InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:12:45 · Jamie Wilson
[00:12:45] S1: I go to a lot of industry events, talk to lots of people in industry on the tech and on the insurance side. Also, bit of a pedant when it comes to terminology. I think probably the joys of being an actuary by trade. I'm listening to talks and people are talking about machine learning, AI, large language models, agentic, and lots of the time these terms are used interchangeably when in reality they often have, like, very specific meanings for very specific context. The way I would describe kind of talking about AI versus agentic, I like using the phrase AI assisted versus agentic. What I mean by that is AI assistance is where a human is doing a piece of work, And occasionally, as part of that piece of work, they will call out to AI to help them with something. So it might be, you know, if I'm an underwriter, let's talk about that. That's what the survey was all around. If an underwriter... If I'm going through my day to day work, a submission comes in, I'm responsible for taking that submission all the way through to quote, it may be that I call upon AI to help me with certain parts of that workflow. So I call upon AI to help me ingest the risk, or I call upon the AI to help me check to see whether or not this risk fits within my underwriting guidelines, for example. That's an example of AI assisted. The underwriter, the human, is in the driving seat. They are moving the work along, but they just get AI to help them at various points. Agenic kind of workflows or Agenic underwriting is the inversion of that model. So the agent can actually move work along the workflow and can actually do the work and calls out to the underwriter or calls out to the human, whatever workflow it is, to get help when the agent can no longer do the work. And that could be because the agent either doesn't have the understanding or it's met certain guardrails that it can't go beyond. But, like, crucially, that's the difference between those two things.
00:14:31 · S2, Matthew Grant
[00:14:31] S2: The market is separating MGAs with strong foundations from those built for better conditions. At InsTech's upcoming one day MGA conference, we'll explore what that means in practice from capacity strategy and underwriting performance to technology, governance, and long term growth. To find out more and register, visit www.instech.co. [00:14:49] S0: I used to call that the humble algorithm where the critical thing there is it does know it, doesn't understand, and not get into that whole world of hallucination, which is what you're doing at HX. You released a product Hyper Operator, which has extended your reach. Can you just talk a little bit about what that is doing?
00:15:03 · Jamie Wilson
[00:15:03] S1: We announced the Hyper Operator in July of this year at our flagship event in in London, HX Live. It's kind of an extension of the general product direction in some respect. We've got to this point where HX, the platform, effectively an an AI assisted underwriter workbench, end to end underwriter workbench. I'm gonna use that term AI assisted very purposefully. The hyper operator is effectively... Sometimes we describe it as the AI agent for underwriting work. And it runs across the HX platform, and it has the ability to kind of leverage specific tools and specialist agents for whatever it's working on. And it can effectively act on the underwriter workflow rather than just advise or support on individual kind of like work points. And it does all of that within the platform's guardrails that the insurer can set up. So kind of that's a bit of a mouthful, but it's that conversion of agentic to AI assisted in the sense of the hyper operator can take a submission and bring it into the platform and move it through the workflow, take it maybe through ingestion, through clearance, get it through, like, some sanction screening and basic checks, get it to triage. And maybe at the point of triage, the guardrails are set up such that, oh, this is on the boundary of being an appetite. So I now need to call out to an underwriter to take a look and make an actual judgment decision or judgment call about whether or not we should move on to the next stage of underwriting, if that makes sense. And so kind of the underwriter or kind of the insurance company, they can set those guardrails. Those guardrails are really key because it may be that I've got one line of business over here that's really complex. My appetite for agentic workflows currently isn't there, and I want an underwriter to be involved in every single decision point. And so what I almost do there is I dial up the guardrails so that the kind of the agent's autonomy is dialed down in essence. And so the submission comes in and maybe the agent does ingest the risk, but someone has to approve that ingestion of data. And then the agent moves into clearance and populates everything, but a human has to get involved with that step. So you have the ability to effectively dial up those guardrails. You also have the ability to dial them down.
00:17:10 · Jamie Wilson, Matthew Grant
So it may be you have another portfolio in another part of your business. Maybe it's, like, higher volume, lower premium. Maybe it's renewal risks in a particular region. You actually think, okay. These particular policies that I'm renewing, I'm happy for those to be agentically underwritten. And submission comes in for the renewal. As long as it meets all the criteria, it can go all the way through from ingestion, triage, clearance, pricing or rating, peer review authority, all the way to generating a quote. And you can make a decision about does that quote go out without an underwriter looking, or does the underwriter have to be involved in that workflow? And then crucially, it's trying... The hyper operator is effectively us taking the existing HX platform, the existing capabilities we had, and allowing our customers to be able to decide which parts of their portfolios do they want to dial up that agentic capability within. [00:18:02] S0: And as you're talking about that, I'm thinking that all makes sense. But the role of the person who is managing those dials has become really critical. And a lot of underwriters... Not all of them, actually. There's quite some very technical ones, but quite a lot on the kind of slightly relationship based world. How does that work? How do you find with your clients when you can walk in there and say, right. You now gotta control what this is doing, but someone has to literally set those dials and... Yeah. That must be changing. Is it what people have been trained to
00:18:27 · Jamie Wilson
[00:18:27] S1: do and the roles they've got? It's a great question. I think five years ago, I would have been much more nervous about this than I am today. There's... Obviously, there's gonna be lots of learnings as this becomes, like, a capability that didn't exist before. But I think over the course of the last five years, we've definitely seen across a lot of insurers the kind of the building out of, like, technical portfolio teams. Because effectively, this is what you're talking about. They're defining those guardrails. That's in reality. That's portfolio underwriting at that point. Right? You're saying, k. Like, where do I want my portfolio to go? And I want to effectively make tweaks to my appetite or make tweaks to what I want to kind of... Where do I wanna grow? Where do I wanna shrink? That's, like, technical portfolio underwriting. So I think we've started to see the rise of those teams more and more over the course of the last five years. And, there's probably lessons to learn. I have no doubt about that. I've got lots of thoughts around some of the kind of the nuances of the challenges people will face. But what will be interesting is underwriters on the ground, this will also, for them, potentially impact how they're working. And kind of for me, the dream scenario is that actually underwriters on the ground are freed up to work on the most complex risks. They're freed up to apply their judgment, their expertise. You know, we were talking again at the beginning of the podcast around what makes an excellent underwriter, all of those technical judgment inside criteria. What you want is for that exceptional underwriter to be freed up from looking at boring admin tasks or simple risks that actually aren't worth them kind of going through and saying, yes, this renewal is very similar to last year. And, I'm happy to kind of go out with a 3% rate reduction because I want to retain this risk. Like, that type of decisioning is taking them away from the really complex new business that's come in where they're having to do a full assessment. That's where you want your expertise to be spent.
00:20:12 · Matthew Grant
[00:20:12] S0: And then now that you've got this tire solution set, you've expanded the footprint of what you're doing with the company, how are you finding insurance companies are buying these days? Because they might already have their own preferred ingestion tool. Is it an all or nothing solution now, or can people pick and choose and integrate with what you're offering on a modular basis?