Have you heard the one about the yoga instructor, jazz musician and 1950s American car fanatic?
When we talk about the disruption AI is (or will…) bring to industry, there is a tendency to tell a straightforward story. Either:
AI is taking our jobs!
AI is setting our creativity free!
AI will destroy the world!
There are exceptions, of course. But often the nuance – that which makes us human – is lost.
When we brought together a dozen people in Canary Wharf to discuss how AI is impacting insurance, I knew we would get deep into the benefits and risks of natural language processing and computer vision; the importance of ‘agent in the loop’; and a future with specialist prompt engineers.
But all this insight comes from people: they feed into the model; they interpret what is sent back; and they refine that model over time.
So at the outset of the roundtable, rather than merely asking for a professional introduction from each guest, I also asked Chris Maguire’s favourite question: “Tell me something about yourself that might surprise me.”
We learned that among our collection of insurance chairmen, department heads, InsurTech founders, tech wizards and lawyers, we had a yoga instructor; an experimental jazz musician; a mechanic capable of building a V8 muscle car engine; and someone who rebuilt the roof of a Welsh farmhouse unaided!
Just over a decade ago, two other people were on that very floor in Level39, gazing at the London financial district and dreaming of the future. Revolut went from Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko on a hotdesk to an office, an entire floor… and, several stages later, its own building outside that window.
It is people who have a vision. They also build the tech (for now, anyway).
Jake Wells is the co-founder of InsurTech startup Meshed, which uses AI to reduce fees, find suitable policies and provide coverage in real-time. When he points out the boardroom window and says “Revolut didn’t build technology for the existing players in the market – but themselves as a true disrupter… that’s what we aim to do”, that is a human being talking.
A serious write-up of how the AI train is ploughing through an historic industry, featuring insightful commentary from the roundtable attendees, is in the works.
It will be engaging, framed appropriately and, of course, accurate – written as it is by a human, and not ChatGPT.
For context, that human was born with three thumbs; once worked (and indeed interviewed) in that same Canary Wharf building for the Daily Mirror; and twice weaved through those same skyscrapers, desperately trying to persuade his legs that they could take another eight miles of London Marathon.