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?
00:12:48 · Amrit Santhirasenan
[00:12:48] S2: Yeah. Yeah. So when you asked me this question, gave me nostalgia because I remember the very first presentation I did, the launch presentation of Hx seven years, nearly eight years ago now, talking about how the fact that the frontier of the world's risks, our market, the specialty market, is the place where Apple, Tesco, John Lewis, right, where the leading providers in retail technology, They come to buy their insurance. Right? And these companies are changing so fast. They've been changing for decades. And actually, us as a market, we haven't had the ability to keep up. And one of Hx's core missions from the very beginning was to use technology to synthesize better data. Right? To be able to actually keep up with the pace of change because our clients were getting more sophisticated in the way they were thinking about risk. Ironically, we were unable to do so. So Hx's motivations, you know, it feels so quiet now to talk about having an API or, you know, machine vision algorithm. To be able to pull some third party data sets. I remember we demonstrated the first API machine vision algorithm in the market in 2017. Now that just feels like table stakes. Kids who come out of university are doing that for toy projects before they get get to to our clients. But now deep risk research. Right? Why can't you have deep risk research on every single risk? Why can't you say, tell me the most important characteristics you can find in the world about the top three exposures I'm doing. No human could do this work. Right? It was just the cost benefit for trade off. Right? The frontier in different centers of the world. The cost benefit trade off there isn't right. It wasn't economic. But actually, you can you can run have an OpenAI deep risk API call to go and do that on every single risk you underwrite today. And if your FHX is underwriting agent, sorry, founder doing his bit of sales, right, we do it for you. Right? This is what we do. And so I think it's all of a sudden making it dramatically easier to bring that level of differentiation and specialism in the way underwriting has always been done at the kind of the very best... From the... In the best underwriting to every single risk you want to touch because you can have an army of digital agents helping you now. Yeah. It's just incredible, really. All for $20 a month. It is incredible.