MAM
Sassoon Kosian returns to consulting, joins PwC to lead AI in financial services
After nine years building algorithms at New York Life, the data-science veteran heads back to his roots
NEW YORK: Sassoon Kosian has gone back to where he started. After a near-decade run building AI inside New York Life Insurance, Kosian has joined PwC as director of AI and GenAI for financial services, swapping the corporate inside seat for the consulting trenches he cut his teeth in over two decades ago.
The move, announced on LinkedIn, comes with the kind of relief usually reserved for a homecoming. Kosian called it a return to his “consulting roots,” joining what he described as a “talented, globally recognised team” after more than 25 years straddling the line between data science and business strategy.
His New York Life stint, which ran from 2017, was hardly a quiet one. Kosian built an AI-driven recommender for agent recruiters, an AI-powered scorecard that lifted agent conversion by 3 per cent and generated over $20m in lifetime value, and a hiring tool that he says delivers multimillion-dollar benefits every year. He also rolled out GenAI RAG chatbots for sales and service teams, predictive models to sniff out agent fraud and non-compliance, and deep-learning tools that forecast multiple performance metrics simultaneously to curb churn.
Before that, the résumé reads like a tour of America’s analytics shops: senior director of data science at AIG, nearly 11 years at EXL Service rising to head of methodology, and earlier stops at Inductis, American Express and Palisades Research, where he cut early teeth on Basel II credit risk models, price optimisation tools and parallelisation techniques for SAS that he claims saved a top US credit card issuer over $5m.
At PwC, Kosian’s brief is to build out AI and generative AI solutions for financial services clients, a role he steps into after spending a career proving that the line between data science and business value can, in fact, be drawn straight.
Twenty-five years, eight employers, and one consistent thread, Kosian builds the models that move the needle. PwC is betting he can do it again.
