Episode 26: Digital Disruption in Insurance

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Guest speaker: Leandro DalleMule (Planck Data - https://www.planckdata.com)

Many traditional industries have undergone or are in the process of being disrupted by innovative startups who are deploying new and emerging technologies to rewrite the rules and change the game.

Planck Data, a startup based in New York City with offices in Tel Aviv, is doing exactly this to the Insurance industry. In 2018, this innovative startup raised $12m as part of its Series A round to simplify insurance underwriting using AI (https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/planck-re-scores-12m-series-a-to-simplify-insurance-underwriting-with-artificial-intelligence/)

This week Tom sat down with Leandro DalleMule, former Chief Data Officer for AIG who left that position 6 months ago to become General Manager of North America for Planck.

During this ~30 minute conversation, Leandro provides some fascinating insights into how Planck is disrupting commercial underwriting and why he is so excited about the future. Here are some of the points covered in this episode:

- An introduction to Leandro DalleMule (1:06)

- Why did you join Planck & what does the company do? (2:56)

- Brand New Insights with AI: How Busy Is Your Dancefloor?(6:28)

- Insurance on-demand using behavioral insights (12:33)

- People are not good at assessing risk!(15:10)

- What is inhibiting Planck's growth?(17:40)

- What is enabling new players to disrupt the insurance industry? (20:08)

- What will Planck look like in 5-years?(21:01)

- The trick to success for Insurtech's(25:08)

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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The focus of the rapidly changing nature of technology is usually centered on B2B or B2C products and/or services. But how has this technological change we have seen over the past 20 years impacted the way Enterprises think about their commercial agreements with large deals?

In this episode of Pardon The Disruption, Tom Young is joined by Robert Finkel (Partner at WilmerHale, a law firm which provides global legal representation across a comprehensive range of industry and practice areas) to discuss emerging trends within commercial agreements.

- How has the nature of commercial deals changed over time? (3:40)

- How does the prevalence of data factor into commercial deals? (6:48)

- Do companies understand the value of data? (10:10)

- What are some emerging trends related to commercial agreements? (14:42)

- How can you secure data with technology? (17:46)

- Mitigating the risk of protecting data (23:35)

- Selling Risk-as-a-Service (25:37)

- Regulating emerging technology (e.g. AI) in the context of commercial agreements (28:50) (31:16)

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In a recent article from Horses for Sources (https://www.horsesforsources.com/rpa-dead-integrated-automation-platforms_041519), the author Phil Fersht claimed that 'RPA is dead'.

For those of you who haven't come across RPA, we created a short video to introduce the concept (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNCKyjdtWts).

So is RPA really dead?

Whilst the headline of the article is provocative, it raises many good points and comes at a time when valuations for RPA companies like UiPath are skyrocketing (the firm recently raised $568m at a $7bn valuation).

The article itself argues that as a standalone silver bullet, RPA deployment is only a component of the overall solution. Without a fully integrated automation strategy, encompassing an API gateway methodology at scale, process orchestration / BPM platforms, the underlying data management frameworks, and finally advanced analytic and AI / ML platforms to make use of the data.

As TJ Young (Consultant, Rumjog) summarizes, "In silos, all of it has limited impact, but together it's this integrated digital toolkit that you can approach end-to-end process to transform at scale versus spot projects".

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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Today, most AI companies are looking at how they can develop algorithms to replace people.

Unanimous AI is different.

Founded in 2014 by Louis Rosenberg, they approach AI from almost the opposite perspective, as we found out during a 30-minute conversation with Louis:

"We start from the premise that people are really smart, they have knowledge, wisdom, insight, intuition."

Louis believes that these fundamental human traits are missing from Big Data but do exist in the human database.

"If you are a sports fan, you are watching games and developing your own intuition about how the teams are playing and what the momentum of the game is."

Based on this premise and applying hive decision making lessons from nature (swarms of bees, flocks of birds, etc), Unanimous AI has developed AI technology which connects groups of people together to maximize the value of their knowledge and insights with impressive results.

Not only has this innovative startup been able to accurately predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby & Premier League football results (https://unanimous.ai/epl-perfect/), but they have also applied the technology within businesses to help internal teams with sales forecasting, marketing predictions, and product development. They have also used their products to bring together swarms of customers helping companies to better understand their insights.

https://unanimous.ai/

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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When honey bees are faced with the existential decision on where to relocate their hive, that is to find the perfect environment in which their colony can survive for generations to come, how do they reach consensus? A honey bee's brain is smaller than a grain of sand and has less than a million neurons. Humans have 85 billion. However, researchers have found that honey bees pick the optimal solution over 80% of the time.

This begs the question, what is the best way to accurately predict outcomes? Does the answer lie in nature?

Ants, bees, birds, and fish all self-organize themselves without any single leader, to help make complex, sometimes life & death decisions, as a single organism rather than individuals. This is known as Hive Intelligence.

Louis Rosenberg, CEO & Founder of Unanimous AI, provided insights into how this can be used by humans in real-world applications on the TED stage (you can see his full talk here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-RyZt_Uas&t=794s).

This is not voting. Instead of having a one person, one vote system, the relevant intelligence of all individuals in the network combines to give a group intelligence or a brain of brains! How can you tap into this Swarm Intelligence from large groups to make better decisions, from customer experience to what is going to happen next with your products & services?

How would you even get a group of people or robots to co-operate together in a dynamic way which adjusted in real-time? Radhika Nagpal discusses how you can program rules to allow organisms to self-organize and react to the environment they see at TED (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgVR0lzFJc&t=300s).

Autonomous cars will almost certainly use this tool in the AI kit to function, that is the ability to use Swarm Intelligence to self-organize themselves based on the environment around them, as Magnus Egerstedt shows in this video (13:50, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULKyXnQ9xWA).

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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In a world where AI is increasingly stitched into the very fabric of our society and we start to rely on it for complex decisions including those which have potentially life or death ramifications, shouldn't there be a common understanding of the rationale behind AI reaching a final decision?

This week, the Pardon The Disruption podcast team welcomes Gus Bekdash, Senior Managing Director of AI Solutions at IPsoft (www.ipsoft.com) & Vanessa Bates-Ramirez, Senior Editor at Singularity University (https://singularityhub.com/author/vbatesramirez/#sm.0001676oghr96fqjq9a1ha6301jy1)

While it may be clear to understand why we need to explain AI, how we get there is far less clearer. There are a couple of dimensions to understand; (i) What is the goal set being programmed into the platforms and (ii) Once it has those optimization parameters how does it reach the final decision?

But while skeptics tend to blame the developers of the technology for not clearly defining the goal sets being programmed, Gus believes the importance of getting these decisions right requires more people to have a seat at the table.

Vanessa recently attended SXSW in 2019 where Explainable AI was a hot topic. At the event, she surfaced two schools of thoughts developing as it relates to Explainable AI. On one hand, there are people who believe that these AI systems should be explainable and no further progress should be made until we do this. Conversely, waiting for perfection will waste time and potential gains AI could yield.

What do you think? Do you think countries in the West will hit the brakes on AI-related progress because of the complexity of understanding AI's rationale whilst countries further East slam down the accelerator?

Regardless of whether you are bullish, bearish, or skeptical - the topic of Explainable AI will continue to be debated publically and privately.

Check out Vanessa's article on Explainable AI on Singularity Hub (https://singularityhub.com/2019/03/19/to-be-ethical-ai-must-become-explainable-how-do-we-get-there/)

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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Remember when Bitcoin was all the rage? At the time of recording this podcast, the price of Bitcoin was trading at $4,100. Just a day later, it topped $5,000.

Recently, JPMorgan announced their own pseudo digital coin (https://www.jpmorgan.com/global/news/digital-coin-payments) and the NYSE which is owned by ICE announced their own cryptocurrency platform called BAKKT which raised $200m in funding (https://www.coindesk.com/182-million-ice-exchanges-bitcoin-startup-bakkt-announces-massive-fundraise) have brought cryptocurrencies back into the limelight.

This made us want to revisit not only where cryptocurrencies are today, but also got us asking the question 'what is money?' and how do people perceive it compared to previous generations? Alan Watts helped to answer this question brilliantly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryBUYB3F0NU).

As we move towards a cashless society, cryptocurrencies will inevitably provide competition for institutions such as JPMorgan who have a vested interest in their own application of digital currency - queue Mr. Robot's prediction(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ee-cHbCI0s).

What's for certain is that cryptocurrencies are going nowhere, evidenced by simply following the money. As Coinbase shows, 2018 total funding for blockchain, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, topped $3bn (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-venture-capital).

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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In this episode, Tom Young (Managing Partner, Rumjog) and Frank Casale (Founder, The Institute for Robotic Process Automation & AI) discuss future trends, including how different demographics are using technology, whether there will be consolidation amongst existing industry players, the importance of reinvention, and advancing technologies in Healthcare.

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Imagine if you could modify your DNA to be part-human / part-wolf?

Ok, that's a bit far fetched. But it turns out that the technology to edit the human genome in this way exists today and in theory could be used to fundamentally edit the sequence of DNA or RNA to change what organisms are. This has implications for Healthcare, Agriculture, and has the potential to change the course of humanity.

How did it get discovered? When scientists sequenced the human genome, they found sections which had a structure, but for which the function remained a mystery, termed 'junk DNA'. It turns out that this was actually a storage array, and information was being stored here.

Further studies discovered that bacteria contained virus DNA in their genome. Why? It was a defense mechanism. Bacteria are essentially storing virus DNA (think of virus mugshots) so they can find and destroy them more easily (for more information check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tunNfh2Xchs&t=309s & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9evyeRivZwk). Once the bacteria finds the virus, using the information or mugshots it has stored in its own DNA, they use CAS-9 protein to snip the DNA of the virus to kill it.

It turns out that when DNA is snipped, it goes through a self-healing process. What researchers have done is hijack that self-healing process and inserted DNA carrying specific information (hence part-human / part-wolf).

For more information check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pp17E4E-O8&t=108s

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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The 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was dominated by Google's announcement that they are launching a game streaming platform called Stadia. Imagine being able to stream AAA rated games at 60 frames per second in 4K across multiple devices from a chrome browser with little to no latency or lag. This is the promise of Stadia (full announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUih5C5rOrA&t=2295s).

But why is Google getting into gaming? It turns out that Electronic Sports (Esports) is a huge industry. The market size of Esports is projected to cross $1bn in 2019 (https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/newzoo-global-esports-economy-will-top-1-billion-for-the-first-time-in-2019/). However, if you look at Fortnite, a game which is free to play, their 2018 revenue was $2.4bn. So $1bn is a gross underestimation of the market value.

Another way to understand the size of the market is to compare gaming vs movies. To develop and market Red Dead Redemption 2 it cost $400m+. In 3 days it made $725m, in 3 months it crossed the $1bn mark. Today's current value and tomorrow's future growth is why Google is entering the gaming market.

It seems that gaming is now going through the 6 D's of Digital Disruption (https://singularityhub.com/2017/12/29/what-are-the-6-ds-of-exponential-organizations/#sm.0001676oghr96fqjq9a1ha6301jy1).

If Google is able to fulfill the promise of streaming games at scale, it could be extremely disruptive and allow them to capitalize on a rapidly growing market.

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The world is changing and so is the way we work. At Rumjog, we provide clients with consulting services to help rethink business. We advise at every stage of the change lifecycle from constructing strategies to solution implementation.

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