Jennifer Hobbs

Vice President, Lead Data Scientist and Manager Zurich NA

Jennifer Hobbs, PhD is the Vice President, Lead Data Scientist and Manager at Zurich North America where she serves as a trusted technical expert charged with evolving the data science roadmap for their AI efforts. Her teams work to develop and implement AI/ML models and systems to support business use-cases. Recently these teams have been focused on using the latest advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI, and Agentic AI to enable greater search and understanding of Zurich’s vast amount of structured and unstructured data. Additionally, she supports the responsible AI efforts and provides guidance around regulatory and compliance surrounding AI.

Previously Jennifer was the Director of Machine Learning at Intelinair, an AgTech company using computer vision and machine learning to deliver intelligence and insights to the agriculture industry. There she led an international team of scientists, engineers, and product members in delivering state-of-the-art computer vision models from remote sensing imagery, weather, and other unstructured data sources. She also previously worked in sports data and technology, where she helped build and deliver the company’s first AI-based product using player-tracking data for event search and automated game analysis. There she also helped lead data infrastructure modernization, adoption of MLOps, and R&D around player-tracking and action recognition efforts.

Jennifer received her PhD in Physics and Astronomy from Northwestern University, doing research in computational neuroscience to understand how the brain encodes touch.