Guardian Life, Priceline Step Up Pace of Digital Initiatives
12 May 2020 - 07:59PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
Enterprise technology executives from Guardian Life Insurance
Co. of America and Priceline are accelerating digital initiatives
involving artificial intelligence, cloud computing and software
development, despite the economic uncertainty caused by the
coronavirus pandemic.
"Decisions are being made so much quicker now," Dean Del
Vecchio, Guardian Life's chief information officer, said Monday in
an online web conference hosted by New York-based seed-stage fund
Boldstart Ventures, which invests in enterprise IT startups.
Guardian Life recently launched an AI-based "digital agent"
named Amelia, developed by New York-based technology company IPsoft
Inc. The agent can help the company's customers access information
about insurance claims using natural language queries, according to
the company.
The project was developed and deployed in a few weeks, but would
have taken months to deploy in the past because such initiatives
weren't as urgent, said Mr. Del Vecchio, who is also the insurance
company's chief of operations.
With the pandemic forcing customers to spend more time engaging
with companies online, the New York-based insurer has been focused
more than ever on its digital consumer experience, Mr. Del Vecchio
said.
"We're seeing a level of collaboration and a sense of urgency
like we've never seen before," he said.
The company also is digitizing many of its insurance policies,
especially those that involve life and disability insurance. Most
of Guardian Life's approximately 9,000 employees are working from
home, and there are no plans to return to the physical office soon,
Mr. Del Vecchio said.
The company benefited from public cloud and infrastructure
investments after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 that allow employees to
work remotely, he said.
Connecticut-based Priceline, part of Booking Holdings Inc., is
focused on tools that enable its software developers to be more
productive, said Marty Brodbeck, chief technology officer.
For example, he has doubled down on the shift toward Kubernetes,
software used to manage clusters of so-called containers.
Containers are standardized building blocks of code that can be
moved around the internet and across a broad range of devices.
"Now more than ever, since all of our engineers are remote, we
want to make sure our developers are having the best engineering
experience as possible from their home," he said.
Priceline, which offers discounted online travel bookings, also
is accelerating its move toward Google Cloud and expects about 40%
of its applications to be in the cloud by the end of the year. The
goal for both initiatives is to increase the speed at which
developers can design, develop and deploy code to push out features
and functions "at a much more accelerated pace than we do today,"
Mr. Brodbeck said.
Many other companies, though, are pulling back on current and
planned IT projects in the near term, such as more complex
deployments of artificial intelligence or automation, as they
grapple with the economic fallout from the pandemic, according to a
report by market research firm Canalys. The pullback is in contrast
to a year ago, when demand was soaring for workers with advanced
skills in areas such as data analytics and artificial
intelligence.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 12, 2020 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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