AIQA Global Names Maria Ross Chief Operating Officer

Veteran insurance transformation executive joins to bring the AIQ™ score to carriers, brokers, and reinsurers as the industry standard for AI governance quality.

CHICAGO, May 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AIQA Global, LLC., the first independent AI governance rating firm, announced today the appointment of Maria Ross as Chief Operating Officer. Ross will lead the company's commercial operations, client delivery, and operating execution, while also spearheading AIQA's go-to-market strategy for the global insurance sector.

The appointment marks the company's next phase of growth as it expands the AIQ™ score into markets where artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is growing rapidly and where governance is a business requirement. The AIQ™ score is the first independent, standardized rating of enterprise AI governance quality.  The rating is designed to benchmark the quality of enterprise AI governance programs.

Maria Ross is an accomplished digital transformation leader with a career spanning nearly three decades across management consulting, financial services, and insurance. Her expertise in business process improvement, digital strategy, and enterprise transformation, has been honed during her leadership tenures at two of the world's largest insurance carriers.

Most recently, Ross served as Vice President of Enterprise Digital Transformation and Global Head of Customer Experience at Chubb. There, she led a multi-million-dollar digital and customer experience transformation portfolio spanning operations, technology, finance, and product across more than 50 countries.

Earlier, Ross served as Assistant Vice President of Digital Automation and Transformation at MetLife, where she helped pioneer and scale Robotic Process Automation and AI strategy across more than 40 global business lines. Her work delivered more than $100 million in productivity gains, included the launch of the company's first enterprise chatbot with more than 90% adoption in its first thirty days, and established standardized governance and delivery frameworks that optimized safety at scale in a heavily regulated environment. Together, her tenures at Chubb and MetLife give AIQA nearly a decade of senior operating experience inside two of the world's largest carriers.

Ross's career also reflects the entrepreneurial arc familiar to AIQA's founders. Ross began her consulting career with WDScott Consulting as the firm's first U.S. hire, where she built and scaled the U.S. transformation and value consulting practice into a profitable advisory business serving multinational clients. The practice's success led to its integration into FTI Consulting, the global business advisory firm, where she continued as Senior Director leading large-scale digital and operational transformation engagements for Fortune 500, healthcare, and public sector clients.

"Maria is the operations officer AIQA needs at this stage of growth. She has spent her career inside the global insurance industry and inside the discipline of measurable, governed transformation — building the kind of governance frameworks, value-realization architecture, and adoption programs that make a measurement system credible. Insurance is where AI governance assurance will be standardized first, and Maria's appointment as Market Segment Leader for Insurance reflects how seriously we take that opportunity," said Chase Malackowski, Co-Founder of AIQA Global.

"Across fifteen years in the insurance industry, I have watched AI evolve from a speculative concept into one of the most consequential forces shaping how risk is assessed, priced, and managed. That maturation demands governance that is measurable, not merely aspirational. Boardrooms today are asking how AI is being governed, and whether that governance can be proven with evidence. AIQA exists to answer that challenge.  I look forward to introducing the AIQ score to carriers, brokers, and their clients as a standardized way to evaluate AI governance quality alongside credit, claims, and operational risk," said Maria Ross, AIQA Global Chief Operating Officer and Market Segment Leader for Insurance.

As Chief Operating Officer, Ross will oversee AIQA's commercial execution, client delivery, and operating cadence as the company grows. She will also lead the company's insurance market strategy vertical, including engagement with carriers, brokers, reinsurers, and other participants across the risk-transfer ecosystem.

AIQA was co-founded by James E. Malackowski, who previously launched the Ocean Tomo Ratings system for intellectual property, Chase Malackowski, who developed the AIQ score methodology, and General Counsel Joel Lutzker.

About AIQA Global, LLC

AIQA Global, LLC is the first independent AI governance rating firm, providing enterprises, investors, insurers, and boards with a standardized, quantitative measure of AI governance quality. The company's AIQ™ score quantifies enterprise AI governance quality across 250 data points and five dimensions.

AIQ™ scores are based on disclosed and verified data and represent AIQA Global's independent assessment of AI governance quality. Scores do not constitute regulatory compliance, legal advice, or investment advice. No assurance is provided regarding future performance, risk outcomes, or insurance eligibility. AIQ™ and AIQ score™ are trademarks of AIQA Global, LLC. Copyright 2026 AIQA Global, LLC. All rights reserved.

SOURCE AIQA Global, LLC