Scouting for Growth
00:00:16 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:00:16] S0: Hello, hello and welcome back to Scouting for Growth, the podcast where we explore how corporates and the ventures they work with, commercialize innovation, and where growth really comes from in the age of AI. I'm your host, Sabine VanderLinden. This episode was recorded live at ITC Vegas in the Press Room Studio at Mandalay Bay with approximately 9,000 people downstairs looking at demos. My guest and I talked about what happens after the demo. Bastiaan de Goei leads financial services marketing at OpenAI where he is an insurance person first. Dutch by birth, he found his way into the industry in The United Kingdom, spent years across AXA Group in retail, life, specialty wealth, and banking, and then moved to San Francisco to help lead AXA Next back when selling a policy through Facebook Messenger was a radical idea. From there, he joined Instabase to work on the industries and structured data problem. And now he sits at OpenAI translating frontier models into something an underwriter can actually use. Here is what he told me about where that leads. You become an orchestrator of the underwriting process rather than the operator of one. We start this discussion with what is already in production. Travelers, where it says 80 to 90% of claims intake data is now handled by an OpenAI powered tool. Oscar Health, where claims verification was accelerated by half. And the commercial underwriter who ignores up to 50% of incoming submissions because there is simply too much. And what a persistent agent does with that inbox overnight. We get into accountability who owns the quotation when an agent has priced it and what the tuning has to show you before you can say yes. We talked about the economics of decision and his idea of efficiency by a thousand cuts. We also talk about cyber where the same capability that defends you is the one that attacks you too. And he gives us my favorite, your ninety day playbook including the one thing he would tell every insurance leader not to do. And when I asked him for a prediction for next year,
00:03:04 · Sabine VanderLinden, Sabine VanderLinden, Bastiaan de Goei
[00:03:04] S1: he said this, if the most targeted organization on [00:03:07] S0: the planet can do it, then an insurance company should be able to do so too. A little of Las Vegas come through in the audio. I make no apology for that. This is what life means. Here's my conversation with Bastiaan de Goei from OpenAI. [00:03:29] S1: Hi, Bastiaan. Hi, Sabine. Thank you so much for joining me today. [00:03:33] S2: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me today. [00:03:35] S1: So, Bast, I'd love to go into who is Bast because you have an amazing background from Europe to The United States, and I would love our viewers and listeners to know you a little bit more.
00:03:48 · Bastiaan de Goei
[00:03:48] S2: Well, thank you so much for the kind words. I hope I can live up to them. So my name is Bast. Maybe that for your listeners already tells a little bit about my background. I'm Dutch by origin. I lived for a long time in The UK where I actually found my way into insurance, worked for AXA Group and had the incredible pleasure to work in different parts of the group, in retail insurance, wealth management, banking even, life insurance, specialty insurance. That's the advantage of an incredible, organization like AXA. And at some point, the group found itself in a need to go to the next stage, what they called their next phase or AXA Next. And it was in that context that I also relocated to San Francisco in order to help lead the group's transformation. This partnerships with technology companies such as Facebook or Meta nowadays of course, where the group was one of the first companies to sell insurance policies via Facebook Messenger. Just super exciting. This is now ten, twelve years ago. And during that time, I found myself being in need by startups and technology companies who were actually looking to understand the insurance industry. So they needed a bridge of somebody who understood insurance, but also understood technology. And as a result, I made a transfer to join an exciting startup company, which was Instabase. I spent quite a bit of time with them, then worked with some other fintech companies. And today I find myself leading financial services marketing for OpenAI.
00:05:22 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:05:22] S1: Wow. Congratulations. You have been in this innovation space leading amazing projects and helping actually, like IAM, move corporations from highlight to execution. Right? Right. So when you look at the larger organization like AXA, for example, you know, 30 old, core system potentially, or maybe more, you know, updated, how do you bring your knowledge from working with big hires into that new world of open AI? You know, how does that look like and how you start solving big problems?
00:05:59 · Bastiaan de Goei
[00:05:59] S2: I love that question. And I think that there are, two specific elements to it. And I think the first one, is rooted in understanding and trust. So one of the first things that you need to nail or really get done is you need to start talking, get into a real conversation. That conversation needs to be built on understanding and trust. So when you are talking about complex large language models, OpenAI's recent Astra models and or like persistent agents, the first thing that needs doing is to translate those incredible capabilities in something that is real for an insurer. And so, okay, there is something that is a persistent agent. What does that mean for an underwriting workflow? And so like truly illustrating that is step one, cause that earns you the conversation and earns you the trust to say, okay, this is a technology company, but they have an understanding of what I experience as an insurance professional. Now the second step is to help guide and work together with large companies like large carriers to actually make that real. And so many times what I find is that I actually have to temper enthusiasm Because as soon as people have an understanding, okay, now I understand that what this could mean for me as an organization, the natural inclination is to then want to do everything all at once. And that is actually the wrong instincts. What I found is that it is much better to basically achieve efficiency by a thousand cuts. And which means start small and add rapidly additional aspects of automation and efficiency to them. And we can work together in a partnership to help make that real.
00:07:48 · Sabine VanderLinden
[00:07:48] S1: So I want to start diving into what you just said. Right? What is already real, right? The intelligence layer. And what we want to do is move that intelligence layer into production. We heard about the numbers, too many pilots, not enough execution. And we are here at ITC Vegas to actually drive, you know, that operational execution. So everyone at this show has seen the demo. I mean, we have a lot of demos, right, downstairs here. And where is AI generally load be real inside carriers today? So that is the first part of my question. Doing the work that would break something if you switch it off tomorrow.