One of the world’s largest insurance firms announced Wednesday it is consolidating its metro Atlanta offices into a new innovation center and hiring hundreds of additional employees.
American International Group, known as AIG, is relocating its existing Alpharetta and Buckhead operations to 2002 Summit Blvd. NE in Brookhaven overlooking I-285, where the Fortune 100 company will also establish its first innovation center. The 180,000-square-foot lease signing is one the largest of 2024 so far in metro Atlanta and roughly triples the company’s office footprint in the Atlanta area.
The innovation center will spur at least 600 additional hires over the next five years, which company executives said firmly plants AIG’s technological future in the Peach State.
“We looked at a number of other cities, but through our evaluation process, Atlanta came to the top every time,” Claude Wade, AIG’s executive vice president, chief digital officer and global head of business operations and claims, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The move not only injects some juice into the region’s languid office market, but it expands the growing roster of innovation centers that companies across several sectors are establishing to tap into Atlanta’s diverse talent pipeline.
“AIG’s decision to grow their footprint here in Georgia is just the latest confirmation that we have what businesses want and are leveraging those assets to their fullest so we can bring new opportunity to all parts of the state,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in a news release.
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS
AIG will maintain its headquarters in New York. But work within the new facility, expected to open in 2026, could change the way the company operates across the board.
The office will be AIG’s first location to feature the company’s entire insurance underwriting process, which Wade said will allow employees to evaluate its processes and look for inefficiencies. The big-picture intent is to reset AIG’s digital footprint and modernize through incorporating generative artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.
“We want to remove the friction that gets in the way of (AIG) doing its job most effectively,” Wade said. “So clients will definitely feel a new modern digital AIG going forward.”
It mirrors similar recent efforts by other corporate giants in Atlanta.
Fortune 500 insurance firm Travelers Cos. opened its own innovation center within the WeWork location at the Coda building at Technology Square in Midtown in April. Last month, private food producer Cargill announced a 400-person innovation center within the NCR campus in Midtown. And a battery manufacturer is scouting Atlanta for an innovation center with a Fulton County agency offering nearly $870,000 in incentives to land the office.
Wade said AIG received no discretionary incentives for its innovation center plans.
As part of the office consolidation, AIG will vacate its existing offices at One Alliance Center in Buckhead and the Brookside business park in Alpharetta. The roughly 1,000 employees based out of those offices will be relocated to the new Brookhaven offices.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The relocation and lease signing comes after the COVID-19 pandemic upended in-person work schedules, prompting a tumultuous few years for the region’s office market, which saw the amount of unwanted and available office space break records. About 32.3% of all office square footage at the end of September was either empty or available to rent, according to real estate services firm CBRE.
Office leasing, however, has begun to gain momentum this year, signaling the market’s potential recovery. As of September, at least 11 office leases of at least 100,000 square feet were signed, according to real estate services firm Savills. AIG’s announcement will add to that momentum.
Credit: Courtesy AIG
Credit: Courtesy AIG
Wade said AIG has already opened 300 Atlanta-based jobs for the forthcoming innovation center across various roles, including underwriting, claims, operations, data engineering and AI. More information is available at aig.com/careers.
He said the innovation center will “really help to shape the future of AIG.”
“These colleagues that are in this new Atlanta innovation hub will actually be setting the global standard for the rest of AIG,” he said.
