Rough Draft
Technology Assistance Beginning – TAB
The Paul Truesdell Podcast

The AI Revolution in Insurance: Why the Seasoned Professional Still Matters
Let me tell you something that ought to keep a lot of folks in the insurance industry up at night. Artificial intelligence is about to shake the foundations of how insurance gets written, sold, and delivered. And whether that shaking stabilizes things or tears them apart depends entirely on who's paying attention and who's asleep at the wheel.
We're watching a transformation unfold right now. The distribution of insurance as we've known it for decades is changing faster than most people realize. Agents are going to be scrambling. Underwriters are going to be scrambling. Policyholders are going to wake up one day and wonder why their application got denied by a computer that never met them, never heard their story, and certainly never understood the nuances of their particular situation.
Here's the problem with artificial intelligence in underwriting. The technology loves homogenization. It loves milk toast. It loves everybody looking the same, living the same, driving the same, owning the same. When your lifestyle fits neatly into a hundred checkboxes, the algorithm hums along beautifully. But the moment you're unique, the moment your situation has a wrinkle or two that doesn't fit the template, you've got a problem. And most people have wrinkles. That's just life.
Now here's what nobody wants to talk about. Whoever programs the algorithm is really making the decision. The computer isn't thinking. It's executing instructions written by somebody sitting in an office somewhere who may or may not understand the real world of risk. Anybody who's worked with AI for more than five minutes knows it has limitations. It can be remarkably helpful, but it's not the gospel according to the mouth of God. Unfortunately, there's a growing number of people who treat it exactly that way. They accept whatever the machine spits out as though it were carved in stone tablets. That kind of blind faith is going to create some dangerous situations for consumers who deserve better.
The seasoned professional who understands how to make both a quantitative and qualitative risk assessment is becoming a rare bird. These are the folks who can look at a situation, weigh the numbers, consider the human factors, and make a judgment call that actually makes sense. They're not just checking boxes. They're thinking. Remember that word? Think. I had it on my license plate for years. Had a plate cover that said think about it. I've used that phrase on my podcast more times than I can count because it never stops being relevant.
We've already watched this same transformation happen in medicine. Doctors today are operating under a real crunch when it comes to time. They've got to get you in, get you out, and move on to the next patient. They're exhausted by the end of the day. They're using their phones to record conversations just to keep charting time down to a minimum. Medicine has become checklist-based. If your symptoms fit the checklist, great. If they don't, good luck. The doctor barely has time to think because the system doesn't reward thinking. It rewards throughput.
Insurance is heading down that same road. Investment advisory services too. The whole financial services industry is accelerating toward a future where the technology does the heavy lifting and the human beings become optional accessories. And what's going to happen eventually is that people are going to start appreciating the seasoned professional again. When the algorithm fails them, when their unique situation gets kicked out of the automated system, they're going to wish they had someone with thirty or forty years of experience on their side.
Take my situation. I'm way beyond the age where I could retire in the traditional sense. Stop working, collect Social Security, sit in the recliner, watch cable news, go golfing, ride around in the golf cart, go out to eat way too often, and slowly fall apart physically. That's not the plan. I don't want that for myself, and I don't want it for you either. But here's the reality. More and more people in this industry are going to retire. They're going to take their institutional knowledge with them. And there's nobody coming up behind them who's ready to handle the influx of oddities and exceptions that real-world underwriting throws at you every single day.
Entry-level and mid-level roles are critical if you want to develop people who can eventually step up and do the job that needs doing. You can program AI to do a lot of heavy lifting, but you can't program wisdom. You can't program judgment. Those things come from experience, and experience takes time. Too many people today expect immediate satisfaction. They don't understand that most valuable things in life come from a slow grind. Knowledge and wisdom aren't downloaded. They're earned.
There aren't a lot of people like me out here. Folks who are far beyond their traditional retirement age but still showing up every day because they love the work. When you're self-employed or you're a business owner and you genuinely enjoy what you do, why would you quit? Take a look at some of the most successful people in the world. They don't retire because they've hit some arbitrary age. They keep going because the work itself is the reward. I have a phrase I use all the time. I am a lifestyle business or business as a lifestyle. That really encapsulates what I think a person ought to do with their life. Find something you're good at, something you care about, and keep doing it until they carry you out.
Now let me introduce a concept I've been thinking about. I call it TAB. Technological Assistance Beginning. The idea is simple. AI and technology can help you get started. They can provide remarkable flexibility when it comes to information, documents, and general support. They offer great logic and access to knowledge. But they're not going to solve everything for you. They're a beginning, not an ending. The legacy systems of critical thinking and human judgment haven't been replaced. They've just been supplemented. And if you forget that distinction, you're setting yourself up for trouble.
Here's my daily benchmark. If you go to bed at night and you had a good day, that's success. If you wake up in the morning, you had a good night. Anything else isn't good. Keep it that simple. And combine that simplicity with what I call MY TEAM. That stands for Minimize and Maximize Your Time, Effort, Aggravation, and Money. Notice the order. Time comes first because it's the only resource you cannot get back. Then effort, because you've already spent decades working hard. Then aggravation, because frustration will wear you down faster than anything. And finally money, which matters but isn't everything. Apply these basic concepts, understand the limitations of AI, and you'll navigate this transformation a whole lot better than most.
The traditional quoting systems coming out now are competitive, no question about it. But here's the catch. If you don't hit all the right boxes, you've got a problem. And people should be genuinely concerned about that when it comes to property and casualty insurance. Not just here in Florida, where we've got our own special set of challenges, but everywhere. The algorithm doesn't care about your circumstances. It cares about checkboxes. And if your life doesn't fit neatly into those checkboxes, you're going to need a human being in your corner who actually knows how to think.
We're in a transformation. There's no stopping it and no going back. But that doesn't mean we have to surrender our judgment to machines programmed by people who've never walked a mile in our shoes. The seasoned professionals still...