of corners of the business. I wonder, how do you make structured and unstructured data available to AI? while maintaining security and privacy and trust, which of course are so important? Yeah, great question. You know, one of the tenets, we have three pillars of our technology and strategy, and one of them is intelligent decision-making and trusted data. So we have a very focused effort. We actually have a trusted data score that we average with the nationwide. This trusted data score, we take our data assets and then we tiered them.

30:56And then we have targets around those data assets based upon what we consider to be good elements of good hygiene that we expect all of our teams to have. And that is helping us create this foundation for faster, more competent decisions. The thing about AI, I tell people all the time, AI has been and always will be about the data. So better AI and better analytics begin with data that people can understand, that's governed well, and that people trust. And as we talk about being kind of AI enabled that we've been talking about, you know, trust is not a control kind of added at the end. It's something you have to kind of make inherent and part of the product.

31:38And that's what we have invested so much in data platforms and tooling around our data to help our teams make sure that it is trusted data. If you think about tools around making sure that we know lineage is clear, that we have good data governance tools in place, that we have good metadata management platforms in place. We've got this really strong foundation that teams are leveraging. And then we have joint objectives with business partners and technology to make sure that those data assets reach their targeted data trust score.

32:15Peter High: Fascinating. I wanted to ask you also, obviously yours is a team that works to improve employee experiences, customer experiences as well. You also have an ecosystem of agents and financial professionals, some of those colleagues as well, forgive me. But as you think about the many parts of the organization whose experience you impact, I wonder how do you and your team devise from each of those constituents where there are pain points or opportunities so that you and the team are focused on those areas where you can have the most leverage and provide the most help in solving those issues or exploiting the opportunities that are articulated?

32:59That's great. I think I mentioned to you earlier about this kind of this partner platform, this platform that we have. And that is a that's actually a second pillar of our technology strategy is this partner ecosystem, building a flexible kind of digital ecosystem that delivers kind of that personalized and seamless experience for a partner. So the way that we activate that within technology is taking those, creating these shared digital capabilities that can connect, you know, because we are heavily intermediated, whether it's a financial professional, a firm, it's an independent agent, it's their firm, right?

33:36We are heavily intermediated in lots of parts of our businesses. So we want to make sure that those digital capabilities help connect our channels and the products to our partners to be able to integrate those new capabilities. And so that's the technology piece of ensuring that we make them available. And in our partner platform, this partner ecosystem that we talk about, we actually then package these digital capabilities. And yes, they could be APIs. We've all heard about APIs. But we know there's much more modern integrations, too, that our partners are looking at. So we've heard from partners.

34:13We actually align. I myself, I connect with CIOs and CTOs of our partner firms to be able to listen to their strategies, technologists to technologists. This isn't just something we're going to wait from a sales team or business team. Right. So I know within my role and I was prior to have the enterprise role, I was the chief technology officer for Nationwide Financial. I interacted with the CTOs and CIOs of our key firms to understand where their technology strategy was going. So understanding the technology strategy of our partners and then being able to make sure that I always tell our teams, I want to be ready before they're ready.

34:51And so we've heard things such as data shares, data streams. Yes, we have like APIs. And yes, we have our traditional kind of legacy file integrations. But we have a litany of those. What we're seeing is our partners really extending more into more real-time modern integrations that allow them to be able to create great experiences for our shared member that owns the product and then also our distribution partners that are, whether it be a financial professional or independent agent, to make it easier for them to be able to, quote, understand and sell a nationwide product.

35:31Peter High: fascinating i love the layers of that of what you what you described and in the middle you mentioned the technologist to technologist interaction i want to actually ask you a little bit about agent to agent uh in the ai sense uh interactions as well uh what changes when agents begin communicating coordinating and executing work with other agents rather than simply responding to humans and how do you think about that and and uh what sort of practices are you instituting or beginning to think about in order to ensure that that's done effectively? Yeah, great question. So we see that in two ways.

36:03One of it is thinking about the digital interactions coming to us, even from on nationwide.com. We're seeing a lot more agents as being the agents are the ones that are quoting right through our public websites. They're interacting with us. We see agent, this is part of why we have this advanced kind of partner ecosystem that I talked about, right? Because we're seeing these digital interactions are going to be core to this agent-to-agent communication. So we have a foundation. We have an architecture. Already kind of lays out our agent-to-agent communication because it's twofold. It's agents-to-agents.

36:41We already have agent-to-agent communication happening within Nationwide. And then when we think about agent-to-agent communication happening outside of Nationwide, we've laid that foundation internally. So our architecture, our A architecture that we have put in place, we have the right platforms and the right standards around that agent-to-agent communication. But we're seeing it significantly could change both the servicing and the sales elements of our business where we're preparing for a future. In fact, we've already done this today when thinking about within ChatGPT or other types of tools like, you know, Gemini, Claude, whatever you're using, right, being able to quote insurance.

37:24We already have those experiments that we have, that we've experimented with and have working to be able to find ways that say, you know, this is how sales is going to work differently. It's going to be working in a chat experience. It's not going to be necessarily how we see it today. So that type of communication mechanism we're preparing for. And a lot of it is still our biggest thing. You can't plan for everyone, but this digital foundation I talked to you about gives us all the flexibility that we need in order to be able to really grow into this agent-to-agent communication as our business partners and kind of lean into that across nationwide.

38:08whether that be a firm in the financial services or an independent agency, we're going to be there and ready.

38:15Peter High: Fascinating. I wanted to ask you, Michael, before I let you go, what do you read or listen to in order to stay current that you might recommend to others? These are such dynamic times. It's important that we remain abreast of what's happening out in the world and the potential applications or implications to ourselves, but also to our teams. I'd love your thoughts if you have anything you'd recommend. Absolutely. Well, of course, I would have to say Technovation, of course, Peter, but you and I have spent time working, so I love listening to this podcast. But I would say my other go-to is the AI Daily Brief.

38:47It's a podcast with Nathaniel Wittemore. I listen to that pretty much every day on my way into the office because with AI, it changes on an hourly basis, if not minutes. And so that's what I use to kind of continue to kind of stay kind of up to speed on AI in particular. I will tell you, I also have an agent that runs every day myself that goes out and searches for new news. And when I listen to the top podcasts, usually when I get into work, I go to our personal productivity software here at Nationwide, and I have an agent that runs, and then I read my daily technology brief that looks at AI, it looks at technology trends and what's happened in our industry.

39:31And so I leverage AI in my learning. In fact, I tell people, my learning has changed so much with AI. I oftentimes on Fridays, I try to set time out to be able just to kind of think with AI. And it might sound weird, right? But I think if you're truly going to leverage AI to its fullest extent, you really need it to kind of leverage it as a thinking partner, not do the thinking for you, but leverage it as a thinking partner. So a lot of times I'll have a concept that I want to, maybe I've heard on your podcast, Peter, or I've heard on the AI Daily Brief. I will leverage AI to be able to kind of ask questions, right?

40:06To kind of deepen my learning on a topic. So as a leader, I can be asking the right questions. I need to be asking my team as I stay current. The other thing I think is important for any CIO in a company like Nationwide is you also need to make sure you're a good student for business acumen. So for me, the Wall Street Journal, when I get into work, I'm always reading the Wall Street Journal every morning, looking through the articles around, yes, there's tech news in there as well, but it's also like what's the economy doing so I can understand what our business is facing. I also get industry-specific updates.

40:42There's property and casualty and financial services-specific publications that I read a lot. And the reason why I share this broad business knowledge is I tell people, you know, working for a national, I consider myself a business professional with a technology skill. And so you have to make sure that you're always deepening your business knowledge. You have to make sure you're always deepening your technology knowledge. And then lastly, I would say leadership. And that's probably the there's a current book that I'm reading. It's Never Lead Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. I had a chance, actually, I've heard the book before, but I just recently started reading it.

41:18I was at an event. I've actually you were at the event, too, last week. I converged in 26. Keith was a presenter there. I had a chance to sit next to him at a dinner and really told me a lot about concepts. and his Never Lead Alone book that's going kind of from traditional top-down leadership to a model that's centered on co-elevation and peer-to-peer accountability. So how do you move to what from leadership to teamship? And so I'm reading his book right now. In fact, I send it to every member of my team and we're going to be leveraging that to kind of just think about how do we take even our team to the next level in an upcoming strategic that we have in a couple of months from now.

41:57So there's a lot more that I continue to kind of read on a regular basis, but those are kind of the highlights that I would share, Peter.

42:04Peter High: Fantastic. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing so much in this conversation. I'm always impressed whenever I have a chance to connect with you, how broad your thinking is, how you think about the downstream and implications and adjacent implications to the work that you do, that you think about the ways in which your team can help bring to life new opportunities for the business and for your customers. It's really inspiring to hear you speak and I appreciate you sharing your perspectives with this audience. Thanks for having me, Peter. And likewise, I always get a lot when you and I connect as well.

42:40So thanks for having me.

42:41Peter High: Thanks for listening to Technovation. If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe and leave a rating. It helps more leaders find our podcast. Thank you and I look forward to seeing you next time.

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