Unum offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee
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Unum is a leader in disability, group life and supplemental benefits, generating nearly $13 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025. Its products support employers and their people across key life moments from disability and life insurance to leave management and workplace accident protection. With more than 10,000 employees worldwide and 47 million lives covered, the company paid $8 billion in benefits last year alone.
Gautam Roy is the company’s chief technology officer, and he has spent seven and a half years helping reshape the 178-year-old insurer into a digital-first enterprise. His remit spans architecture, infrastructure, digital platforms, data, AI and automation and, critically, the people and culture needed to bring all of it to life. “I see my role as a CTO in both a strategic architect of the future and also a practical builder for today,” he said.
Reimagining a Legacy Business
Roy describes Unum’s technology shift not simply as digital transformation but as digital reimagination. “Digital reimagination to me is an ability to envision and create new possibilities by blending technology, data and human creativity,” he underscored. The aim is to rethink products, experiences, operations and business models, in some cases.
Part of that reinvention is becoming digital first, where every product and service is designed with digital as the primary channel. Roy emphasizes that this is not about migrating offline processes online. Rather, it is about designing experiences from scratch based on customers’ needs for speed, simplicity, personalization and accessibility.
He outlined three major levers in this shift:
- Moving from applications to journeys to value streams, starting with “moments that matter” such as enrollment, claims and leave.
- Embedding data, AI and automation to remove friction and accelerate service delivery.
- Expanding the ecosystem, integrating with employers’ HR, payroll and benefits systems to reduce handoffs and improve data quality.
Transforming End-User Support Into Technology Experience
One of Roy’s signature initiatives has been remaking traditional IT support into what he calls technology employee experience. The change was grounded in understanding employee needs, using telemetry to capture real-time insights and shifting from reactive problem-solving to proactive and predictive support.
“We implemented endpoint analytics, experience management software… because we wanted to understand the experience of the employees,” Roy explained. AI now identifies degraded performance or configuration issues before employees encounter them, allowing the team to fix problems before they become tickets.
Self-service has also expanded significantly. Roy described guided workflows for common tasks such as password resets or application reinstalls. “If we are alerted that your laptop…is having a performance problem, we’ll throw a bubble on your screen,” offering steps users can take or prompting a remote diagnostic session, he noted.
The team also built a digital experience platform connecting Office 365, ServiceNow, Amazon Connect and other tools to unify collaboration and support. But perhaps most transformative is the cultural shift. “We’ve been shifting from a service provider mindset to an experience partner mindset,” Roy shared, a shift reinforced through training, rituals and incentives.
Measuring What Matters: Customer Satisfaction
Unum now measures customer satisfaction at every interaction rather than in broad strokes. The company uses digital forensics and targeted surveys to understand how customers experience portals, claims processes and document submissions. Roy noted that the goal is simple: “To make sure that we deliver the best experience for you by focusing on things that matter the most for you.”
Fostering an Innovation Culture
Innovation at Unum is both bottom-up and top-down. Roy has worked to build “safe spaces for people to experiment,” through hackathons, sandboxes and targeted pilots. Failure is expected, so long as it is fast, inexpensive and instructive. Cross-functional collaboration is required, and ideas are recognized even when they do not scale.
Continuous learning is core to the culture Roy is cultivating. “In a world where technology and customer expectations are evolving faster than ever, the organization that wins are the ones that make continuous upskilling part of their DNA,” he said. Future-focused skills such as generative AI, data literacy and digital design are prioritized across roles. Curiosity and versatility are encouraged in hiring, and progress is tied to incentives.
AI as Copilot and Catalyst
AI is already reshaping Unum’s operations and customer interactions. Roy sees three broad areas where AI will have lasting influence:
- Efficiency, automation and scale across functions such as claims, underwriting, HR, finance and operations.
- Customer experience transformation, enabling proactive, personalized, 24×7 support through intelligent copilots.
- New possibilities unlocked through the combination of technology, data and human creativity.
“What excites me most is where the technology, data and human creativity would come together to unlock completely new possibilities,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. Hyper-personalization, intelligent copilots and connected platforms across insurers, employers, providers and employees are all emerging possibilities.
Roy also highlighted the growing importance of agentic AI, where end-to-end automation blends large language models, generative AI and high-quality data to reimagine whole business processes, not just fragments of them.
Looking Ahead: Platforms, Ecosystems and Speed
Roy envisions a future where insurers do not have to build everything themselves. Instead, they will orchestrate external services and internal capabilities into fit-for-purpose solutions. Like a conductor, his team aims to orchestrate the right elements, whether automated workflows, data streams, or ecosystem APIs, to deliver value more rapidly and economically.
Seven years into his tenure, Roy remains energized by the transformation underway. Unum’s mission is to help working people thrive through life’s most difficult moments, and it is clarifying and drives both discipline and innovation. As AI accelerates, Roy sees even greater opportunity to enhance experiences, simplify complexity and push the company toward a future where technology amplifies both business performance and human impact.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on X @PeterAHigh.
