Perspectives from Tomorrow’s Broker to Protect Your Future

Lou Smith, Head of Digital Products and Services for Willis (a WTW business) and Spike Lipkin, co-founder of Newfront and Chief AI Officer at WTW, discuss how shared capabilities, vision and values will drive better, faster experiences.

Question [Q]: How has WTW been digitizing the value chain?

Lou Smith [LS]: We've long been investing in digitizing the value chain through things like our Broking Platform, which modernizes how insurers and brokers can trade, and programs like Gemini, our global digital auto-follow facility. We’re continuing to deliver digitized capabilities that make things easier for our clients, whether that’s investing in fully end-to-end digital journeys for small to medium-sized businesses, or Risk Intelligence Central, which gives clients easy and efficient access to their risk information, or continually enhancing our risk and analytics capabilities so clients can optimize their risk and insurance.

We’re always asking: How do we bring data back to our brokers as quickly as possible? How do we digitize more of the value chain? What do our tools look like in an AI agentic world? With the work we’ve done, the acquisition of Newfront and the coming together of WTW, Spike and the Newfront team, we’re entering a really exciting new phase of answering these questions.

[Q]: How and why was Newfront created?

Spike Lipkin [SL]: I’d been buying insurance working at an investing startup and the experience was terrible: mountains of paperwork, filling out documents, sending them off to a broker (it wasn't WTW!) and then waiting, sometimes months, only to get back documents that might as well be written in a foreign language, then making payments to many different carriers and hoping what you bought will cover you when you have an issue.

Simultaneously, I saw other businesses and marketplaces like payroll and banking digitize and move to the cloud. There was an opportunity to bring the entire insurance marketplace online.

I teamed up with an engineer, Gordon Wintrob. We had a vision. If we built really great technology, we could help digitize the process and lead to better client experiences. And then ultimately what we learned is if you build a better client experience, you also build a better colleague experience because you're doing things in a digital interface versus in a more manual manner. And if you can capture exposure data, you can help clients make a better case to the market, which drives better experiences for carriers too because you're sending them clean submissions in a data-driven way.

[Q]: How does the acquisition of Newfront accelerate WTW’s digital journey?

[SL]: WTW is already an industry leader with an enduring legacy in data analytics. It also operates as an integrated business, with consolidated data across operating units.

We saw a really exciting opportunity to combine our client-facing tools to complement what Lou and team have built. One of these tools organizes insurance and benefits information and allows clients to access that information in a single platform, while an AI product we’ve built, delivers highly accurate coverage gap analysis.

These are the kinds of developments we think will accelerate the WTW digital journey, but more than any products, the big driver to acceleration is how WTW will leverage Newfront-built technology and expertise to deliver great products for clients.

We believe you build great products by embedding engineers in professional teams. Engineering can't be an ancillary function, where the business throws some requirements over the wall and gets back a completed product. You can only build great products when an engineer and a professional sit shoulder to shoulder, design something together, come up with solutions and iterate together.

[LS]: And now we can now bring together WTW’s talent and insurance expertise, Newfront’s technologies and the AI-powered capabilities the team has been working on, coupled with the assets we've built and work together to accelerate our digital journey faster.

[Q]: How will WTW’s accelerated digital journey benefit clients?

[LS]: Clients expect immediacy because that’s what's happening in other areas of their lives. That’s why we’re really focused on combining our risk and analytics tools with digital services plus AI and data-driven advice to enable brokers to turn things around quickly for clients.

The culture at Newfront, where engineers and SMEs co-build together, meant we gave brokers and servicing teams the tools they needed to deliver on client expectations faster.

Newfront’s product mindset of really thinking about experience layers, getting stuff out there quickly, learning and iterating fast was so powerful. We were already expanding our capabilities in both engineering and experience design, but by coming together with Newfront, we can deliver things clients really want to engage with even faster than before.

[Q]: Is this way of working unique in this industry?

[SL]: It was unique when we started doing it. We have a ‘crossing the aisle’ value, where in our early offices, we literally had an aisle between engineering and the professional teams. We thought it was really important those teams intermingled and you’d see engineers literally sitting with professional teams. These teams should be co-located and get to know each other, so when you have an issue with a product, you won’t be submitting a bug report, hearing back a month later, but tapping the engineer or the product manager on the shoulder and talking about why it's not working for you.

[LS]: The distance between the people who use tools and capabilities and those building them needs to be close to zero. It’s how you get the best outcome, for both clients and the colleagues delivering experiences people want to engage with. We have product leaders, engineers, SMEs, users and client research, all sitting together in one structure. That’s become the norm of how we work, which I think is unique.

[Q]: How do we think of technology development and usage — do we prefer to build, buy or partner to fill gaps?

[SL]: Building things historically has been more expensive than renting them. In general, we should always go into the market and look for companies purpose-built around the issues we have. This allows us to focus our limited technology resources and focus them on what matters.

[LS]: I completely agree. Partnering or buying to get speed and where the capability is transformative, acquiring, is critical to how we move forward.

[Q]: What does our digital and AI strategy mean for our carrier partners?

[LS]: Our strategy is focused on data and connectivity, connecting Willis brokers to the market and the market back to Willis. It means better data and faster submissions, which are a huge benefit to carriers, as well as clients.

And with greater AI agentic-type capabilities, carriers have an opportunity to transform for their clients. If there's better data and faster submissions, the whole value chain wins.

Cleaner, more complete submission of data for carriers also means we can expect them to assess and pay clients’ claims faster and with less friction.  

[Q]: How is our AI strategy different? 

[SL]: It comes down to three things. One: models are really only as good as the data you feed them and WTW has volumes of proprietary data that can make models so much better. Two: WTW is an integrated, agile business, compared to peers that are more like siloed holding companies operating separately, making technology adoption really difficult across multiple employee bases, systems and leadership teams with sometimes competing priorities. WTW doesn’t have these issues. The third driver of differentiation is the approach to technology. WTW has long been investing in technology, with a legacy of building and owning significant technology businesses, as well as engineers embedded in the business.

[Q]: How will technology and AI accelerate training and talent development within the organization?

[SL]: Bringing on early-career talent is key to winning over the long term and AI can become really significant for helping early-career colleagues ramp up faster. By training an AI model to analyze a multi-hundred-page policy for the latest terms and exclusions, we enable our earlier-career colleagues to do deeper analysis, learn and accelerate earlier in their careers.

[LS]: There are huge opportunities to compress learning curves. New brokers can look at simulations, access information, look at patterns using AI to see things in a different way. I think it brings people up to speed or up to a certain level quicker, but it also enables those different thinkers to develop their views. Our clients will win when we combine new talent and reduced learning curves, so colleagues can be more effective, more quickly.

[Q]: What can we expect to see for the rest of 2026?

[LS]: Our clients can expect more immediacy, more access to data and for us to be where they need us to be. We plan to be more accessible, using data and AI to deliver on our clients’ expectations while meeting colleague demands for more access to data and tooling, so they can serve their clients better than anybody else. On the talent side, we’ll continue to focus on building that vital culture of deploying engineers in ways that mean we keep delivering the things clients want quickly.

[SL]: I wholeheartedly agree. It’s also worth saying AI doesn’t mean we’ll have fewer engineers. It means the engineers get to work on the most interesting problems. AI is ‘clearing the underbrush’ so professional teams can do more strategic work.

[LS]: AI enables teams to start to think about things in a completely different way, rather than in legacy or heritage ways. Everybody can work at a higher level, enabling even faster acceleration.