Innovation

New York Life | January 26, 2022

Chief Analytics Officer Glenn Hofmann recently explored the many innovative data science and AI-driven solutions being implemented across New York Life in a Q&A with aiTech Trend. Chronicling his journey to his current role and his experience building a data science team that is now functioning at scale, Hofmann noted that major focus areas for New York Life’s Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CDSAi) include providing data science education and supporting an active data science community. This involves both individual partnerships with the company’s businesses talking through model-driven approaches and facilitating data science educational tracks as well as workshops and events.  

As an example of CDSAi’s work, Hofmann explained, “As a life insurance company, we evaluate and price for the risk we take on when issuing a life policy. The CDSAi team works closely with the Underwriting department to identify opportunities for AI algorithms to be used to help manage that risk. In response to the virtual environment brought on by the pandemic, our efforts toward model-supported underwriting were accelerated to enable the company to underwrite even more life insurance policies without the use of fluids while still mitigating risks.”

He also highlighted CDSAi’s collaboration with New York Life’s Technology team in building the infrastructure for data science models to be developed and deployed at scale. Among other achievements, the partnership yielded a cloud-based computing environment for all aspects of the data science lifecycle last year.

“The insurance industry has a wide variety of interesting business opportunities that can be supported by AI-based solutions,” Hofmann said. “At New York Life, CDSAi has rapidly expanded over the last five years in terms of size, scope, and technology. We are now at a stage where we are operating at scale with an efficient process that moves us from an initial idea to an eventual deployment of a model within a business and we’re very much entrenched in business’ decision-making processes. It’s an exciting time at New York Life as we continue our AI-enabled journey.”

Read the full aiTech Trend Q&A here.

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