Guardian Life, Priceline Step Up Pace of Digital Initiatives

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 [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 12, 2020 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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