If you enjoy these conversations, you need to be in Menlo Park this July.
VB Transform 2026 is VentureBeat's flagship enterprise AI event, built entirely around one question: How do you orchestrate AI autonomy at scale? July 14–15, Hotel Nia. Real projects, proprietary research, no fluff.
50% off for listeners with code BEYONDTHEPILOT: https://bit.ly/4fK4F6z
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He negotiated seat-based (unlimited) licenses before token costs exploded — and projects only a 20–30% spend increase when that changes. MassMutual's CIO rebuilt a COBOL mainframe app into a working web prototype in 7 days — work that used to take a 15-person SI team 90 days. That's not a pilot. That's a new build-vs-buy equation.
Sears Merritt, CIO at MassMutual, runs AI inside one of America's most regulated legacy environments. In this conversation, he breaks down the architecture decisions, cost structures, and security posture behind real, production deployments — not roadmaps.
On infrastructure: MassMutual routes all agentic tool calls through centralized API gateways with identity and access controls, using Amazon Bedrock as a proxy layer. That multi-harness design preserves model optionality while enforcing FinOps discipline. On model selection: a trust score rubric drives every model decision, balancing cost against user experience. In their IT contact center, that rubric led them to choose the more expensive model after users said the quality gap was worth two extra seconds of inference time.
Productivity results are concrete: 30% boost in developer output across the SDLC, call resolution time dropping from 10 minutes to under 1 minute for specific call types, cost per interaction from dollars to cents. On the security side, MassMutual is embedding AI into its SDLC for vulnerability scanning and compressing cyber response cycles from days to hours — building agentic tier-one and tier-two capabilities to match the accelerated threat landscape that frontier models like Mythos have exposed.
🎙️ GUEST: Sears Merritt | Head of Enterprise Technology & Experience, MassMutual
🎙️ HOSTS: Matt Marshall | VentureBeat, Sam Witteveen | VentureBeat
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If you enjoy these conversations, you need to be in Menlo Park this July.
VB Transform 2026 is VentureBeat's flagship enterprise AI event, built entirely around one question: How do you orchestrate AI autonomy at scale? July 14–15, Hotel Nia. Real projects, proprietary research, no fluff.
50% off for listeners with code BEYONDTHEPILOT: https://bit.ly/4fK4F6z
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00:00 Intro & COBOL Modernization Preview
00:01:15 Guest Introduction: Sears Merritt, MassMutual CIO
00:02:00 Multi-Vendor Strategy & Avoiding Lock-In
00:02:30 How MassMutual Evaluates AI Tools (Cost vs. Experience Rubric)
00:03:15 12-Month Contracts and Switching Optionality
00:03:30 AI Standards Cycle: MCP, A2A, and the Early Internet Analogy
00:05:15 Measuring Developer Productivity: 30% SDLC Boost
00:06:15 Contact Center Results: 10 Minutes to 1 Minute, Dollars to Cents
00:07:00 Managing Token Cost Explosion
00:07:30 Seat-Based vs. Consumption Licensing Decision
00:08:45 Token Maxing While the All-You-Can-Eat Window Is Open
00:09:45 Building FinOps Infrastructure for Model Routing and Optimization
00:11:15 Outcome-First Model Selection: When to Pay for Opus vs. a Cheaper LLM
00:13:15 Trust Score Framework: How MassMutual Picks the Right Model
00:15:00 Sponsor: OutShift by Cisco
00:15:30 Claude, OpenAI Codex, and Multi-Harness Agentic Architecture
00:16:30 API Gateway Design: Identity, Access, and FinOps Controls
00:17:30 What the Usage Analytics Revealed (And What Merritt Was Afraid to Find)
00:18:15 Projected Token Cost Increase: 20–30% Off Unlimited Plan
00:19:45 Power Law Usage: Top 10% Consuming 80% of Tokens
00:20:45 COBOL Mainframe Modernization: The 7-Day Prototype Workflow
00:22:30 The Full AI-Assisted COBOL Migration Playbook
00:24:00 Implications for IBM and Mainframe-as-a-Service Providers
00:25:15 Open Source Models, DeepSeek, and the Cost Efficiency Question
00:27:45 Chinese Models in a Regulated Environment: Evaluation Criteria
00:29:30 Agentic Security: Identity Management and the Evolving Threat Landscape
00:30:00 How Frontier Models Changed the Threat Velocity (Not the Threat Types)
00:31:15 Fighting AI With AI: Agentic Tier-1 and Tier-2 Cyber Capabilities
00:31:30 Project Glasswing and the CISO Community Response
00:32:30 Embedding AI Into the SDLC for Security Scanning
00:34:00 Closing: When Will Agentic Standards Consolidate? Advice for Builders
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