Aon plc (NYSE:AON) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Bob Huang: I know that you talked quite a bit about tech innovation and efficiency. Maybe if I can just dig a little bit deeper on the cost of AI implementation, right? Obviously, tremendous potential down the road, but from what we’ve seen recently, for example, Microsoft just announced that their AI-enabled products are twice as expensive as non AI-enabled products. Just going down that line of thinking, can you maybe help us think about how your AI investments fits in — the cost of that fits into your three areas of investing with the AR business right now?

Christa Davies: Yes. Look, thank you so much for the question, Bob. And we are super excited about AI more broadly and how it can apply to our business. And we would say we think about this in terms of everything from really basic machine learning, robotic process automation, all that stuff that helps us drive automation and efficiency at the sort of very low end, very cheap and super scalable, and we’re really looking to implement that broadly across our business, to help our colleagues get out of the sort of day-to-day cutting and pasting and inefficient processes that they’re doing today and equally to make things much easier for clients to interact with us and do business. And so that’s sort of the low end. And then you could say at the high end, sort of generative AI, it’s really helping us drive insight and impact in the analytical areas that Eric was describing around risk capital and human capital.

Catastrophe modeling, helping us add data sets, the human capital assistant, helping clients interact with human capital assistants, much like they would an expert in human capital today. And so Bob, we’re very thoughtful about the cost of this, and where it’s best to use basic technology, machine learning, robotic process automation, because it’s just cheaper and more efficient and more scalable broadly. And where we’re really trying to have insight and impact with clients and use generative AI. So we’re sort of scaling it depending on the impact and opportunity.

Greg Case: And I just had two observations, on this. First, we’ve been doing AI, as Christa described, really for a decade. So it’s not as we haven’t been incorporating this. It’s one of the reasons we drove an business services. That’s my second observation. Because we have Aon Business Services, because we’ve been working on it since 2017, we actually have a platform to scale these ideas. Absent Aon Business Services, literally, the ability to kind of get this moved around 120 countries around the world is basically 0. So you can come up with a good idea in a geography, but how do you actually systematically move it around the world. So one of the reasons we’re excited about our ability to do this and do it cost effectively is Aon Business Services.

Bob Huang: My second question, maybe just to go back to the line of questioning regarding Commercial Risk Solutions, right? And obviously, you’ve talked in depth about why the U.S. segment is the way it is. But you also — one of the things we noticed is that Asia has been strong for a few quarters. In the last quarter, you also saw strength in Latin America and rest of the world. Just as we gradually come back to a more normal M&A market in the U.S., how durable is the growth in the rest of the world. I’m just trying to think down to next year, how we should think about Commercial Risk Solutions growth going forward?

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