InsTech - insurance & innovation
00:25:13 · Matthew Grant
[00:25:13] S1: Frisch, before we leave that, can you just talk a bit more about vibe coding? Because you mentioned it in passing and my sense is that is gonna be a major part of what every person needs to think about in their career going forward. I'll let you explain what vibe coding is, but it could be as a concept and I think you touched on it in a very interesting sort of career development point of view. People score themselves either to people that can handle technology and they're going to stick their hands in and play around with it and those that can't. I think what you're saying is that, I'm trying put words into mouth, but the technology is not gonna totally replace everybody. I mean, you talk about a digital or bionic AE, maybe it will, not an underwriting for sure, but you kind of have to have your bionic arm and your tools that are gonna help you. Yeah, it'd be helpful just to talk a bit more about vibe coding. Again, if there's anything specific you can recommend to anybody who has sort of heard about it or wants to try it, is not quite sure where to start, that would be fantastic as well.
00:26:12 · Richard Gunn
[00:26:12] S2: Yeah. There's been an undulation of reporting around web coding in the news. Unsurprisingly, many of the the kind of podcasts that I listen to, turns out they're actually funded by some of the the the big kind of providers in the space. So I think, like, the most recent way before recording this was about whether or vibe coding was dying, and then I think it's Lovable reported that 5x their users over the course of the last two to three months. And so I won't try and kind of predict that. What the reflections I would have is, like, vibe coding is ill defined in terms of how it's being used, but as I understand or at least as I use the terminology, it's about... Often about allowing a nontechnical user or someone who historically wouldn't have jumped into the zeros and ones of code to to be able to... A natural language or in a low code, no code interface, be able to very quickly spin up either... And the Vibe coding definition will probably more likely lend itself to either mock up a quick kind of proof of value or kind of illustration of what it could look like all the way through to... And I think where we will certainly see it resolving to is actually production grade websites which you can use. And, like, a lot of the work and the development that's going on now is around actually how can you make it the code which is written by agents versus written by humans, either at the hands of a sophisticated engineer or a nontechnical user. How can they actually be greater in terms of the security and their performance than if they were coded by a human? That's where it starts to get exciting because it goes from, like, the quick wins now are... That illustration I gave beforehand, can you have a customer success manager who's inherently gonna be less technical than an engineer working with a customer to mock up what an iteration of your product could look like and then feed it back into that builder role who does have engineering capabilities towards actually that customer success manager mocking it up, running it through some programmatic testing in partnership with an agent, and then and then actually committing that for review. And I think there'll be, like, a spectrum of use cases there.
00:28:04 · Matthew Grant
[00:28:04] S1: So Richard, you covered a lot in there, lots of useful angles. What's going be happening in the next twelve months? What should we come back and talk about with you or one of your colleagues in November of 'twenty six?
00:28:15 · Richard Gunn
[00:28:15] S2: Sure. So I think one thing we're already seeing from a market perspective or from a... To kind of set the scene or the context is there's certainly pockets of the market which are softening, and then there's unequal, particularly globally. And so what we're seeing is a movement from growth through to profitability. We run an annual survey that runs data pricing and underwriting. And historically, when we would survey underwriters, they would often kind of reflect that number... One of their number one pain points related to kind of access to data would be around, you know, rekeying or speed. And one of the top ones that came out this time was actually real time portfolio view, which clearly shows the shift of mindset towards thinking about profitability and, you know, where they're deploying the capital rather than how quickly can they deploy their capital. So I think that's one thing that I expect us to do a lot more. It's less emphasis on speed. Speed is important, but it's very quickly become table stakes. Like, how can you solve for ingestion leveraging Gen AI so that you're not wasting time on busy work, and actually around how do you use that additional time and how do use some of the tools out there to try and drive profitability in it. A key area we've been focusing on, unsurprisingly, is the pricing and underwriting platform, some of our portfolio intelligence capabilities look to tackle that directly. I expect you to hear a lot more from us around how are our underwriting actuarial and ingestion agents helping clients achieve profitability in a volatile market and certainly softening market versus how can you just write as much risk as quickly, which has maybe been a bit more of a focus for the last couple of years.
00:29:45 · Matthew Grant
[00:29:45] S1: Yeah, I mean, my previous life, you used to refer to it marginal impact pricing and our ability to understand what an additional piece of business you write had impacts your whole portfolio. I mean, it's been hard to do it until now when the tools are out there. That makes complete sense. It is a really good point. I mean, efficiency only takes you so far and you start to get sort of reducing benefits and then need to look for something new. And then finally, Richard, I find it really helpful to get my listening or reading fix from people I'm talking to. So do you have any recommendations for a podcast or a book or both of you feel particularly inspired to do so?
00:30:21 · Richard Gunn
[00:30:21] S2: Well, I don't know about you, but I kind of flip flop between reading business books and then looking at my work stats and realizing I'm having, like, one hour of good sleep each night because I'm just lying there in bed thinking about work and strategy and then reading books that help me fall asleep and go to sleep or, like, distract me from the day to day. So on the book side, I'd gone through a a recent flip back towards reading the books I used to read when I was traveling, when I was kinda 18 to 21. So most recently reread Papillon, which definitely distracted me from the world of insurance technology and helped me sleep. On the podcast side, one thing we're seeing is, like, vendors love to talk about building a partnership, but, actually, it's more important than ever when carriers are looking for software providers to pick the right partner who's going to help them learn and help them navigate the evolving landscape landscape of AI and just kind of technology more broadly because it's it's changing so so quickly. And so a podcast that I just do every single day is the... Think it's called the daily AI brief or the AI daily brief, one of those two. It just helps me give that quick sound bite about what's the latest and greatest in all news related to AI, just to make sure that I'm on the forefront of that. Then obviously, it's on me to do a bit more research about how that applies to of HX and insurance.