David Kuhn, VP – Head of AI & Emerging Tech at ValueMomentum

We’re finding carriers are still having challenges realizing value from their PO, CS or even their pilots. And that comes from a couple different things. One is they try to automate a broken process. So it could be a process that is already in place and that’s just how they do it today because  systems force them to. So we recommend heavily taking a look at the process. What is the process? What should the process be? Take technology out of it. Think about if you had to to go write this on paper again, you know, 100 years ago before we had computers, how would you do this? Would it be the same? And now start thinking about what is the best experience that someone could go through in this? What are the real inputs and outputs and what’s being required there? So that’s one aspect. Another big place is that sometimes they’re ideas are too far ahead of the change management challenge that’s going to be ahead of them. So they might go solve a big problem and they solve it really well. But creating the business case for that and understanding the change that’s going to occur there is one of those challenging areas. Who are the stakeholders? Who’s going to be impacted? How are they going to be impacted? Are you going to disrupt 30 or 40 people in the job they do today? You have to start thinking about before you even start that work, what’s going to happen with those people, Where do we put them? And start thinking about that as you go through the proof of concept. Because if it plays out and works well, then people are going to want to accelerate that. So those are two of the big areas. The other one is the we’ll wait and see. Insurance has always been slow to invent. Most carriers want to be a fast follower. The challenge right now is that if you’re not building some of these things and if you’re not taking them to production, even the small ones that are low risk, higher reward, some carriers are still afraid of doing this. They’re afraid of regulations. Or are they going to jump on this too quickly and then they have to change often? We look at this as a way to kind of reinvent how insurance works and reinvent the type of people that you should be employing. We all want problem solvers. We all want people. So instead of looking at it as we have this one thing we’re testing, AI, we need to start looking at how do we test the change process at an organization? How do we test what could happen from a market change? How quickly can we adapt? How quickly can we roll something out new and make that happen? So don’t just look at it as an AI problem. It’s a business problem in terms of how do you take a new concept and roll it out very quickly, Walk things through slowly, make it available to small groups in your organization or back office, and learn and progress through that learning.