The Future of Insurance – Guru Vasudeva, SVP & CTO of P&C, Nationwide

Episode Detail

Guru Vasudeva leads technology for Property & Casualty at Nationwide, a business that spans personal lines, commercial lines, Excess & Surplus, and agribusiness inside a company spending well over a billion dollars a year on technology. In this conversation he lays out how Nationwide thinks about AI in three layers: everyday tools for more than 25,000 associates, a rebuilt approach to software engineering, and the transformation of Underwriting, Claims, and customer service. Guru shares specifics on what happened when close to 5,000 people in software engineering received AI tooling, why a legacy project once estimated at $5 million now costs $750,000, how generative AI turns Underwriting into a growth opportunity that lets each underwriter manage more territory, and why he finds it easier to teach business people AI than to teach AI people the business.

Guest Bio

Guru Vasudeva is SVP and CTO for Property & Casualty at Nationwide, where he leads technology across personal lines, commercial lines, Excess & Surplus, and agribusiness. He joined Nationwide in 2004 and has held a series of senior technology roles there, including Chief Architect, business unit CIO, Enterprise CTO, and SVP and CIO for Program and Application Services. Before Nationwide, he was an Executive Architect at IBM and a software engineer at AT&T. Guru holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Mysore and an MBA in International Finance from the University of Cincinnati.

Show Notes:

Three Layers of AI at Nationwide:

Everyday AI: A Nationwide-specific generative AI tool rolled out in full at the start of the year to 25,000-plus associates and another 5,000 to 10,000 contractors, including the ability to build their own daily agents.

AI for tech: Started in software engineering and is expanding into operations and cybersecurity.

Business transformation: Underwriting, Claims, and customer service, which Guru calls the hardest layer because it requires picking something bold.

Context: Nationwide has run near real-time predictive analytics at scale for 15 years, so generative AI is the new capability, not AI itself.

Software Engineering at Scale:

Train the trainer: Across roughly 400 development teams, three people each (tech leads, Scrum Masters, and app owners) were trained on autonomous development and MCP gateways, then taught their teams.