Why insurance giant Travelers’ CTO is placing fewer, bigger bets on AI

As a child growing up in Iran, Mojgan Lefebvre dreamed of becoming a doctor. But turbulent times in the Middle East nation led her to immigrate to the United States, where she took a pragmatic approach to planning for her future. The cost to study medicine felt too prohibitive, especially given that Lefebvre would fund her own education.

“Having a strong math background, everybody told me I should go into computers,” says Lefebvre. “I had never seen a computer before in my life, but I decided to take the advice.”

Lefebvre was a quick study at Georgia Tech, where she earned her degree in computer science. She began her career as a software engineer at BellSouth, now part of telecommunications giant AT&T, served as a consultant at Bain & Company, and took on technology leadership roles with increasing levels of responsibility. She served as chief information officer at three different companies before becoming the chief technology and operations officer at Travelers Companies, the No. 99-ranked Fortune 500 insurer, in 2018.

“I would say in today’s world, the CTO and CIO titles have become interchangeable,” says Lefebvre. “I’m in charge of everything technology at Travelers, everything internal and external.”

Most recently, her efforts have focused on strategically mapping out and deploying the insurance giant’s artificial intelligence strategy. Some of this work predates Lefebvre’s time at Travelers, as the company had embedded machine learning and AI into its business for well over a decade. In 2020, Lefebvre created an AI-focused accelerator team, an enterprise-wide center of expertise that centralizes efforts on the technology.

After ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022, Travelers wanted to quickly put AI in the hands of its 30,000-plus employees. It launched TravAI, an in-house agentic AI platform intended to boost employee productivity, that integrates multiple generative AI tools with internal systems. Every employee can access TravAI after completing a training program.

“It’s taken away that fear that AI is here to take away my job,” says Lefebvre.

But Lefebvre says she doesn’t want to rack up numerous, disparate AI use cases. The so-called “let a thousand flowers bloom” theory to allow dozens or even hundreds of AI pilots proliferate across the enterprise has fallen out of favor. As technology leaders hunt for a more clear return on investment, which has proven to be elusive for many, they’ve gotten far more focused.

CTOs and CIOs are focusing on fewer bets that have a greater ability to scale. At Travelers, that means spending more on AI tools that can improve claims, service management, and bolster the company’s data and analytics capabilities. “I don’t think a thousand little things will add up,” says Lefebvre.

Already in 2026, Lefebvre has launched two new AI tools focused on those priorities. In January, Travelers and Anthropic announced that nearly 10,000 of the insurer’s engineers, data scientists, analysts, and product owners would get access to Anthropic’s personalized AI assistants to speed up........

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