Six Things 2.25.24
Insurance Thought Leadership
Transforming the Insurance Industry - Welcome to the Conversation
This is a sampling of thought leadership content from ITL's free weekly newsletter, Six Things. To receive the full newsletter, subscribe to Six Things.
Experimentation With Gen AI Must Be Far Bolder
Paul Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of ITL
My first book, "Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM," published in 1993, was an archetype. Despite the years of reporting and the blood, sweat and tears that went into it, the book boiled down to a familiar story: A self-satisfied giant failed to see that its world was changing and lost to a nimbler upstart.?
That upstart, Bill Gates, recently published the first volume of his autobiography, "Source Code: My Beginnings," which reminded me of a moment in my book where everything hung in the balance for Microsoft. Gates, just 24 years old at the time, made a shrewd contract demand whose significance the IBMers missed — and without which the world at large might never have heard of Gates or Microsoft.?
How could someone that young be so sophisticated? Because he had already negotiated dozens of contracts with big corporations (he started doing professional programming work in eighth grade) and had been living in the nascent PC world for years. His IBM counterparts, raised on mainframes, had had only a few months to get acquainted with the PC business — and, as they would soon learn, its economics bore little resemblance to mainframes.
There is a lesson there, I think, for the insurance industry. The PC revolution, along with more recent seismic technology shifts, shows that an advance as fundamental as gen AI can change the source of revenue and profits. Yet insurance companies are largely focused on gen AI's low-hanging fruit, such as efficiencies.?
That work is important, but companies should be thinking much, much bigger if they want to be the winner in the latest tale and not a self-satisfied giant left by the wayside. Insurance companies should already be envisioning where the new revenue and profit pools might be, should be testing to see if those visions might be right and should be experimenting with how to get to those pools first.
I'll offer some thoughts on where at least one major pool could be for insurers, as well as on how to test and experiment. But let's start with the meeting that a young Bill Gates had with a roomful of IBMers in a makeshift office in Boca Raton, Florida, in late September 1980.
零犀科技 -- 合夥人
1 周When all the low-hanging fruits have been picked, it all depends on your own ability! However, we cannot blame the insurance companies entirely, as they can only do the “visible” part. Things that are not visible right now, that are innovative, that take time, and that require investment are too risky for the incumbents. Moreover, from the perspective of AI technology on the sales side, in addition to the AI of the sales chain, the AI of insurance products, and the uncontrollability of "people" in human-machine collaboration, these are all reasons why today's transformation is so difficult.
President-Founder at InsurTech Consulting
1 周Happy to have our article featured among some of the best thought leadership in the P&C industry and related ecosystem. Thanks to co-author Stephen Applebaum and Insurance Thought Leadership, "Six Things".