Patty Crawford’s decade-long career at Aon has been one of leadership in digital transformation and innovation. She’s described by her co-workers as a “champion of technology” and an “early adopter of emerging, game-changing technology” who delivered up to 100 transformation projects a year.
Recently promoted to a new role as head of platforms, Crawford’s transformational momentum remains a key part of her charge at Aon. Within the last month, she completed the launch of a new capability for delivering certificates of insurance using artificial intelligence and natural-language processing, called AuDE for Aon Automated Data Entry. AuDE extracts unstructured data and important information and presents it to brokers, rather than making brokers key in items multiple times.
It’s not the only project that’s been personified with a name. They serve a dual purpose: to serve as part of the change management that is required to reify advanced digital technologies with sometimes reticent insurance workers, and to help Crawford and her team of eight direct reports and 1,000 associates stay organized.
“People have a relationships with each other that you're now adding bots into,” she says. “We have a bot that is called Victoria; you email Victoria and she takes the task on from you. So it's still a relationship, it's just an automated relationship versus it being another human.”
But Crawford’s goal is not to replace all interactions with machines. Her focus is on limiting time-consuming manual tasks across Aon so that the company’s associates can focus more on customer service.
“We're talking about not necessarily applications, but more of an integrative platform,” she says. “How do we actually get it to where the brokers can see across their clients’ risk and make better connections by putting dashboards on top of their policy management system, so we're actually presenting the data to them? Up until this year, we've had our data and analytics completely separate, and they've been provided some great solutions – now we’ve pivoting to digitize the end to end process and provide a broker portal to where the data is at their fingertips by region.
Aon has always had an under-the-radar, siloed data practice. This was a common and necessary step so insurers could begin to build infrastructure and internal expertise around it, Crawford says. But the time has come for data and analytics to be more integrated with brokers’ processes so that they can effectively utilize those insights, she adds.
“We made it all the technical solution (data lakes, big Hadoop clusters, workflow) and all this other technology, and people don't understand that,” she explains. “We’re trying to say, ‘let's not start with a technology solution. Let's understand with what the business problem is, and let's figure out the best way to solve that business problem.’”
Today, new options for digitalization are coming faster than ever to the insurance industry. And simultaneously, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended how collaboration works at major enterprises. Crawford, for example, relocated to the American West from the Chicago metropolitan area, and says it hasn’t really changed her day-to-day habits all that much.
“Some people talk about video fatigue, but even when I'm in Chicago in the office, I'm actually on the phone 90% of the time with people in London or, you know, in the Netherlands or wherever my clients happen to be,” she says
A committed mentor, however, Crawford says prioritizes mentoring conversations when she is in the office once or twice a month. She currently mentors 10 colleagues around the world and in the technology organization. One topic she’s helping proteges through is learning how to be visible in the more virtualized office.
“We're talking about how the pandemic has changed self-promotion, which for some of our junior colleagues is unnerving,” she says. “How you do self promotion when you're not running into people? But you can still be visible even if you're not in the office. You just have to be more purposeful about it. The pandemic has been a great equalizer in that.”
