CIOnews spoke with Rory Meleniclis, CIO of Global Specialty Lines at Intact Insurance, about how IT organizations can move beyond responsive ticket takers and become strategic partners capable of translating business needs into technology solutions.
“When you can create that connection between the work our software engineers do and the business value it brings, when we innovate immediately we think: How is this going to bring us new revenue or make us more efficient?”
The long-standing debate amongst CIOs over whether to build or buy technology is reaching a new inflection point. And companies like Intact Insurance offer a blueprint for how organizations can reclaim control of their IT future.
For much of the past decade, large companies outsourced significant portions of their technology needs to third-party vendors that managed software on their behalf. Few organizations had the budgets or talent needed to launch new products and maintain existing features at the same pace and scale as specialized providers. Enterprises traded speed for flexibility. Ambitions were constrained by vendor-led roadmaps and pricing decisions.
AI agents are changing that equation by automating many of the historically time-consuming and costly aspects of application development. For CIOs, the challenge is now turning ideas and experiments into reusable, enterprise-grade systems that address real business needs. At Intact Insurance, a combination of centralized oversight and deeper collaboration between technology and business users helps internal teams bring new technology from ideation to reality.
“Many carriers in the market are heavily reliant on” third-party vendors, said Rory Meleniclis, CIO of Global Specialty Lines at Intact Insurance. “We don't have to rely on a vendor to tell us what they think the agentic journey should be. We go directly to our business.”
For example, the company built its own underwriting platform that is designed to support underwriters throughout the policy lifecycle. Rather than relying on multiple point solutions, the platform is part of Intact’s broader effort to create a common underwriting experience across its global specialty businesses, enabling teams to work more consistently while allowing the organization to prioritize enhancements based directly on business needs.
“As technologists, we can get distracted by shiny objects,” Rory said. “When you can create that connection between the work our software engineers do and the business value it brings, when we innovate immediately we think: How is this going to bring us new revenue or make us more efficient?”
CIOnews spoke with Rory about how IT organizations can move beyond responsive ticket takers and become strategic partners capable of translating business needs into technology solutions.
Born in South Africa, Rory cut his proverbial IT teeth as a software engineer before moving through architecture and development roles. After relocating to Canada, he worked at several of the country’s major financial institutions, including Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia, and Royal Bank of Canada, before joining Intact in April.
As AI reshapes corporate IT, technical backgrounds like Rory’s can be a powerful advantage. CIOs must balance their role as cross-functional business leaders with basic IT responsibilities, such as maintaining uptime. And while AI is streamlining many traditionally manual processes, hands-on technical expertise is proving increasingly valuable.
CIOs who have built and managed systems themselves can more readily troubleshoot problems, assess what AI tools can realistically accomplish, and provide meaningful guidance to the engineers deploying them. For Rory, however, the biggest advantage is the ability to connect with his engineering team.
“I don't think that you will find many CIOs today that are not technical individuals. It’s become enormously beneficial in the age of AI,” he said. “But what’s most important is not necessarily the ability to drive an architecture and be able to create something. It’s more being able to identify with software engineering teams on their level.”
Historically, CIOs relied on a common rule: build for competitive advantage, buy for parity. AI is complicating that calculus. Even non-technologists can now use AI to build functional systems in days or weeks — although those applications may lack many of the security, governance, scalability, and reliability capabilities required for enterprise environments. In the hands of experienced technologists, however, AI can be a transformational accelerant. Instead of relying on the same commercial tools as their competitors, companies can now design software around their specific processes and needs.
“We own that code base, we drive the road map, we invest as many dollars as we feel is important, and we don’t have any third-party risk of a software vendor hiking up our fees,” he said. “It’s putting the power in our hands, but we also need to be very mindful with that power that we’re also delivering.”
That last point is critical. With so much attention focused on how quickly AI can generate new applications, it is easy to forget that the work does not end at go-live. Historically, established software vendors could often launch and maintain capabilities faster because they had mature development practices, specialized teams, and the resources to attract top technical talent. Companies choosing to build more of their own software must develop those capabilities themselves.
Intact Insurance is addressing that challenge with a model designed to balance control with flexibility. A centralized team of AI and machine learning experts builds and maintains the underlying infrastructure and establishes governance guardrails. Reusable frameworks are then made available to global teams across the business, allowing subject-matter experts to lead the development of new innovations. Those capabilities can be shared across business units and geographies, while common tools and frameworks can be continuously updated and improved.
“It’s a federated way to design and framework everything, but a decentralized way to implement it,” Rory said.
And to guide investment, Intact Insurance has a structured process for evaluating which projects to pursue that accounts for people, infrastructure, and token-consumption costs, as well as the direct premium or revenue the technology is expected to generate.
For many CIOs, AI is more than an enterprise IT transformation. It is also a personal learning exercise. Nights and weekends have become a playground for experimenting with different AI tools and ideas.
Rory built an algorithm designed to replicate aspects of human thinking and applied it to an environment where creatures evolve following evolutionary principles. A creature that consumes too many “brain” tokens, for example, develops an oversized head and eventually dies. Natural selection emerges and the strongest of the species survives The project may have little to do with enterprise software. But that is precisely the point.
As the pace of AI development accelerates, curiosity is becoming an increasingly important attribute for CIOs. First-hand knowledge helps leaders separate hype from possibility. It gives them a deeper understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations. And many use their own experiments to spark ideas across the organization.
The enterprises that ultimately benefit most from AI will not necessarily be the ones that build the most software. Those that bring the right people together, give them the tools and freedom to solve real problems, and put guardrails around what they create will be the ones to create meaningful competitive advantage.
“There’s so much going on around AI. It can be overwhelming,” Rory said.
AI may give companies a golden opportunity to reclaim more control over their technology. But with that control comes a responsibility to not just build faster, but make sure what they create is worth the investment and built to last.
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