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Jay Bell
Jay Bell, COO and Head of Business Transformation for Global Construction and Surety at Zurich North America, joins James Benham live at ITC 2026 to explain why so much of the industry's AI work measures activity instead of impact, how a volunteer AI literacy group turned casual users into citizen builders, why Lean and Six Sigma work best when the method stays behind the scenes, and what a herd of goats has to do with his new book, The Goat in the Machine.
The full episode
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From Parris Island to the Claims Desk
Jay's road into insurance did not start in insurance. He began at Ohio State, joined the Marine Corps, and served six years as an enlisted Marine from 1993 to 1999, starting at Parris Island. He was an assaultman, trained on a shoulder fired assault weapon built to take out bunkers and light vehicles. As he puts it, a lot can go wrong with shoulder fired weapons, and a lot can go absolutely right, depending on which end you are on.
After the Marines he finished his degree at Albertus Magnus College while working full time for a local telephone company, doing installation and repair. He was one of the first DSL installers in the country, then moved into business service tech work. He thought about going into management, but the union went on strike so many times in that period that he decided he needed to do something else. He was weighing law school against business school, and he lived in the Hartford area, where, in his words, you can throw a rock and hit an insurance person every five feet. Someone suggested claims.
So at 29 he started over as a workers' comp claims adjuster in The Hartford's local claims office, making about a third of what he earned in his last year at the phone company. James, for whom work comp is his baby in insurance, approved of the choice: complicated claims can last a lifetime, and it is not an easy way to enter the industry.
Trading Six Sigma for an Underwriting Education
Within about 18 months Jay was a team leader, a pattern that would repeat through his career: managing people who were more experienced than he was. He remembers the first time an adjuster with about 15 years of experience had to come to him to get reserves approved. It was, at best, uncomfortable.
He wanted to move to the side of the business where money comes in the door rather than going out. At the time, becoming an underwriter at The Hartford meant six months of training at one of three locations, and relocating was not an option for his family. So he made a trade. The claims side had just been through Six Sigma programs, he had studied the method in business school, and underwriting was about to start its own engagements. He offered to bring Six Sigma to the underwriting organization if it would train him on underwriting. That is exactly what happened.
Offered a few different roles, he chose construction, which he saw as the closest he could stay to a blue collar role within a white collar world. He has stayed close to construction ever since, with a stretch in programs from 2016 to 2022 that culminated in leading The Hartford's middle and large commercial programs.
Walk a Mile in Underwriting's Shoes
James admits he envies that resume. He has spent 25 years building software for insurance companies and wishes he had come up through the ranks of insurance first, because you need to understand the problem to solve it, and there is no better way to understand it than to do the work you are trying to automate. Jay agrees, and his operations team now acts on it. They have a strong preference, not a mandate, for bringing people with an underwriting background into operations.
"The operation serves underwriting, and it's incredibly difficult to understand how to serve them best if you've never walked a mile in those shoes."
Jay Bell
Same Playbook, Same Places, Same Results
Jay is speaking at ITC on "Claims Transformation Without Claims Chaos," and he starts with a disclaimer: he is not a technologist. He has never worked in IT. His path into AI was predicated on empowering the individual.
Looking around the industry, he saw everyone rolling out efficiency initiatives in the same places the industry has poured them into for the last 20 years: intake on the claims side and submission intake on the underwriting side. Now leaders are asking where the real return on investment is. His question back is why anyone expected a different result from the same effort aimed at the same spot, when the only new ingredient is the tool.
His belief is that a true and lasting advantage has nothing to do with the tech stack or vendor selection criteria.
That is why his focus with AI is driving AI literacy and helping individuals achieve greater impact and better outcomes. Technology, he says, is a tool that helps.
"It's all about empowering the people."
Jay Bell
Activity Is Not Impact
Think of every meeting with a lovely presentation on the wall and a chart going up and to the right. Someone announces that 2,000 people were trained. Jay's response is a simple question: what can those people do today that they could not do before? If you think about it ahead of time, he argues, it is not hard to set up the measurement, calibrate it and establish a baseline before you roll anything out. Most organizations simply skip that step.
With the tools available today, he says, that habit is now the problem.
"I've started to get more relentlessly focused on the difference between activity and impact."
Jay Bell
"We're just continuing to do the same things we've always been doing."
Jay Bell
Keep the Discipline, Hide the Method
James has spent years studying Lean and implementing it alongside technology. His favorite book on the subject is not The Toyota Way but 2 Second Lean, which argues that shaving two seconds off every small task adds up to real results. He would happily see a whole ITC curriculum on Lean, because there are a lot of shiny objects on the expo floor that do not solve real problems.
Jay loves Six Sigma, and he says it sits at the root of everything he does. But he learned early, working with underwriters around 2005 and 2006, that he had to uncouple the discipline from the DMAIC methodology and its tools and keep them behind the scenes. The more he leaned into the tooling with the wrong audience, the more underwriters pulled back. They have a natural aversion to anything that feels like robotic science, and they will quickly remind you that underwriting is an art and a science.
James adds the other risk: process improvement can become a bureaucracy of its own, where being a black belt turns into worshipping the process instead of the two core tenets, improving efficiency and eliminating waste. In most of the claims organizations he works with, he says, many problems can be solved without AI at all. But AI is a remarkable multi-tool, one that threatens to be either our best friend or the destroyer of all worlds.
No Mandate, No Money, and a Room Full of Citizen Builders
For Jay, the answer starts with the individual again, which means AI literacy. Zurich stood up a special interest group called DAILY, short for Driving AI Literacy. It launched without a mandate and without a budget, and it passed 1,400 members in about three months. Leaders of that group are now moving into more influential roles and helping shape how the company thinks about AI and its implementation.
His favorite example is Miles Wemken, a member of his team. Six to eight months before the recording, Miles was a casual AI user who mostly polished emails with it. Then the team faced a choice: run traditional time studies, or find a way to use AI to do them more effectively. Miles spent about 60 hours of his own time over a couple of weeks and built an agent in Copilot. It is now used across Zurich, including in some international markets, and Miles has become one of the company's top citizen builders. It all started with literacy, and with giving one person room for his own epiphany.
Zurich North America has rolled out Copilot's premium tier to all of its people, and a small group also has access to Copilot Cowork. James and Jay compare notes on how fast the frontier tools are moving, from Claude and ChatGPT to Gemini and NotebookLM, and agree that the capability gains of the last year have been remarkable.
"We're turning regular folks into real citizen builders."
Jay Bell
The Goat in the Machine
Then there is the book. The goat on the cover of The Goat in the Machine is Jellybean, and the one on the back is Peanut, both his. Jay has seven goats, three sheep, a livestock guardian dog, chickens and guinea fowl. The goats have cleared almost three acres of overgrown land on his property, to a very high degree of efficiency. And no, the goat does not stand for greatest of all time.
The book grew out of LinkedIn. Jay was posting ideas that went nowhere until a friend told him the ideas were good but nobody knew who he was, and that he should lead with his more unusual interests. He considered Brazilian jiu jitsu, which he has practiced for about 30 years, but it felt overplayed in business, and his style is more self deprecating. So he wrote about being humbled, repeatedly, by the animals he takes care of, and the lessons they share with leadership. People found it interesting. What started as a coffee table book for friends and family became a field guide to turning AI activity into measurable impact, built around his Enable, Elevate, Evolve approach.
The book includes a nine question assessment, Walk the Fence, that leaders can run with their teams. Jay recently facilitated it with a room of CIOs and CTOs at a GDS event, across four 90 minute sessions over two days, and the feedback was strong. Now he wants to hold himself to the standard he asks of others. The book is on Amazon, and he gives it away free at goatinthemachine.net. The price is feedback: run the assessment with your team and tell him what worked and what did not, so the next version gets better.
Key Takeaways
The full transcript
Transcribed automatically from the episode audio, so some names and terms may be misheard.
James BenhamJay, welcome to the show. Glad to have you on. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah. So we're here in beautiful Las Vegas. I'm guessing this is not your first time in Las Vegas. It is not. Is it your two hundredth time? It's probably close. Yeah. I mean, I've been to this conference alone probably at least 10 times, and then I've been here, to Vegas a few other times as well. If you're in global construction and surety, you're here a lot because I I I was telling you before that I I spend a lot of time in construction.
I started a construction bidding and prequalification product to satisfy surety requirements that came around in 07/06 when all the subs were defaulting on things. And, it ended up being a a big network. It's called SmartVid. Okay. And it was for pre qualing subs and then bidding to them and then distributing plans. And and,
Jay BellI mean, holy hell. The number of construction conferences in Las Vegas was staggering. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. So to be candid, I'm I'm relatively new to the surety space, although I've been around it for a number of years. Been involved in the construction industry for the bulk of my twenty plus year career, but the surety role is a new addition for me that I'm excited to dig into. Well, was just talking about construction. Builders love coming to Vegas. They certainly do. So
James Benhamwe're here at ITC. I've been here a bunch of times. You've been here a bunch of times. There's always really similar themes. Sometimes it feels a little bit like Groundhog Day because we're gonna keep talking about some of the same things over and over again. Although the last twelve months have been a bit of a Wild West and true implementations into production of stuff that has been promised for a long time, but now is actually real. Before we jump completely in, I just wanted to give a quick background.
You're from the Connecticut area. Is that right? I am. And you went to Albert... Oh, sorry. Albertus Magnus College for a master's. You went to Central Connecticut
Jay Bellfor your undergrad. Is that right? I actually finished my undergrad at Albertus Magnus as well. It was a long, sordid story. I started at Ohio State before I joined the Marine Corps, spent some time going to Central Connecticut, and then finished while working full time for a local telephone company, and finished at Albertus Magnus, and then went back and got my master's there as well. Oh, nice. And, you know, probably got your best education at the United States Marine Corps,
James Benhammaybe at... I don't know, Pendleton or or Paris Island. There we go. Paris Island? 100 Paris Island. Okay. So I I I was telling you before we started recording, I was in the Aggie Corps of Cadets as a Navy Marine, ROTC Midshipman. Not the same. I did not deploy. Did not commission. But I fell in love with the Marine Corps. I mean, I fell in love with the Marine Corps hard. I wanted to be a Marine. It was not the right time for me or the Marine Corps for me to be in the Marine Corps, but, what a great education.
What did you do in the Marines? So I was a small gunner. Right? So o three fifty one. Right? So o three f fifty one zero three designates infantry and small is really... An it's antiquated weapon system at this point. I think they've actually retired my MOS. But it was basically a shoulder fired missile assault system that would allow you to take out bunkers, lightly armored vehicles, etcetera. And that's just stuff on movies that sometimes they joke about a guy doing a shoulder fired RPG or they they shoot it the wrong way.
I mean, a lot of things seem to go wrong with shoulder fired weapons, but a lot of things can go absolutely right with them as well. So if you if you like you like big boobs. It depends on your perspective here. Mean, it depends on which end Exactly. The the sender or the recipient Yeah. You're the one with the weapon system. It usually goes pretty well. If you're the one who's receiving the weapon system, not Usually not a good day. 100 So marine corps for four years or what was From '93 to '99.
Nice. Enlisted. Enlisted. And then then college, and then you you jump in. I... I'd love to know... I always like to know, like, what path got you from US Marine Corps,
Jay Bellthen undergrad, grad school Mhmm. Into the insurance industry. Yeah. Fair question. So I was working for a local telephone company. I'm doing installation repair, and then I was one of the first DSL installers in the country, and then I was doing business service tech work. Oh, that would be digital subscriber line for those of you who are noobs and don't remember that era. We had ISDNs,
James BenhamDSL.
Jay BellWe had dial up before that. I ran an Internet service provider that was all dial up. Then DSL was a dream. Yeah. So I I actually finished my degree while working for the phone company. Was thinking about going into management, but we went on strike so many times right around that period. So I was like, I need to do something else. And then I was trying to debate whether I wanted to go to law school or whether I wanted to go business school. I live in the Hartford area, so you could throw a rock and hit an insurance person, like, every five feet.
And so someone suggested, hey, maybe check out claims. And so I started at the age of 29, right, making about a third of what I did my last year at the phone company. And I started off as a work comp claims adjuster at the local Hartford Claims Office. Hell yes. Work comp is actually my baby in insurance.
James BenhamSo complicated claims can last a lifetime. Not an easy way to enter the industry. So that's really interesting. So what took you... Like, what what were the different steps? Because you had, you know, you had you had quite a few steps. Right? You had work comp level three team leader, then you had, you know, director of strategic design, program director, director of underwriting operations. So you actually worked your way through being in, like, a rank and file adjuster all the way up to... Then then over to underwriting.
Yes, sir. So
Jay BellI ended up becoming a team leader in about a year and a half, which was... Started a little bit of a trend for me. So managing people that are technically significantly more experienced and possibly adept than myself. So I remember one of the first time I had a claims adjuster with about fifteen years of experience that had to come to me to get their reserves approved. It was a a somewhat uncomfortable experience at best. Decided that I wanted to eventually get to the side of the business where money was coming in the door versus out the door.
At that time, The Hartford, if you wanted to an underwriter, you had to go to one of three locations, and you were gonna be there six months. So was either New Hartford or San Antonio or Charlotte, North Carolina. My wife made it abundantly clear that relocation was not an option for me. So then I was like, okay. We had recently gone through some Six Sigma programs and different projects on the claim side. I'd also been exposed to it in business school. So I thought, okay. Well, if I can learn Six Sigma because they're getting ready to do some underwriting engagements, then perhaps I can do a trade.
So I can bring something of value to the underwriting organization, and they can train me on underwriting. And that's exactly what happened. It took another stop in a strategy role where I supported construction programs and captives, got offered a couple different roles, chose construction between you and me because it was my view the the closest I could stay to a blue collar role within a white collar world, and then have stayed relatively close to construction the entire time, although I did work in programs from about 2016 to 2022, culminating in leading the Hartford's middle and large commercial program group.
That's cool. I mean,
James BenhamI I I wish I had your resume, to be honest with you, because I've spent twenty five years building software for insurance companies. And I I wish I could have come up through the ranks in insurance first before I solve technology problems. I... I've been building software since I was 11. Okay. I mean, I'm I'm a lifelong nerd. Yep. I mean, I started writing code 1991. That's awesome. Got involved in the Internet the year it commercialized. Had a dial up ISP. I mean, '95. I mean, early there.
I I the cool thing is I got to play with all the technology the year it came out. Mhmm. Continue... That continues to be a theme in my life. Okay. Fell in love with the technology, but you you really do need to understand the problem to be able to solve the problem. And there's no better way to understand the problem than actually do the thing that you're trying to automate or disrupt.
Jay BellIt helps. I'll give you a perfect example. So one of the things that we're trying to do now within our operations organization is we have a preference. I'm not saying it's a mandatory issue, but we have a strong preference to bring people in operations that have an underwriting background. Because operations serves underwriting, and it's incredibly difficult to understand how to serve them best if you've never walked a mile in their shoes.
James BenhamYeah. Very difficult. Yeah. It's very difficult to understand anything. Actually, about the marine corps, one of the things I loved is you had NDOC, and everybody went through the crucible.
Jay BellRight? Crucible's a little bit after my time, but, yeah, heard about it. Well, now Yeah. There you go. Right? Mhmm. But everybody We had our own version. Yeah. I'm sure I'm sure you had a
James Benhama more hellacious version of whatever went on. It's like when I talk to cadets in the Aggie corps now, and they're like, oh, yeah. We got we got crapped out. We had to, you hit our phase two twenty five. I'm like, that's cute. You know? You're like, mean, I I was getting beaten my first week when I was there. I mean, our our our role model Mhmm. Was full metal jacket. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah. 100%. There was a little bit more accuracy to do that than some people can't remit.
Yeah. Five five six, metal jacket. You know, was like, I mean, that was... We we we we idolized that movie, and we made it happen. You know? It was Absolutely. It was a different time thirty years ago. Mhmm. Or in your in your case, forty years ago, you know, it's a... It's it's... So for... You know, side note, respect for everything you've done, both both serving the country and in the insurance business because you're probably one of the top 10 most qualified people here to talk about the problem because you've done the jobs.
And that that certainly helps. Well, you're you're actually talking here, and I'm glad that they had you speak about claims transformation without claims chaos. There is a ton of chaos, and I've been part of, unfortunately, some big transformation projects that led to mass chaos where, you know, the the business side of it that I... That was not under control, then, you know, we we had we had some coordination issues there or some training issues, and we we had to kinda rein it back in. What does that mean to you?
Jay BellI mean, maybe I'll I'll back up for a second. So the the the first part is I'm not a technologist. Right? So I've I've never worked in IT. I've never worked in tech. My my path to getting involved with AI, getting involved with some of this stuff was maybe a little a little different. And candidly, it was all really predicated on empowering the individual. When I looked at, like, what we were doing in our industry, everybody was rolling out, you know, efficiency focused initiatives, and, candidly, they were rolling out those efficiency focused initiatives in the same area we've been pouring efficiency initiatives too for the last twenty years.
Onto... Intake on the claims side, intake on the submission side for underwriting, and then we're expecting different results. So now you have people saying, okay. Well, where's my real ROI? And I guess my thought process is why are you expecting something different when we've done all of these similar efforts over the last twenty years? The only thing different now is the tooling. So my belief is that the the true and lasting path to competitive a advantage is not have anything to do with your tech stack, doesn't have anything to do with your vendor selection criteria.
It's all about empowering the people. And so my my focus relative to AI is through driving AI literacy and helping individuals achieve greater impact and greater outcomes.
James BenhamAnd then technology is a tool that helps. 100%. 100%. Yeah. It's a tool. AI is also a tool, not the tool. And so I... I've started to get more relentlessly focused on,
Jay Belllike, the the difference between activity and impact. Right? And so think of how many different meetings you've been in where there's, you know, a lovely presentation up on the wall. Right? It's usually accompanied by a chart going up into the right, and you'll hear something like, hey. We train 2,000 people. Okay. Great. What can they do today that they couldn't do before? Alright? It's a very simple question. And if we think about it ahead of time, right, we can put things in place to figure out what the measurement calibration is gonna be, figure out what a baseline is.
It's it's not that difficult to do, but we're just continuing to do the same things we've always been doing. And I think in today's environment with the tools that we have available to us, like, now is the time.
James BenhamYeah. And there's a lot of things we do in general in process improvement. Now you're a Lean Six Sigma. Mhmm. I'm not a Six Sigma, but I have spent years reading books, studying, and implementing lean practices alongside technology. Because if you don't, you you really are hosed. My favorite book on lean is not Toyota Way. It's it's Go ahead. It's actually six second lean Alright. Or two second lean. Sorry. And he argues that if you can shave two seconds off every little transaction, you can you can achieve what you really wanna achieve, which was, you know, the three s's, sweep, short, standardize.
You he really drives into a lot of the core lean principles. The author of that book flew to Japan and really studied it. I feel like we should have a whole curriculum here just on lean. Mhmm. And that would help us a lot with implementation because there's a lot of shiny objects here that don't solve actual real problems.
Jay BellThe challenge with Six Sigma... Don't get me wrong. I love Six Sigma. And, candidly, and, you know, I'm doing this now in a public forum. Everything I do is Six Sigma's at the root of it. Right? But you almost have to detangle or uncouple six sigma and the actual Demag methodology and the tools and keep it behind the scenes because I learned very, very quickly back in, like, 2005, 2006 where I was first engaged in six working with underwriters, that the more I leaned into the tooling, unless I had the right audience, the more they started pulling back.
Mhmm. Right? And so while I absolutely agree with you that we need more lean, we need to drive more of that more effectively, we have to do it in a way where it doesn't feel like it's this robotic science because underwriters have this natural aversion to that, and then they go into that immediate, you know, it's not... Know, it's an art and a science. And then they they love to hear that when I heard that in overabundance
James Benhamin the early days when I was in Six Sigma. Yeah. I I can see that. You don't want it to turn into a bureaucracy under its own right, and that that has happened in many manufacturing companies that implemented Lean Six Sigma is then, you know, being a black belt becomes... It becomes almost about worshiping the process and less about eliminate... Well, the core two tenets, improving efficiency and eliminating waste, which is really what my last twenty five years has been about is how do we improve efficiency at our client organizations?
How do we eliminate waste? That's that's that's challenging. So so... And now we have this amazing multi tool, AI, that promises to change everything. The reality at most of the claims organizations I work in, a lot of them are work comp claims organizations. We can solve most of their problems without even using AI. Mhmm. But AI is a pretty remarkable tool. Like, how how does this new multi tool factor in to all the work you're doing in transformation and enabling people, elevating work, evolving the organization?
Because you have this thing that threatens to either be our best friend or the destroyer of all worlds. So,
Jay BellI mean, for me, it it starts with the individual again. So it starts with driving AI literacy. So one of the things that we've done at Zurich is we stood up a special interest group calling... Called DAILI. So driving AI literacy for you. Right? And we did that with no mandate, no money, and we got to over 1,400 members within, like, a three month period. And now we're seeing individuals that are leaders of that group starting to take on much more influential roles in helping to shape the way we think about AI, shape the way we think about AI implementation.
And we're we're turning regular folks into real citizen builders. And I've seen individuals that were just casual users at best of AI. In fact, a gentleman by the name is Miles Womkin, phenomenal individual, one of the guys who works on my team. I would say six to eight months ago, he was a casual user. He would use it occasionally to improve emails, make it a little bit faster. And then we had a situation where we needed to either go out and do some time studies or figure out a way to utilize AI to help us do those time studies in a more effective, more efficient manner.
He spent, like, sixty hours over a couple week period on his own time trying to dig in and create an agent. And this is somebody who had barely used AI. He figured it out. It's now being utilized and adopted in various areas across Zurich more broadly, even in some of our international markets. And that that one individual has become one of the top citizen builders that we have in our organization who's going on to create some amazing tooling. And again, all of that started from an AI literacy perspective and just giving him the opportunity to have his own epiphanous moment.
They built it with Copilot? He did, as a matter of fact. And so you know how much more challenging it could be when you're Very. And that was, like, six to eight months ago. Right? So nobody bought it with Copilot. Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So have you all rolled out premium to, like, all of your all of your users across the org? Yeah. So Barry Perkins, the COO of Zurich North America. Still appreciate him for making this decision. They rolled out Copilot Premium to everyone across Zurich North America, and there's been a small select few of us that have access to co work as well.
Obviously, that's a usage based tool, so it's been a little bit much more tightly constrained, but a phenomenal tool. And just the the the capability improvements that we've seen through Copilot and now, obviously, Copilot Studio and now Cowork have absolutely been phenomenal. What's interesting in Claude, like, Claude just converged all their products into one last week. So there's no more... There's no such thing as co work or chat anymore. It's just Claude. Mhmm. And it is ridiculous.
James BenhamI mean, and and Copilot's catching up very quickly. ChatGPT Astro, which is Mhmm. Either in Copilot or will be very soon, has capabilities I never would have imagined AI would have.
Jay BellThe videos that are coming off it are crazy. I'm a little surprised with Gemini though, aren't you? Like, you know, for a while there, Gemini was doing some amazing things, and I still love NotebookLM,
James BenhamI'm but a little surprised that Gemini is not keeping pace in that frontier level along with Anthropic and Cloak. I wouldn't rule them out. I wouldn't rule them out. You know, they they... If you didn't know this, the founders of all the major AI companies worked together ten years ago at Google in the same lab. And all this started with one paper, one research paper ten years ago on the transformer architecture. So it's kinda wild. They originated it. I wouldn't rule them out, but you're right.
I don't use Gemini anymore. And I I used it a lot for a short period of time, and then Claude just came along and kicked his butt, and then Chad GBT came along for the same. Let's let's close with this book he wrote. So this is the goat in the machine.
Jay BellA goat does not care about your strategy. It doesn't. I can promise you that. So this is not... This does not stand for greatest of all time? It does not. It stands for a goat. Yeah. The goat on the cover there, her name is Jellybean. That's my goat. And the goat on the back is named Peanut, also my goat, and they are featured throughout boat. How many goats do you have? I have seven currently. I also have three sheep. You're a citizen farmer. Really? I have a livestock guardian dog.
I have chickens, guinea fowl, the whole nine yards. Was this your idea or your wife's? No. It was mine. Okay. Alright. Always wanted to do this? I mean, I've both... Again, my... When my folks grew up when I was younger, my my dad was surrounded by animals and grew up, like, you know, visiting on farms, etcetera. And then I'd go back to Connecticut in more of a suburban environment. I told my wife, as soon as we get some land, I want goats. Alright? So we'd already had chickens.
We only had a third of an acre. We moved to a new spot. I would say probably right before the the pandemic, we got goats. I didn't plan on turning it into a business opportunity or kinda doing that whole thing. It just kinda happened naturally. I'll tell you, I started posting on LinkedIn a little bit with some of my thoughts or ideas, and the reality, nobody cared. Right? And then I reached out to a friend of mine, am I doing wrong? I think these are good ideas.
She's like, they are good ideas, but nobody knows who you are. And she's like, listen, I say this with the, you know, the most respect. Jay, you're a weird person. You have all sorts of weird interests. Lead with some of your weirdness, and who knows? People will be interested. So I was trying to go through... I have a lot of a lot of choices. But the two I kinda landed on was that I've been doing Brazilian jiu jitsu for, like, thirty years. Right? But that seemed a little overplayed in the business world, and plus I didn't want it to seem like I was, like, you know, some badass trying to tell people how to do things.
Yeah. I have more of a self deprecating style. So I'm like, I've actually learned things and been humbled repeatedly by the animals that I'm in charge of taking care of, And there's there's some commonality there. And I started linking some of those on LinkedIn and posting it, and people found it interesting. Didn't initially intend to write a book. I was really initially going to do like a coffee table book for my friends and family. Then as I started getting into it, was like, oh, wait a second.
I think I'm actually writing a book. And I was like, you know what? Let me scale it back a little bit and build a little bit more of an audience. This is intended to be a field guide. Yeah. You can buy it on Amazon, but I'll also give it to you for free. A field guide to what? A field guide to turning AI activity into measurable impact. Like, that's the thesis. I introduced a couple frameworks in there. I actually have a nine question assessment that people can run with their team.
I had the opportunity to do that at a GDS event recently where I was facilitating a talk track with a room full of CIOs and CTOs. I had basically four ninety minute sessions with them over two days and walked them through that assessment, and the feedback I got was very positive. So I wanna give this away, have people run it with their teams, come back to me and say, here's what worked, here's what didn't. Because just like everything in there, when I'm trying to tell people that you need to have real measurable impact, don't just assume something's gonna work.
I wanna take... Hold myself to the same standard and have people run over their teams, give me the feedback, and I'm gonna use that content to help build out the broader book and figure out what we can do better next time. Amazing.
James BenhamI have a weird genre of videos on Instagram I like to walk... Watch of goats clearing land. I mean, I I see that every day. So, yeah, you know, it's awesome. It's it's incredible. Amazing job. So especially in the South where there's a of kudzu, they'll they'll unleash goats on a few acres of land. And, like, there's guys that just rent their goats out to do this, and they go spend a a few days there and will clear cut. And I mean Mhmm. Well, you see it.
Yeah. I had no comprehension
Jay Bellall the stuff they would eat. Yeah. Well, the property that we had originally, there was a large section of almost three acres, which was heavily overgrown. It is no longer overgrown in any way, shape, or form. I could see through it no problem whatsoever. They have absolutely maintained that area for me to a to a very high degree efficiency. And so all all your your land, have they free access to all of it? I mean, I move them from area to area. So I basically have like three sections.
One more grassy area, one that's a mixture of woods and grass, and then one that's really more wooded area, has a little bit of a field in it, has multiple streams that cross it and everything. So they got a little bit of everything.
James BenhamYou are a good dude. So I have too many hobbies as well, too many for us to talk about today. But as a fellow hobbyist, good on you. Life's more fun with things to do Hell yeah. Outside of work, Right? Great conversation. We are at time. Okay. But I wanna encourage everybody to go check this out. Where can they get this book? So they can actually buy that on Amazon if they want to, or they can go to thegoatinthemachine.net
Jay Belland get a free copy. The only thing I would ask if you get free copy is run it with your team, give me some feedback.
James BenhamI think that's a reasonable request. I'll be reading this. Thank you for giving me a copy. Appreciate it. Thank you all our listeners out in listener land for joining today. Again, this is ITC twenty twenty six here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. This has been an interview with Jay Bell from Zurich. Appreciate you. Awesome, thank you so much. Thanks.