Marsh CEO doubts rival’s 40% AI sales claim

Marsh used its fiscal second-quarter earnings call to argue that its proprietary data and long-standing client relationships position it to benefit from AI. Revenue increased 6% in the quarter.

The company is organizing its AI strategy around growth, productivity and efficiency, supported by its Thrive program, which is designed to free up resources for investments in the Marsh brand, sales capacity, operations and technology.

As part of the brand push, Marsh became the official risk partner of Formula 1, giving it exposure to more than 800 million fans and what the company described as a large concentration of C-suite executives and decision-makers.

Marsh also highlighted several AI initiatives:

• Marsh Risk Companion, a client-facing analytics platform launched at the RIMS conference in Philadelphia.
• Atlas, a reinsurance platform that brings together hazard scores, litigation risk, market pricing, economic indicators and other financial data.
• Claims IQ, which uses anonymized data from millions of claims to support claims management and generate client insights.
• LenWork, an agentic assistant built on Marsh’s LenAI suite that helps employees develop product ideas and sales strategies and respond to RFPs. The tool uses third-party models but is purpose-built for Marsh’s ecosystem, which the company said provides a more secure and cost-efficient approach as token costs rise.
• A project involving BCS, Oliver Wyman and Amazon Web Services to redesign middle- and back-office processes, beginning with claims services and reinsurance treaty issuance.

During the call, BMO analyst Michael Zaremski asked about a competitor’s claim that upgraded analytics tools had produced a 40% improvement in sales win rates.

“I haven’t seen anybody in the market report 40% growth rate. So I’m a little bit skeptical there,” Marsh CEO John Doyle said. “But we’re not trying to keep up with the market. We’re leading the market and continuing to extend our leading spot in the market.”

Doyle pointed to Marsh Risk Companion and the company’s data as advantages in helping clients model and benchmark risk before financing it through captives, traditional insurers or alternative capital.

Bottom Line: Zaremski did not name the competitor. He referred to “one of your direct competitors” and to that firm’s “newer upgraded analyzers” — Aon’s term for its Risk Analyzer suite. The likely source is Aon CFO Edmund Reese, who told a Morgan Stanley conference on June 9 that Aon’s analytics get presented and the firm wins more, adding that “RFP rates are up over 40%.” Reese cited the figure as a retention driver and did not define the metric or give a baseline. He did not say “win rate.”