Guy Goldstein, CEO of ERGO NEXT, is joining the ERGO Group management board as its first chief artificial intelligence officer, effective October 1. He will continue to lead the US small business insurer.
In the new role, Goldstein will take group-wide responsibility for implementing AI across ERGO's value chain and all its markets. His appointment coincides with the departure of chief digital officer Mark Klein, who will leave at the end of the year at his own request. Klein joined ERGO in 2016 at ERGO Digital Ventures and has sat on the group management board since January 2024, overseeing digitalization, group marketing and global partnerships.
Markus Rieß, CEO of ERGO Group, said the role reflects the group's strategy through 2030.
"With the creation of the Chief AI Officer role, we are underscoring our strategic ambition to implement artificial intelligence systematically along our entire value chain and in all our markets," Rieß said.
Goldstein co-founded NEXT in Palo Alto in 2016, building it into what ERGO describes as one of the leading digital insurers for small businesses in the US. The business partnered with ERGO and Munich Re from 2017 and was fully integrated into ERGO last year, later rebranding as ERGO NEXT.
Goldstein said he would focus on the group's ambition to establish a leadership position in AI, which is a key pillar of its strategy to 2030. He said his dual role would allow him to draw on synergies between ERGO NEXT's US growth and the group's wider AI plans. The next step, he added, was to fully embed and scale the technology across the business, building on the digital transformation work led by Klein.
For agents placing small business risks with ERGO NEXT, the immediate effect is continuity. The US unit keeps its founder as CEO and gains a direct voice on the group board, rather than being managed at a distance from Germany.
The open question is how far group-level AI priorities will shape the underwriting, quoting and service tools ERGO NEXT offers its distribution partners, and whether capabilities built for the US small commercial market will be exported to ERGO's other markets. ERGO has not yet set out how Goldstein's time will be split between the two roles.
