Scouting for Growth
00:05:48 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:05:48] S2: Yeah. Great question. I always love reminiscing with... About Lloyd's with you. So I come from the era where I would see the brokers and claims handlers turn up in the lift with files in a suitcase. So the email submissions, that was a luxury at the start of my career. So it's amazing to think about how much it's changed today, hasn't it? You know, particularly with the kind of dawn of AI or generative AI in terms of untangling the vipers nests of these submissions. Right? So we've gone from an era where data was, you know, bound literally in physical PDFs all the way through to email based submissions, people doing work much faster, still very manually through to the breakthrough we've had with LLM's ability to synthesize this data at pace. And the thing that's been most exciting for me, I'm a self professed, very proud nerd, is just to look at the pace at which the kind of capabilities of the core models have got so good that, you know, in the space of six months, you know, what historically, you know, even six months ago was a whole product and capability and feature set is now, you know, within the gift of Gemini or, you know, GPT-5. Alright. Or... Oh, lord. It's just... It's amazing really to see how much the change has come through.
00:07:01 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:07:01] S1: How much change has come through? And I use all of them because I want to compare the result. And so it's fascinating, the speed of change, and I think it's important for us to realize that. So let's dive into specialty underwriting, right? We are in the age, as you said, of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, amongst others. Tell me, what is a genetic underwriting for you? How do we move from the chaos of spreadsheets, PDFs, and emails within the under... Underwriting sphere? And why do you believe artificial intelligence is now crucial to manage data complexity in our industry?
00:07:43 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:07:43] S2: Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a great question. And, you know, you'll know that, you know, although we sell and service more than just the specialty markets now, our home, our core is the specialty space, and it's something that's personally very close to my heart. So I often reflect, right, if you were to think about your dream technology for a specialty in commercial underwriter, right, you've got this heterogeneous data. It's disgusting. It comes from a 100 different datasets. And actually, the data that an underwriter and an actuary can come together is often the source of differentiation. Right? And I think if you were to think about the dream technologies to untangle all of that, it would be something not far off what we see today in these LLMs. If you're a high throughput, high velocity SME or underwriter, the state of the art was pretty impressive. You look at some of our clients, likes of Aoife, they're pressing risks extremely quickly, even before Gen AI came along. The breakthrough technology, I think, for specialty and commercial insurance to really break the back of that extremely of extreme morass of data is the Gen AI, right? The ability to structure it, to synthesize and analyze unstructured data from a variety of sources in a conversational way, in an exploratory way. Right? You know, that's the thing that I see really clearly. You know, to build on that question about why is this important? Well, think, you know, and what's agentic underwriting? Well, you know, the thing I tell my team is in the same way that maybe fifteen years ago, no one would have imagined us doing all of our banking, living our day to day lives on one of these. I think there are lots of people that are really underestimating how much they will do their day to day jobs in symbiosis with a set of agents. And so for Hx, one of the ways that visions that we have is for us to be the leading frontier provider of underwriting and actuarial support agents. Because that's just where the market is going to go. If you're an underwriter filling out a spreadsheet or a renew model, right, you know, a spreadsheet maybe 1996, maybe 2023 as a Renew model. Twenty twenty five is working with the Hx underwriting or actuarial agent inside a Renew model to have your peer partner to help you get to the best result.
00:09:55 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:09:55] S1: Can you tell us, you use a really key term which I was using just last week with the team at Microsoft. You use the term frontier. What does exiting frontier means for us in insurance?
00:10:12 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:10:12] S2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is my work, and so I spent a lot of my time thinking really about what this looks like. And I think, you know, insurance is just one of these incredible domains where I was talking to someone, I was doing a job interview this morning with someone, I was explaining to them that you're not going to see that many places with a $7,000,000,000,000 contribution to GDP with such a small number of companies responsible for this and such a small number of people in the grand scheme of things. Don't get me wrong. Some of our clients are just, you know, the size of cities, but, you know, it's still a very small number of people compared to many other sectors in the world. And so for me, the frontier is to think a little bit about like this very specialised in the grand scheme of things skill set, right? The specialised art and science of actuarial and underwriting and the IT work in insurance. How can we contribute to that? What does it mean for us? Does it mean... And you know, for Hx we will have the world's leading AI research team in insurance next year. Right? What is it to like encapsulate the skills of an actuary, the subset of an LLM, these 170,000,000,000 parameter models, like what subset of those represents an actuarial or underwriting skill set? How can we fine tune and optimize these models to do really, really, really great tasks in underwriting and actuarial. They probably don't need the complete works of Shakespeare. Right? Some of the stuff that's embedded inside some of these models. So what does that like? What does it mean? So for me, sorry to give you the focused answers. It's really looking at like what the applications of the leading technology that we see today, how those can be focused and really refined for the very actually quite unique, quite like specialized skills inside insurance. And that's what motivates me. I'm a technology nerd as well as an actuary at heart. So thinking a little bit about how we can tie those things together and do some of that work for our clients. Super exciting stuff actually.
00:12:03 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:12:03] S1: It's leading edge. Some people said bleeding edge. And actually when you start looking at our industry, our sector, and you've said, small amount of company being accountable for so much GDP. We are moving into a world where we have specialty exposure. The conversation I'm having every day with the Fortune 500 I work with is around emerging risk. From cyber to marine, to current societal changes actually, Amrit, to looking at changing faster with historical losses, historical data. How can underwriters stay ahead of these emerging risks that are affecting us leveraging AI?