GenAI Products Leader at Northwestern Mutual, pioneering enterprise generative business intelligence (GenBI) at a Fortune 100 financial services company with a “crawl-walk-run” approach to AI adoption in conservative environments.
Current Role & Co-Founder
Leads Northwestern Mutual’s GenBI initiative, applying AI to enterprise data intelligence in a highly regulated environment. Co-founder of Multinear, an open-source platform for tracking AI experiments and managing models from prototype to production.
Key focus areas:
- Business question to orchestrator pattern for query processing
- Metadata agents for understanding context and lineage
- RAG agents connected to certified existing reports
- Building stakeholder participation directly into research
Content Manager for Product Excellence, Israel’s largest PM conference (1,200+ annual attendees).
Background
Product leader with 19+ years technology experience, 12+ years in product management. M.Sc. Bio-Medical Engineering (computer vision, medical imaging) and B.Sc. Electrical Engineering from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Previous roles:
- WeWork: Led Sales & Commerce tech division (6 teams) driving $4B+ global revenue
- eBay: Led structured data and machine learning initiatives across shopping platforms
Key Publications
- Getting Real with GenBI - Co-authored with Dima Kuchin exploring practical GenBI implementation, Text-to-SQL engines, data quality requirements, and five mini-products for AI-enhanced BI
- The Strawberry Test - Co-authored benchmark examining how LLMs handle deceptively simple tasks, exposing fundamental limitations in transformer-based language processing
- From Benchmarks to Business - Translating technical insights into product value
Active writer on his Substack covering AI product strategy, GenBI, and leadership topics.
Northwestern Mutual
Fortune 100 financial services company providing life insurance, disability insurance, annuities, and advisory services. Known for conservative, risk-averse approach while managing substantial assets. The Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute drives GenAI innovation while balancing long-term customer relationships spanning 40-50 years.
Conference Appearance
AI Engineering Code Summit 2025 November 20, 2025 | 2:05 PM - 2:24 PM Session: “From Small Bets to Big Impact: Building GenBI at a Fortune 100”
Asaf presented on overcoming four key barriers to GenAI in conservative financial services: unknown technology, messy real data, trust bias, and budget/impact validation. His approach emphasizes using actual production data instead of synthetic data, bridging the demo-to-production gap, and building incremental ROI at each step to establish organizational trust in risk-averse environments.