About Generali
Generali Group is one of the world’s largest insurance and asset management companies, operating across more than 50 countries and proudly serving 71 million customers. The Group is powered by nearly 90,000 colleagues and an extensive network of agents, delivering essential protection and financial solutions globally. Underpinned by robust financial performance, including an adjusted net profit of 3.8 billion in 2024 and €863 billion in assets under management, Generali continues to strengthen its position as a global leader. Guided by its ‘Lifetime Partner 27: Driving Excellence’ strategy, Generali is committed to innovation and sustainability, and to creating long-term value for all stakeholders.
Business Challenges: Nurturing Talent for Global Customer Excellence
In the demanding and rapidly evolving financial and insurance sectors, exceptional customer service and highly skilled talent are not just beneficial, they are fundamental differentiators. Generali's core purpose is to enable people to shape a safer and more sustainable future by caring for their lives and dreams. To achieve this, the Group recognised that its people are the engine of change and paramount to its success.
Generali operates in an environment marked by swift technological advancements, a diverse workforce spanning five generations, and the imperative to continuously upskill and reskill colleagues to keep pace with changing customer expectations and emerging business priorities. These complexities presented significant learning and development challenges:
- Scalability: Ensuring consistent, high-quality learning experiences across Generali's diverse global operations and varied roles.
- Engagement & Relevance: Motivating colleagues to take responsibility for their development journey and aligning learning content with rapidly changing business needs and emerging skills. Generali's colleagues, through their latest engagement survey, expressed a strong desire for excellent learning opportunities, affirming their expectation for Generali to be "the place to be."
- Technology Integration: Leveraging digital tools and AI effectively while maintaining a human-centric learning approach.
- Measurement: Tracking the impact of learning initiatives on performance and business outcomes to ensure continuous improvement.
Addressing the global talent shortage and upskilling at pace is essential not only for Generali's business success, but for delivering the exemplary service that its customers expect. The quality of advice, protection, and service offered relies directly on the expertise and development of Generali’s people. Consequently, investing in learning experiences to bolster development, growth opportunities, and service quality worldwide transitioned from an aspiration to an operational priority for the Group. The Group Academy, in response, evolved to become a core strategic enabler of transformation, focusing on proactive capability building.
Powering Generali's Purpose with Talent and Learning Experiences
To meet these critical business challenges and fulfil its purpose by actively protecting and enhancing people's lives and to be the preferred choice by delivering relevant and accessible insurance solutions, Generali made a strategic investment in its learning experience platform, We LEARN. This strategic investment reflects Generali’s commitment to its ‘People powered excellence’ objective, fostering continuous skills development to directly enhance customer service and drive business growth. The Group firmly believes that by valuing its people and investing in their continuous learning and growth, it secures its long-term future and enhances its ability to deliver on its promise to customers.
The partnership with Cornerstone was a profoundly collaborative effort to co-design a truly transformative learning experience. Generali's goal was to leverage technology to build a learning ecosystem that directly addresses its strategic needs:
- Fostering Skilled Talent and Growth: Generali’s ‘Lifetime Partner 27: driving excellence’ strategy is enabled by "AI & Data driven excellence," focused on improving customer and distributor experience and driving operational efficiency. Cornerstone's platform supports Generali's ambition by delivering personalised skill assessments, engaging learning journeys and integrating several external vertical business-focused content providers. This enables its people to develop the capabilities needed to seize opportunities from emerging trends and fast-changing customer expectations, ensuring they are not just reactive but proactive in a dynamic market.
- Driving Efficiency and Colleague Satisfaction: Cornerstone’s robust, scalable platform allows Generali to deliver consistent, high-quality learning across 50+ countries for 90,000 colleagues. This addresses the challenge of scalability and relevance, ensuring that all colleagues, whether in a hybrid or office environment, have equitable access to development. By empowering colleagues to own their upskilling journey through a mobile-led, hybrid learning model, Generali fosters a culture of continuous learning and enhances colleague satisfaction, which in turn fuels productivity and efficiency.
- Fostering continuous innovation: Cornerstone's platform supports Generali's vision for a "Future-Ready Organisation" by adopting advanced learning experiences, now incorporating Generative AI. Generali is providing cutting-edge functionalities, improved recommendations, and an interactive welcome page to boost engagement.
Through Cornerstone, Generali is creating an environment where its people can thrive through continuous development of skills, directly impacting its ability to deliver innovative, relevant, and accessible insurance solutions that make Generali the preferred choice for its customers.
Business Results and Impact
Generali’s strategic investment in the We LEARN platform and its partnership with Cornerstone has yielded significant and demonstrable success, proving that investing in talent experience and AI drives customer and colleague satisfaction, growth, and efficiency:
- Exceptional Engagement and Reach: In 2024, an impressive 84% of Generali’s 90,000 colleagues actively participated in We LEARN learning opportunities, accumulating over 1 million learning hours. This translates to over 30,000 unique users accessing the platform monthly, logging in an average of 3.6 times per month. This high adoption rate underscores the platform's value and accessibility.
- Precision in Skill Development: Over 20,000 colleagues have undergone comprehensive skills assessments. This data-driven approach has enabled Generali to identify 60 new critical skills and rapidly develop more than 200 targeted courses to close skill gaps, ensuring its workforce is future-ready.
- Rich and Diversified Content: The platform offers an extensive library, including 5,000 managerial and professional skills modules from Cornerstone’s Content Anytime, complemented by Generali’s bespoke content. This diversified offering, available through webinars, tailored curriculums, chunked learning, and game-based learning, allows learners to choose methods that best suit their needs and preferences.
- Engaging Learning Experience : The experience has been upgraded with the introduction of the Cornerstone Learning Experience platform. The new We LEARN homepage has been co-designed involving 50+ local learning managers and launched in 6 months thanks to a true agile implementation project. It provides personalised experiences for learners to access learning resources, community content and other new sections. It also combines individual learning progress with organisational updates and key communication areas.
- Enhanced Customer-Centricity: the platform is recognised as the one stop shop for all learning needs, simplifying the Generali organisational complexity and integrating Group-designed learning content related to Strategy priorities with locally designed learning content from 50+ country academies. This experience simplification reinforces the direct link between talent development and service quality and contributes to Generali’s objective of being a "Lifetime Partner" by enhancing customer trust and satisfaction across all touchpoints.
- Operational Efficiency and Innovation: The digital transformation of Generali’s HR processes through We LEARN, combined with the upcoming integration of Generative AI, streamlines learning administration and delivering hyper-personalised content. This not only boosts colleague satisfaction but also drives operational efficiency by ensuring Generali’s talent pipeline remains robust and adaptable to market changes.
Generali’s sector-leading learning ecosystem, powered by AI and an unwavering commitment to its people, is not just about development, it’s about creating new possibilities. By investing in excellent learning experiences, Generali is nurturing skilled, motivated talent who deliver exceptional service and drive growth. The journey continues as the Group deepens its investment in technology and learning, ensuring it remains the partner of choice for customers and colleagues around the world.
