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Glenn Hofmann, Chief Analytics Officer, New York Life

Glenn Hofmann, Chief Analytics Officer, New York Life

Describe your career to date

I am the chief analytics officer overseeing an 80-person data science team at New York Life, a Fortune 100 company that is one of the largest life insurers in the world. This is a long way from where I started after I received my PhD as a professor in statistics at the University of Concepcion, Chile. The impetus to switch from academia to industry occurred when I was consulting within the wine industry in Chile. That initial project led me on a path to pursuing positions within industry. For the last 20 years, I have moved between the consulting and financial sectors. Along the way, I earned my MBA from Wharton which cemented my passion to provide innovation through AI to financial institutions.

I thrive on seeing how AI can bring about so much change to an established industry. At New York Life, we have models in place that help all areas of the company. Among them is underwriting which is a crucial component of the life insurance purchasing process. To provide our customers with a better experience in this process, we have models that determine for some applicants whether they can bypass the fluid draw and receive their policies faster. On the sales distribution side, we have neural network models that offer predictions concerning agent retention, sales, and other behaviors. These models are used to prioritize targeted training thereby utilizing training resources in the most efficient way to benefit those agents that most need that extra help at specific times.

What stage has your organization reached on its data maturity journey?

In some areas, we are far along on the maturity curve. For example, marketing is an active area for data science at New York Life with models related to sales, advertising attribution, and retention. Yet, as AI continues to evolve, we need to embark on a new journey to embrace those new developments that make sense for our business. For example, we are in the early stages of exploring Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific use cases within our business.

Tell us about the data and analytics resources you are responsible for

I head New York Life’s center for data science and artificial intelligence (CDSAi) which is the company’s centralized data science team. The head of technology and the chief data officer are my peers, jointly reporting to New York Life’s head of strategic capabilities. This org structure helps us stay aligned on the company’s priorities. CDSAi consists primarily of data scientists and MLOps engineers, and the remaining members of the team are in product, program, operations and training, and communication functions, all equally integral parts of the team. Our group is based in New York Life’s home office in New York City, with full in-person team meetings every other month. We augment the team with staff from external vendors to help ramp up projects.

What challenges do you see for data in the year ahead that will have an impact on your organization and on the industry as a whole?

There are two areas in which I am highly engaged that I believe will be game changing for our business. One is the emergence of LLMs for which there are multiple applications ranging from smarter and more efficient information access to document processing to model enhancement. The potential benefits of time and cost savings as well as better predictions will more than offset the effort in developing these LLMs.

The other area of active interest for us is model governance. The insurance industry is a highly regulated business. As the use of AI/ML models for decision making continue to be adopted as normal practice in multiple areas of the insurance business, we need to continue to ensure that the interests of consumers are protected.

Have you set out a vision for data? If so, what is it aiming for and does it embrace the whole organization or just the data function?

My vision is for data science to work in close collaboration with all our internal business partners to develop model driven solutions which drive decisions using the most up to date tools and data and thereby create incremental business value for New York Life. While we are on our way to achieve that, there continue to be new business challenges, new sources of data, and new developments in technology that keep our work new and exciting, allowing us to continually innovate.

Glenn Hofmann
has been included in:

100 Brands 2022 (USA)
100 Brands 2023 (USA)