Hartford Business Journal

16 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | AUGUST 11, 2025 Talent Gap AI revolution poses urgent workforce development challenge for CT to streamline any sort of financial services operations process — that's where we've seen a lot of uplift." In 2022, SS&C acquired Blue Prism Group — a robotics process automa- tion company — in a $1.6 billion deal. Since then, it has continued to use the platform to roll out automation and AI innovations both internally and for its client companies. Though he recognizes there is currently a lot of hype around the tech- nology, Stone says AI is not just the latest fad. He says it's transforming the pace of change in every industry. "So, it behooves individuals to ensure that they're up to speed, educated, ready," he said. "But it also behooves companies and states and municipal- ities to ensure that their workforce is ready and can meet the AI moment." Just how disruptive that AI moment will be for the human workforce is the subject of a lot of debate. Earlier this year, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned that the technology his company is developing could prove to be a white-collar "bloodbath" — wiping out as many as half of all entry-level jobs in the next one to five years. Neither Stone nor Levebvre agree with that analysis. Instead, they see a different dynamic. "I think the form of the roles will change, but certainly no doubt that every individual in every role, inclusive of engineering, will be doing a whole lot more than they were capable of doing without AI," Lefebvre said. SS&C has already deployed what it calls "digital workers" — software robots — "not in an effort to replace our staff, but really an effort to remove some of the friction that they might have in terms of satisfying their customers on a day-to-day basis," Stone said. And, he says, where AI, like other automation technologies before it, does take over what was traditionally done by human beings, "we don't think that AI becomes a complete replacement of the workforce. We think it is absolutely a complementary technology." "I sense the fear," said Chris DiPen- tima, the CEO of the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. But, he too is bullish on the future of AI. "It's not displacing the workforce, but you have to understand how does the workforce now need to adjust to become the superusers of artificial intelligence?" And for a state like Connecticut, it's particularly important to grasp this dynamic. "Connecticut competes on the skills, innovation and knowledge of our workforce," DiPentima points out. That need for workforce education and development puts a particular onus on policymakers, he says, to recognize their role in managing this disruptive change. "Government needs to embrace that this is the innovative technology of the future and not run away from it, not put our heads in the sand, not be scared of it, but actually fully under- stand it, especially before attempting By Harriet Jones hjones@hartfordbusiness.com T his year is proving to be an interesting time to be a chief technology officer. "We want to make sure that every single one of our software engineers has the ability to leverage AI and build AI capabilities into what they do," said Mojgan Lefebvre, the executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer of property and casualty insurer Travelers Cos. The insurance company, which has about 2,000 technology professionals based in Hartford — its largest tech team — had been engaging with arti- ficial intelligence for years before the generative AI revolution, sparked by ChatGPT, burst onto the scene in 2022. "Everything we do is with data," Levebvre said. "Risk expertise is core to our business, and so modeling and general linear models, which are really the underpinnings of AI methodology, have been used for years." In fact, every aspect of Travelers' core business — underwriting, claim processing and service delivery — is being fundamentally changed by the application of AI. After she joined Travelers in 2018, Lefebvre established an AI accelerator division in 2020 to build core capabil- ities that could be disseminated into all parts of the business. Then the following year, she hired new lead- ership to create a tech and analytics learning organization to ensure that the workforce is kept up to date on a rapidly accelerating field. "Today all 30,000 of our employees have access to generative AI capa- bilities through what we consider a groundbreaking platform, TRAVAI," she said. "It's really a safe way from a data security, privacy and compliance perspective for us to put generative AI safely in the hands of all of our teams." That offers just a glimpse into the massive effort big corporations are making to implement artificial intel- ligence — and the sweeping implica- tions it has for their workforce. And it raises significant questions for the state of Connecticut. How can it ensure that workforce development efforts — particularly for core industries like insurance and financial services — remain competi- tive in the artificial intelligence future? "People are feeling like they're late to the game, and everybody else is utilizing this to their benefit," said Rob Stone, the general manager of intelligent automa- tion and analytics at Windsor's SS&C Technologies, which provides soft- ware and outsourced services for the financial services and other industries. "But the reality is, it's perfect timing for states like Connecticut to really invest and take it seriously and prepare the workforce for what is not going away — which is the reality of AI revolutionizing the way business operates." White-collar 'bloodbath' SS&C is another Connecticut-based global corporation that's on the leading edge of AI innovation. Like Travelers, the software and business process provider's tech-heavy core business already integrated machine learning and other aspects of AI long before the large language models of generative artificial intelligence came along. But that newer technology has greatly accelerated what they do. "In financial services you're dealing with a lot of heavy documentation, legal docs, credit agreements, state- ments, invoices," Stone said. "And so, the ability to utilize generative AI models to ingest information at scale and quickly get to the relevant points of information that you need in order SERIES | CT'S ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS Chris DiPentima Mojgan Lefebvre is the executive vice president and chief technology and operations officer of property and casualty insurer Travelers Cos. Contributed Photo

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