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 software, analytics, and ML model development.
One month later, Travelers debuted its AI Claim Assistant, an agentic AI tool developed with OpenAI that can answer customer claim submission questions in a “natural, friendly” tone similar to what they would expect from a human agent.
When Travelers handles the first notice of loss, which is the initial report a policyholder makes to an insurance company regarding an accident or other incident that may result in compensation, around 50% have opted to go digital and record the claim in the Travelers app. When they do so, the default option is for them to talk to the AI Claim Assistant and so far, consumers are showing “tremendous acceptance” of these conversational AI capabilities.
So far, Lefebvre’s top external partners on generative AI have been Anthropic and OpenAI. “It’s too early in the AI journey to do everything with one, so from the very beginning, we wanted to partner with the leaders in the area,” she says. “There are certainly other players, but you also don’t want to have ten different partners.”
With the conversational AI capabilities, Lefebvre felt that OpenAI was at the forefront, while Anthropic’s analytical, coding, and engineering capabilities are considered to be “absolutely ahead of others.”
Measurement of success varies across Lefebvre’s AI bets. For claims, as an example, Travelers wants to reduce the time it takes to close a claim. Financial-related targets include efficiency gains across engineering and cost avoidance for any workflows that can be automated by AI. A third metric that Travelers tracks is adoption and “empowerment,” with the latter linked to the change management that the company wants to see in terms of embracing a new way to approach work.
“Anything that you don’t measure can evaporate,” says Lefebvre. “You absolutely have to have some commitments in your budgets and your plans. And if you don’t do that, the benefits won’t necessarily be realized, whether it’s expense savings or growth.”
John Kell
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