- Willis Towers Watson covers, actually,
an amazing range of services.
They're all around, though, the issue of people and risk.
- One of the things that sets Willis Towers Watson
apart is the use of advanced technology
to solve client problems.
- The engagement with Microsoft started where we
wanted to work with them on the idea of quantum computing,
preparing for quantum computing by starting off with
what we call quantum-inspired computing today.
This is a breakthrough that is going to provide
incredible computational power
and a different way of really computing.
- Risk modeling is a little bit different to classic
big data, AI sort of problem.
With risk modeling, you're trying to quantify
the whole distribution of outcomes.
It requires quite a lot of specialism
and the prevalent technique is something called
Monte Carlo simulation.
Simply put, throw all the dice lots and lots of times
and then calculate from the resulting outcomes.
- Quantum-inspired optimization leverages the principles
of quantum physics to solve optimization problems
faster to higher accuracy.
- Currently, we can run sort of realistic models
in ten or fifteen minutes.
If we can bring that down to seconds, then immediately
that's opening up the door to real business value.
- What this means for the end user is:
we give them information and insights
that they were never able to have before.
The limits of traditional computing just meant
that we couldn't analyze certain things.
With greater insights, then comes more efficiency,
and better choices.
I love the quantum-inspired computing partly because
of the problems that we're going to be working through
with Microsoft today, but perhaps more,
because of what we'll do in the future.
The problems we're tackling today
we'll get some great insights
and some great results from them,
but there will probably be things that we haven't even
begun to think about today that will give us future results.
That's what's really exciting.
