Scouting for Growth
00:21:58 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:21:58] S2: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think the analogy of, you know, the human jobs to be done is the framework that we think about very deeply, right, when we're trying to build this technology for our customers. And while step changes are absolutely possible, the first place you start is on what's happening today. So, you know, when you look at our technology stack, we have an ingestion agent, we have an actuarial agent, an we underwriting agent. And in the same way that those jobs to be done were done by different humans in the past, they're done by different agents with different skills today. So, know, it's not too different in my mind from the way work was done before. Collaboratives, you know, we use this fancy phrase swarm now, right? We don't talk about humans in swarms, but we talk about agents in swarms, right? A large group of different people, digital people, digital or otherwise, with skill sets collaborating very deeply is how you get the best results. You know, Hx has always been really obsessed about this feedback loop between the underwriter and actuary. And, you know, my time in insurance for the last twenty years doing it myself, I could see where the feedback loop was very tight between the underwriter and actuary and got incredible results. And now we're able to replicate that with a group of agents that work 20 fourseven. They don't get tired. They don't lose their patience. Their performance doesn't degrade over time as long as you've got enough power for them. I think our take on this is very clearly, we have our infrastructure, the core Renew platform, the Hx platform, which is the framework that people build, the decision making tools that they've been doing for the last seven years in Hx. But that just now forms a substrate, right? It's the kind of core information that all the agents who want to work on the different jobs to be done can refer to. So if you've built in a very powerful rater in Renew, our ingestion agent can say, Well, I know what the fields are that I need to fill out. So I'm going to go out with that information. I'm going go and capture the information. Our agent can say, Okay, this is great. This model has these type of parameters. So I need to go and actually do the analysis on the data sets to make sure I can fill out that I can calibrate those parameters.
00:24:04 · Amrit Santhirasenan, Sabine VanderLinden
And the underwriting agent can say, Okay, these are the most important factors in this model. So I'm going go and do some research on those factors. And so to me, it's like that human in the loop and the human in the loop side, I think sits really tightly across that because these agents aren't going to be able to do everything themselves. In the same way when I was a junior actuary, I had to go and get some help when I wasn't sure what to do. The humans are going to be there. So it's not too different from what we've done in the past just with a supercharged set of capabilities from these agents and the humans doing the appropriate guidance, judgment, conducting the orchestra, if you will. [00:24:42] S1: Well, you just mentioned something that I actually heard over the past three weeks, working with various conferences and hosting webinars, which affect not only claims, but also underwriting is the fact that we are now recruiting younger underwriters. And so we need to find a way to build those teams. So using the technology as a teammate to enable the more experienced underwriters to train easily the younger underwriter. What is your experience with this? Because our industry is suffering from a talent gap. And so new underwriters are coming to market. I've heard it from US to Europe. All insurers have told me that over the past three weeks. How do we leverage the technology to help us there?
00:25:34 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:25:34] S2: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's a... It's an existential problem, think, that we're going to see over the next couple of years in every sector. Right? Because, actually, these models and technology get capable at junior tasks or they get capable at senior tasks. And so you can see there's lots of studies being done that show how there's been a collapse in the junior job market. And so when I think about this, this challenge is existential, not just for these new underwriters who are coming in and but for all people working in insurance and in the economy more broadly. I think the really powerful thing that I think the that are the cutting edge technologies available now is that they can be used not just to do the work, but to explain what they're doing. So if you have an underwriting agent, an actuarial agent, you could say, tell me what this algorithm does. You don't need a rocket ship Hx model developer or actuary to explain to you. Right? You have it built in to our platform. You can copy a bit of code and say, explain this to me. For me, think this is going to go much further because one of the things that we see in particularly in insurance where the pricing, where the transformation projects that we tend to see in our market and that Hx has driven probably upward north of approaching 50 of them now is that they're very large in scale and they take time. And the moment that happens, knowledge transfer becomes such a key thing. People leave, people go on breaks, they have children. Right? Many, many things happen. They get reassigned to other projects. And so what we're going to see now is a mechanism of institutionalizing the knowledge implicit in these systems and having again an infinitely patient, infinitely scalable army of teachers to share that knowledge. I think that's going to be a critical kind of gap filler for people because, you know, the reality of the system is... Of the situation is even during busy renewal seasons, the underwriters and senior actuaries are busy enough as it is, right? So being able to go and ask someone or something for some guidance digitally, I think is a huge unlock. I think it's simultaneously causing a bit of the challenge and that people don't need to hire these people. But it's also going to be part of the solution, because it'll be able to do some of that teaching, that knowledge transfer itself.
00:27:51 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:27:51] S1: Would like to dive into some of the capabilities. So I'm going to go a bit technical and you will tell me if I'm going right or wrong here. I read, right, on your website that you have that data ingestion library, right, to really tackle the mess, which is out there when we think about mission by leveraging large language models. Can you share some example as to how that works? How we start maybe parsing data, you know, releasing manually forward, improving the way we are dealing with underwriting and actual activities whilst looking at age cases?
00:28:30 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:28:30] S2: Yeah. Great question. And so you're right, technology has moved very fast. And I think our website in the next, few days will be updated again because the data ingestion library is now our ingestion agent. A very timely conversation. So I think, yeah, it's a great question. So I'll say, you know, one of the things that have been really wonderful for Hx is by focusing on the core problem of understanding the data requirements of our clients for seven years in their quest to make the most impactful pricing and underwriting decisions, we actually created a framework inside Renew for teaching agents what to do. I won't tell you that when I set up Hx in 2017 that I prefigured the rise of the LLM and GPT. There's nothing to do with that. It's just that actually data has always been very important to us. So when you build a model or you build a rater inside Renew, you have to, by design, you tell it the data that it cares about. And that data is used to be entered by a human or API, and then it's used to run the rating algorithm. The most beautiful thing about that is that you can use... You can get an ingestion agent to... If you were to build the ingestion agent, it already has all of the information inside Renew about the data that needs to be captured and what it's used for. And what we were able to do was build an agentic framework which can refer to the existing platform. It understands the data that needs to be captured so you don't have to do any extra work on saying the information you need to capture and it understands what it's used for. And so to answer your question specifically, what does that do? Well, allows you to do things that many other systems can't do, right? Because before they've even before you've even started in Renew, you have an incredibly rich set of context, which is now an important phrase in AI, right? Rich set of context for the agents to work with. That means we can do like very, very clever things, right? We can do things like dress cleansing, which in many other providers, technology suites is a paid for extra feature that's a separate thing to buy. That's just a property that we were able to build into our ingestion agent incredibly quickly in weeks. Right? We can do things like semantic analysis. So we can not just do a transposition or take data from a Word document and paste it into our model.
00:30:44 · Amrit Santhirasenan, Sabine VanderLinden
We can read whole blocks of text and work out the intent of what that text means and then fill out related fields inside a Rater Even though it's not a one to one mapping, because we have all of that extra context. And it means we can do just much more rich, much more intricate things than you'd be able to do if you just said, I care about these five fields. That's the tiny subset of the information inside our system like ours. Is super. [00:31:11] S1: So Amrit, as you are actually talking about the detail of the system, another question that comes often to me is how do we ensure that everything we do is compliant by design? When we start looking at those agents and you actually mentioned all the capabilities an underwriting team, an actual team, a successful team needs to have when they start using agentic capability. Do we ensure we avoid bias? We avoid errors, right? In a world where a discrimination exists. Now we are going to systems helping us do the underwriting. So how do we avoid that, right? How do we ensure that the feedback loop is always there, always robust to make sure that we adapt at the same time to current market conditions?