Oslan you have a track record of leading multiple organizations in AI, cybersecurity, IT, capital management and government initiatives. Please share your experiences.
Having led high-growth businesses from inception through exit in multiple industries, I’ve seen the importance of effectively harmonizing industry and technology. Technology is great but does not inherently solve a problem and must be applied in targeted ways. Customers don’t buy technology, they buy solutions to their problems, so business technology must have a clear intention and focus on what it solves.
Even though large businesses can be slower, slow does not mean no change. To expedite evolution, enterprise solutions require enterprise-class platforms that provide common, integrated information across business units. To do so effectively requires the ability to scale to new challenges over time while having underlying security and management. Along the same vein, ultimately, industry change takes industry collaboration. Whether unifying your historically siloed units within your organization or collaborating with other companies to solve shared overarching issues, a united approach will drive the most positive growth.
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and I’ve learned that responsiveness and customer management is a fine balance. Taking a step back to solve your customers’ fundamental issues is critical, but getting caught up in the maelstrom of every unpleasant detail will not allow you to problem-solve and deliver their desired results effectively.
How AI is Improving Workflows in Property Insurance Claims Everywhere? Is it cost effective?
Artificial intelligence is a cost-effective measure for improving workflow efficiency as it can transform manual processes into automatic actions that take minutes versus days. Understandably, homeowners have incredibly high expectations when things go wrong, particularly when they expect a claims payout, and AI-based solutions make it easier to meet that need with expediency and accuracy. To meet our customers’ technology and investment needs, Arturo also uses innovative computer vision models to assess and predict damages, especially during natural disasters, to streamline the entire claims process, allowing adjusters to make quick, smart and fair decisions.
To serve policyholders speedily, insurers must leverage a macro lens of clarity and optimization across their portfolio. Carriers can integrate their claims data with property intelligence to better understand their resting risk and prioritize who to respond to and how to deploy resources efficiently. At a glance, they can see which policies have open claims vs. those that haven’t been filed. So rather than reacting to these issues, carriers who identify pre-claim conditions can proactively manage risk and expedite assessments. Similarly, further savings from artificial intelligence stem from reducing on-site inspections that reduce trips, fuel and carbon emissions.
Overall, AI—and technology generally—plays a crucial role in helping us provide adjusters with critical and comprehensive property insights to understand historical conditions, current damage and future risk to predict impact beyond today.
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In insurance, today, the imagery and sensor explosion is perhaps the most consequential technological advancement occurring. What are your expectations from AI for the next couple of years?
AI is moving out of its overhyped conversation toward practical uses that solve the right problems cheaply and quickly. As AI goes mainstream, the cost of AI workflow will decrease dramatically. ChatGPT-4 has shown that the months-long process of data curation, AI modeling and validation may see a dramatic time reduction.
AI is critical for automating lengthy tasks, enhancing decision-making and facilitating complex integration but is not required for basic analytics or linear answers like the square footage of a house, so it’s equally important to be mindful to not overengineer a solution with AI that can be solved equally well in a better way. Customers don’t buy technology for technology’s sake, they simply want solutions and artificial intelligence to be used as more of a tool with optimal uses rather than a catch-all solution.
Could you share a few of your business strategies to help lead the property intelligence industry to better meet the complex, end-to-end needs of its customers?
Seeing customers and suppliers alike working together to solve large-scale industry challenges, such as property information creation and collection, is more fruitful than solving problems as individual suppliers. Because insurers have a closer relationship with the end customer, they must communicate what information is most helpful and impactful to property intelligence providers. Fostering that collaboration is key to ensuring we are providing the right efficiencies and resources.
For example, when insurers gain insights into the risk level of various properties, they can send targeted communications to policyholders regarding the risk factors and offer feedback on how to build a resilient home. As the middleman, if insurers connect the supplier’s insights to the end customer, everyone can work together to save money, and this is far more effective than solving these burgeoning industry challenges from one end alone.
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Could you tell us about your latest API which allows customers to seamlessly plug Arturo’s property characteristics data into their workflows?
Our latest API provides the broadest range of property attributes and characteristics in less than 300 milliseconds. In addition to breadth and speed, customers can feel confident in the decisions they make given its unparalleled accuracy. Transforming this wide swath of data into intelligent insights is critical to streamlining workflows and making trustworthy business decisions that reduce risk and enhance profitability.
We would love to hear your perspective in regard to your new product vision designed to unify the insurance ecosystem.
Based on our market research and customer conversations, a common theme we keep seeing is the struggle with inaccurate, non-integrated, ineffective information that does little to meet carriers’ actual needs. Traditionally, making use of this inconsistent and unreliable data required a large monetary and time investment, so we are committed to significantly reducing this cost to allow insurers to better respond to their customers and predict impact across portfolios.
Claims and underwriting departments use different sets of data to solve the same problem, which creates inconsistent pictures of risk and often leads to poor business decisions, as well as loss of profits. We’re excited about our vision to unify these historically siloed insurance segments of underwriting, risk and claims to provide a unified source of truth that lets businesses quickly, confidently and accurately meet their customers’ unique needs.
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A book that you would suggest to our readers.
I enjoy reading a wide range of genres, from powerful memoirs like Andre Agassi’s Open to books with business insights like Jim Collins’ Good to Great. What I’ve learned from all of them is that there’s no greater teacher than life experience.
Thank you, Greg! That was fun and we hope to see you back on globalfintechseries.com soon.
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
Greg has a proven track record of leading high-growth businesses from inception through exit in the artificial intelligence/machine learning, cybersecurity, and information technology markets. He’s raised hundreds of millions of capital from a variety of venture, private equity, and debt sources, and he has been instrumental in various government initiatives. Prior to joining Arturo, he has served as Chairman and/or CEO of multiple companies including Narus, Fixmo, Risksense, and Wireless online. In addition, he led the commercial efforts in standing up both the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) in Silicon Valley and the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the Pentagon. He currently serves on the board of directors of the National Cyber Security Center, Atreides, Inc and multiple advisory Boards. Greg received his MBA from Northwestern’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and his Bachelor of Science from Indiana University.
Arturo’s AI-based solution helps insurers securely underwrite risks, efficiently allocate resources, and lower claims cost across their book of business, allowing them to focus on what matters most: the customer, and our shared commitment to protecting our world.
