← back
Small Bets, Big Impact Building GenBI at a Fortune 100 – Asaf Bord, Northwestern Mutual
Takeaway
In risk-averse enterprises, ship GenAI as many small, evaluated bets that progressively expand scope rather than a single high-stakes launch.
Summary
- Asaf Bord describes building GenBI — a Gen AI + BI agent that answers business questions over data — inside Northwestern Mutual, a 160-year-old risk-averse financial firm.
- Strategy: many small bets rather than a single bet-the-farm deployment, balancing 'don't f up' stability with innovation.
- Four core challenges include the absence of precedent (no Fortune 100 GenBI playbook), data sensitivity, governance, and trust calibration.
- Approach democratizes analytics so non-BI staff can self-serve, with guardrails appropriate for life insurance/wealth management data.
llm-appsenterpriseanalytics
Original description
Enterprises don’t usually make moonshots, especially in GenAI. Governance, budgets, and risk aversion make it almost impossible to justify a huge, uncertain investment. At Northwestern Mutual, we’re building GenBI, an LLM-powered analytics copilot, by flipping that logic. Instead of one big bet, we created an incremental roadmap of small, fundable projects. Each is tied to real business outcomes, delivers measurable ROI, and builds the trust needed to move forward. This talk shares how we framed the problem, earned leadership support, and designed a modular architecture grounded in real data. We’ll show how each research step can stand on its own - productized, measurable, and deployable. Attendees will leave with a clear blueprint for making AI transformation fundable, governable, and real inside large, risk-averse organizations. Speaker: Asaf Bord | AI Product Lead, Northwestern Mutual https://www.linkedin.com/in/asafbord/recent-activity/all/ https://asafbord.wixsite.com/home