Three New York Life’s technology leaders share how small wins, platform consolidation, and AI-first thinking are helping modernize one of the world’s largest insurers with a 180+ year legacy of stability and trust.
How does a 180-year-old Fortune 62 company with nearly a trillion dollars in assets move with the pace of a modern technology startup?
At Unqork CREATE 2026, Unqork CEO Gary Hoberman sat down with three visionary technology leaders from New York Life—Ed Walsh, CIO – Foundational Business; Hemal Patel, CIO – Strategic Businesses; and Miguel Suarez, Head of Technology, Seguros Monterrey New York Life—to share the execution framework behind the firm’s sweeping digital transformation.
The conversation bypassed theoretical hype to focus on real-world delivery and impact, demonstrating that shifting away from traditional code-based development—and embracing a bold vision to leverage AI—can accelerate innovation, slash technical debt, and lower operating costs, furthering New York Life’s legacy for the future.
The Vision: Start Small to Scale Big
For large enterprises, the sheer weight of technical debt can stall modernization before it even begins. Miguel Suarez shared that Seguros Monterrey bypassed this inertia by shifting their operational model on a single, high-priority project: a new client portal.
“We went from ideation to production in three months with a client portal for a new product. And we didn’t have to worry so much about the platform and infrastructure and setting up environments, because all of that was done for us. And that gave us the trust to then move forward with other portals,” said Suarez.
That initial success earned widespread business trust, paving the way for the team to scale the platform across all products, build a virtual office, and eventually replace a major legacy CRM. By eliminating expensive licensing fees and platform overhead, the migration saved millions of dollars annually while securing over 70% user adoption.
“Unqork allows us to then work on other projects and other business challenges instead of worrying about infrastructure, security, and everything else when you own the full stack,” Suarez added.
Breaking the Sunk-Cost Trap of Legacy Modernization
Large financial institutions are accustomed to challenging multi-year IT overhauls. Ed Walsh noted that modernization efforts often fail when organizations expect a new system to do everything a 40-year-old codebase did, plus every capability it never could.
New York Life broke this cycle during its massive acquisition of Cigna’s group benefits business (New York Life GBS). Facing a hard integration deadline, their incumbent software provider was in the fourth year of a projected two-year timeline. New York Life decided to pivot after seeing a proof of concept on the Unqork platform.
The team built and launched a brand-new producer management system within a year, successfully onboarding the new business line. Within two and a half years, New York Life scaled that success, migrating all 12,000 of their advisors and agents onto the platform.
Unlocking the Innovation Mindset
By reducing its architectural surface area, New York Life completely shifted the financial math of software maintenance.
“We often talk about projects done in half the time and half the cost, and how running Unqork for Miguel is also half the runtime cost—not counting the licensing costs that we got rid of,” said Patel.
“But more than this, it enabled a shift in the mindset that has allowed us to really strategize, plan, execute differently,” he added.
Today, this strategy underpins a broader consolidation effort: shrinking an estate of over 600 legacy applications down to 20 or fewer core, strategic platforms by decommissioning roughly 50 outdated systems per year.
“The big pivot was to ask, how do we move away from building an application for every problem and get to twenty or less core platforms that are going to run the business. And that is when we started to think Unqork could scale to be one of those 20 or fewer enterprise platforms.” explained Walsh.
The Leap AI-First Development
Now, that evolution is accelerating through AI. New York Life is actively exploring how UnqorkAI can automate requirements gathering, generate test cases, accelerate application development, and even help modernize decades-old legacy applications.
“When Unqork came and said, ‘We’re going to infuse AI into Unqork’s development capabilities,’ we were excited because we already had an AI-first mindset,” Patel said.
“Looking back, we used to go through a major transformation every 10 or 15 years. Now, we’ve got to transform continuously. And we have a tremendous opportunity to do so, because AI allows us to reimagine how we can do so,” Patel added.
In addition to leveraging AI to tackle tech debt and legacy modernization, Patel said, “We want to get to an AI tech delivery life cycle. And Unqork is a partner and a pillar in that aspect.”
For an organization approaching two centuries in business, the lesson is clear: transformation doesn’t start with replacing technology. It starts with rethinking how work gets done, starting small, thinking big—and now by embracing the possibilities of AI in a truly visionary way.