Marsh aims to be an “AI winner” through growth, productivity and efficiency gains, according to John Doyle, president and CEO of the broker and risk adviser.
“[W]e see AI as a powerful accelerator and enabler in delivering value to our clients, colleagues and shareholders,” Doyle said during an earnings call with equities analysts to discuss first quarter results. (See below for Marsh’s Q1 results wrapup).
He emphasized it’s important to remember that Marsh is not selling commoditized products or simply procuring insurance at the lowest possible price. “[Artificial intelligence] will help us serve our clients who have bespoke and complex needs even better. It will not replace the trusted advice, expertise and capabilities with which we deliver value to clients,” he said.
As KPMG said in a recent report, AI is delivering value, but only for those businesses that scale it. Following that measure of success, Marsh is focusing on scale in its AI investments and is adopting an enterprise-wide strategy.
“While AI adoption is accelerating worldwide, only a small group of ‘AI leaders’ are seeing clear returns. These leaders consistently outperform others, including 82% saying that AI is already delivering meaningful business value, compared to 62% of their peers,” said KPMG International in its first Global AI Pulse survey, published in March.
“This is not simply an AI maturity gap; it is a widening performance gap between organizations that treat AI as an enterprise-wide transformation and those that are trying to bolster AI onto existing models and seeing incremental gains,” said KPMG.
Doyle said he and his team “feel good” about the company’s AI investments and how these new tech capabilities are improving the business. “We moved early on AI, and we’re excited about how it’s already making us better and how it’s going to make us better in the future,” he said, noting that Marsh’s scale matters.
“Our strategy leverages our scale and capacity to invest in AI to drive even greater value from our proprietary data assets and our role as our clients’ trusted adviser,” Doyle said.
He went on to detail Marsh’s strategy for its AI tech investments, which focuses on three main pillars: growth, productivity and efficiency.
Growth
In the area of growth, Doyle said the company is “building AI-enabled applications and services that are generating new revenue streams as well as enhancing world-class capabilities and data-driven insights in insurance, health, human capital and investments.”
There are also significant AI growth opportunities to be found in Marsh’s consulting businesses, Oliver Wyman and Mercer, he said.
Oliver Wyman’s Quotient team was created to help clients deploy their own AI strategies and is its fastest-growing practice, Doyle continued.
“We’re advising clients in multiple sectors such as banking, energy, government and manufacturing around AI and workforce transformation. We’ve already advised on more than $50 billion of capital investment in AI deployment, and Mercer is working with clients to assess and inventory skills and redesign jobs as AI is integrated into ways of working.”
Productivity
Marsh’s second AI pillar is productivity, which focuses on deploying AI capabilities to boost the performance of the group’s colleagues.
“This is showing up in hundreds of different ways across a wide variety of roles. A good example of our work is to embed AI in our client management tools and to develop AI agents to help colleagues source and prequalify leads to support sales productivity,” Doyle explained.
Efficiency
The final AI pillar is efficiency, Doyle said, noting that across Marsh’ business, the impact of AI automation is beginning to emerge.
“A critical reason for creating our Business and Client Services unit, or BCS, is to exploit the efficiency potential of AI. By consolidating our back-office operations and technology into scalable centers, BCS is accelerating the pace of AI-driven automation and process reengineering.”
Doyle went on to cite an example with the fact that the company now handles thousands of documents weekly, improving the efficiency of these processes by 20%, while “enhancing the quality of the data and its usability to further support clients with valuable insights.”
“We are beginning to reduce the cost and time associated with upgrading code to modernize applications. For example, we recently used AI to turn a legacy tool into a newly designed broker workbench in days, saving months of team effort,” he added.
Further, Doyle added, agentic AI has been deployed for Marsh’s IT help desk, which has significantly reduced inquiries, improved colleague experience and created downstream efficiencies in Marsh’s support centers. (Agentic AI is described by Amazon’s AWS as an autonomous AI system that can act independently, without constant human oversight, to achieve pre-determined goals.)
“And in our policy renewal center, AI has enabled us to transform a traditionally manual, email-heavy process into a streamlined digital solution in weeks, a project that otherwise would have taken many months,” he affirmed. “AI-enabled savings will fuel additional growth investments, including in producer talent, and new capabilities while building our confidence in continued margin improvement.”
Q1 Results Overview
During the first quarter, Marsh reported consolidated revenue of $7.6 billion, an increase of 8% compared with the first quarter of 2025, or 4% on an underlying (organic) basis (level with Q1 2025).
Operating income during Q1 2026 fell 12% to $1.8 billion and included a $425 million charge related to the Greensill litigation (compared with Q1 2025 when operating income was $2 billion).
Net income attributable to the company during Q1 2026 was $1.1 billion, compared with $1.38 billion in Q1 2025. Earnings per share for Q1 2026 were $2.36, while adjusted earnings per share increased 8% to $3.29.
Risk and Insurance Services Segment
Marsh’s Risk and Insurance Services (RIS) segment (comprising Marsh Risk and reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter) reported revenue of $5.1 billion during Q1 2026, an increase of 6%, or 3% on an underlying (organic) basis. Operating income decreased 19% to $1.3 billion and included the charge related to the Greensill litigation, while adjusted operating income increased 7% to $1.9 billion.
Marsh Risk’s revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was $3.7 billion, an increase of 8%, or 4% on an underlying basis. In U.S./Canada, underlying revenue growth was 3%. In International, underlying revenue growth was 5%, and included 6% growth in EMEA, 5% growth in Asia Pacific, and 2% growth in Latin America.
Guy Carpenter’s revenue in the first quarter was $1.2 billion, an increase of 3%, or 2% on an underlying basis.
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