In November 2022, a technology arrived that Andre du Preez describes as flipping the world upside down. Generative AI had existed in academic circles for years, but its sudden accessibility, its ability to let anyone reason with data in plain language, without a computer science degree was something different. For most of the insurance industry, it arrived with anxiety. For Andre du Preez, it arrived with clarity.
“For the first time in history, people could talk to and reason with data in natural language,” he has said of that moment. “Unlike many who felt uncertain about the disruption, I only saw the opportunity.”
That instinct to see possibility where others see threat has defined a career that has taken Andre du Preez from designing Apple’s digital presence in Southern Africa, through business analysis and product management in the insurtech space, to leading innovation at Miller, winning the Lloyd’s Lab Dragons’ Den, and ultimately joining McGill and Partners in December 2024 as Head of Emerging Technology. He is, by his own description, not a technologist for technology’s sake. He is a communicator, a translator, and a builder of bridges between what AI can do and what the people inside one of the world’s oldest industries are willing to believe it can do.
That distinction between technical capability and human adoption is the thread running through everything Andre du Preez has built, and it is precisely what makes his work at one of London’s most forward-thinking specialist brokers genuinely consequential.
From Cape Town to the London Market: A Career Built on Curiosity
Andre du Preez grew up in South Africa and studied business management at university, a foundation that gave him a commercial lens through which he would later view every piece of technology he encountered. His early career did not begin in insurance. It began with Apple.
After completing his degree, Andre du Preez took a role as a Digital Designer working on Apple’s brand and digital presence in the Southern African market, through Core Group, The sole owner of the Apple brand and iStore operation in the region. It was, by his own account, a junior role at the time. But it offered something no MBA programme could replicate: a front-row seat to how the world’s most admired technology company thought about the relationship between design, functionality, and human experience.
Apple’s approach made a deep impression. The company did not simply build products, it crafted experiences that felt right. The emotional resonance of their technology was not accidental; it was engineered through the deliberate integration of design thinking, simplicity, and an almost obsessive focus on how people actually interact with tools. Andre du Preez absorbed this philosophy and carried it into every subsequent role. “That early exposure cemented my passion for creating solutions that people genuinely connect with,” he has said.
What followed was a period of broad professional development spanning business analysis, product management, and digital product development roles that placed him at the intersection of user experience and real-world problem solving. He worked in business consultancy in both Johannesburg and London, building the cross-cultural and cross-sector fluency that would later allow him to navigate the deeply traditional corridors of the London insurance market with both credibility and perspective.
The Insurance Chapter: Vitality, Miller, and the Language Problem
Andre du Preez’s path into insurance was not a conventional one. He came through the product and technology side first at Vitality, the innovative health and life insurance company known for its data-driven approach to wellness incentives, and then at Miller Insurance Services, one of London’s well-regarded independent specialist brokers.
At Miller, he progressed into the role of Head of Innovation a position that placed him at the front line of the industry’s encounter with artificial intelligence. His mandate was to lead the development and adoption of cutting-edge technological solutions, with a particular focus on AI. In practice, this meant doing something far harder than building the technology itself: convincing an industry built on centuries of relationship-driven tradition and professional judgment that AI was a tool to be embraced rather than feared.
The resistance he encountered was real and instructive. When he or other technical colleagues explained AI to non-technical colleagues in insurance, the response was consistently negative not because the technology was wrong, but because the explanation was. IT departments and technical experts were presenting Generative AI using deeply technical language to audiences whose instinct was underwriting, placement, and client relationships. The result was confusion, and confusion curdled into rejection.
Andre du Preez identified the problem with precision. The issue was not AI. It was communication. Once he recognised this, he rebuilt his approach entirely replacing technical explanation with storytelling, analogies, and real-world examples that made AI legible to people who had never written a line of code. He focused on making the story of what AI could do simple enough that the person hearing it could immediately repeat it to someone else. Adoption, he understood, spreads through narrative, not specification.
The results were striking. Where there had been scepticism, curiosity began to emerge. Where there had been resistance, engagement followed. “Their fear turned into curiosity, and curiosity turned into adoption,” he has said of that period. It was a lesson that cemented a conviction he now carries into everything he does: technology adoption is not primarily a technical challenge. It is a human one.
Lloyd’s Lab: Building the Insurance Product of Tomorrow
While at Miller, Andre du Preez took part in one of the most rigorous innovation programmes the insurance industry offers, Lloyd’s Lab’s Futureminds Venture 6. The nine-week programme challenged participating teams to develop new insurance product concepts specifically addressing AI risks, culminating in a live pitch at the Lloyd’s Lab Dragons’ Den before a panel of senior industry experts.
Andre du Preez and his team brought forward SMART AI, a product recall cover designed specifically for manufacturers using artificial intelligence in their production processes. The concept addressed a gap that most of the industry had not yet seriously engaged with: the liability exposure created when an AI model makes an error that results in a defective product. SMART AI focused on evaluating AI models at both the underwriting and claims stages, creating a robust framework for managing AI-related product risk throughout the entire policy lifecycle.
The winning team, Andre du Preez from Miller, Tom Jackson from Chaucer Group, and Nick Collins from AON took first place at the Dragons’ Den. SMART AI subsequently moved to Lloyd’s Launchpad for further development in the first quarter of 2024, a signal that the concept had genuine commercial viability and not simply conceptual merit. For an industry still working out how to price and manage conventional cyber risk, SMART AI represented a meaningful step toward the next generation of specialty insurance products one that would need to exist as AI becomes more deeply embedded in global manufacturing and supply chains.
The Lloyd’s Lab experience was significant not only as a competitive achievement but as a demonstration of what happens when insurance expertise, technology understanding, and cross-firm collaboration converge around a precisely defined problem. Andre du Preez has described it as one of the most defining moments of his career.
McGill and Partners: Innovation Without the Weight of Legacy
In December 2024, Andre du Preez joined McGill and Partners as Head of Emerging Technology. The move was a deliberate choice, and the reason he has given for it is revealing: McGill and Partners has no legacy systems.
That may sound like a technical detail. In insurance, it is a strategic advantage of the first order. Legacy technology infrastructure is one of the most significant barriers to innovation in the industry not because old systems cannot be worked around, but because the effort required to do so consumes the time, resource, and creative energy that would otherwise go toward building what comes next. McGill and Partners, founded in 2019 with a deliberate digital-first mandate, was built without those constraints. The firm’s founding ethos — to be different by design meant that when Andre du Preez arrived, he was not inheriting a renovation project. He was arriving at a blank canvas.
“In an industry often defined by tradition, McGill and Partners embrace innovation, creativity, and bold thinking,” he said at the time of his appointment. “They don’t simply adapt to market changes, but they pioneer new paths.”
In February 2025, just two months after Andre du Preez joined, McGill and Partners launched its own AI agent making it the first broker in the London market to introduce Agentic AI technology, built using Salesforce’s Agentforce platform. Agentic AI represents a significant evolution beyond conversational AI: rather than simply responding to queries, AI agents can take autonomous action, execute multi-step workflows, and operate across systems without constant human instruction. For a specialty insurance broker, the applications span the entire value chain from automating research and risk assessment, to accelerating placement workflows, to enhancing the speed and quality of client reporting.
Andre du Preez’s role encompasses both the strategic and the operational dimensions of this transformation. He works alongside the Head of Innovation to identify the technologies that will genuinely move the needle for the business. He builds and manages partnerships with major technology firms including Google Cloud, Salesforce, AI research groups, and insurtech startups that give McGill and Partners early access to emerging capabilities before they become mainstream. And he maintains a relentless focus on ensuring that every technology initiative connects back to a measurable business outcome. “Ultimately, my role isn’t about tech for the sake of tech,” he has said. “It’s about ensuring every innovation effort ties back to real business outcomes.”
Cyber, AI Risk, and the Frontier of Specialty Insurance
Among the areas Andre du Preez watches most closely is the intersection of cyber risk and AI in insurance, a territory that is evolving faster than most of the market’s existing frameworks can handle. He publishes regular analysis of cyber market conditions, including a H1 2025 Cyber Market Report for the broader UK market, positioning himself as a thought leader not just for his own firm but for the industry at large.
His perspective on AI risk in insurance is shaped by direct experience. The SMART AI product he helped develop at Lloyd’s Lab pointed toward a category of liability AI-induced product defects that will only grow as manufacturers integrate machine learning into quality control, production planning, and supply chain management. The insurance industry’s ability to design credible, commercially viable products in this space will depend on professionals who understand both the technology and the risk, and can translate between them fluently.
Andre du Preez is one of those professionals. His career has been built on exactly that translation, from the Apple design philosophy that taught him how people relate to technology, to the Lloyd’s Lab Dragons’ Den where he built a product addressing a risk most of the industry had not yet named, to the London market’s most forward-thinking broker where he is now systematically embedding AI into the fabric of how a modern specialist broker operates.
He has spoken about his longer-term ambitions with characteristic directness. He does not simply want McGill and Partners to adopt new tools. He wants the firm to be known as the broker that leads the way in innovation and in doing so, to inspire the rest of the industry to rethink what is possible
Explore more expert insights, leadership stories, and business strategies at GlobeVox Leaders
