Shelia Anderson

Sandy Venugopal

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Shelia Anderson is a distinguished leader in information technology, particularly within the financial services and insurance industries. With a career spanning several Fortune 500 global organizations, she has consistently demonstrated an ability to steer complex digital transformations and align technological advancements with core business objectives.

She is recognized for her pragmatic, "business-first" approach to technology adoption, ensuring that every investment is meticulously aligned with strategic goals. Anderson also has a significant passion for mentoring and developing talent in STEM fields, actively supporting women in technology, and building exceptional, high-performing teams.

Connect with Shelia on: Linkedin

Career highlights

2025

EVP Chief Information & Digital Officer

2022

EVP & Chief Information Officer

2017

EVP & Chief Information Officer Corporate Functions

2012

Vice President and CIO
Property & Casualty

2010

Managing Director, Business Advisory Services

2005

Director, Asset Management Engineering

Claim to fame

Revolutionary claims processing automation at Aflac

As CIO at Aflac (2022-2025), Anderson spearheaded the implementation of the groundbreaking "Code Based Processing" platform, a machine learning system that transformed insurance claims processing. The platform achieved 46% full automation of claims processing through advanced ML algorithms, with an additional 49% of manual claims becoming significantly less complex through AI assistance.

Enterprise data analytics transformation at Liberty Mutual

At Liberty Mutual, Anderson was responsible for applications and technologies that drive the global company’s Financial, Human Resources, Legal, and Data and Analytics Operations. Anderson’s team was responsible for building, implementing, and maintaining innovative technology solutions that scale to meet Liberty’s growing global business needs across the 45,000+ employee base operating in 29+ countries.

‘Hatch’ing New Ideas

Sheila Anderson was instrumental in strategically integrating the innovation laboratory, "Hatch," at Aflac.

She made the decisive move to bring "Hatch," Aflac's innovation lab where new ideas are "hatched," into a unified team alongside data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) competencies. This was part of a broader strategy to consolidate technology organisations that had grown through Aflac's acquisitions into a single, cohesive entity. By co-locating these functions, Sheila ensured a "tightly coupled" connection between innovation, data, and AI advancements for Aflac.

AI Governance and Enterprise Architecture for Scale

Anderson established comprehensive AI governance frameworks and data management protocols that became the foundation for Aflac's broader AI adoption strategy. She created an AI center of excellence that provided board-level education on AI technologies and established evaluation frameworks for AI use cases and ROI measurement.

Shelia Anderson’s AI philosophy

Shelia Anderson

EVP Chief Information & Digital Officer, Unum

“Start with your business. Simple, really. Understand your business, your business challenges, and your business opportunities. Always start with 'why' and anything that you deliver from there, the closer you can tie the work that you're doing to the business value, the more successful both you and your company will be.” Source

“There’s no secret sauce. More than anything, it’s understanding, first of all, the business areas that you’re serving and what their primary needs are and, secondly, bringing them along with you as part of this. So that would be my recommendation as far as keys to success. Don’t throw it at them in the end; bring them along so they’re understanding a bit about your journey. And usually, many of these individuals are helping to contribute to the training of your models as well — so looking at your data, your data quality, and the training of the models over time.”Source