The latest from the Editor’s keyboard;
IN PRAISE OF EARNIX EXCELERATE
I recently spent 2 days at the Earnix Excelerate 2025 event, where various speakers educated me on the latest automated systems, AI, platforms, data etc and its application across the insurance chain. Meeting new people, exchanging ideas and seeing what competitors are doing is all part of the growth journey for every insurance or insurtech brand. It got me thinking about the power of connecting in the real world vs WFH.
Sure, WFH is a great fit for anyone with a family, absorbing hobbies, pets or just someone who wants a commuter free existence. Having battled across London on a Lime bike during the Tube drivers strike, I can see why women especially would want a life free from the living Hellscape that is public transport in the UK. It is relentlessly dirty, miserable, crowded and occasionally dangerous. So yes, WFH is a dream scenario for many people. I get that.
FUTURE THINKING
So we live in different times and WFH is pretty much enshrined in corporate culture. Certainly it’s the default position in the public sector, where people don’t even live in the UK anymore, they do their Council planning dept admin from Thailand, Portugal or Costa Rica.
But what about innovation? How can we form teams of people with a vision of something better; a product, a string of code, a platform plug-in that unblocks a data roadblock or blind spot in an insurer’s legacy system? These are still problems that need to be resolved. For even though I learned at Earnix Excelerate 25 that new products can now be designed with multi-location compliance baked in, in a matter of days, it still takes a team to build it, test it and more people to deploy it successfully.
At the event I got chatting to two people from Greece who told me how the economy generally has been picking up there, and that several insurers were now partnering with Greek insurance brands, or investing in the market, to develop new products, tap into the new optimism, a potential return to prosperity. It’s really all about partnership sometimes and I think those alliances can be formed better when you meet people face-to-face, not on a succession of Teams calls. You get a handle on what makes people tick, how they think on their feet, spot solutions, or foresee problems well in advance.
All these things can happen at events. Both in the formal setting of a Q&A after a presentation, and off-the-record in a social setting.
OK, HERE’S AN IDEA
I sat in on a presentation by Erez Barak, CTO at Earnix, who spoke about AI agents, data, workflow and how those AI Agents could work in partnership with humans to free up time. The automation of various admin tasks could result in more empathy during claims, more personal pricing at renewals and so on. AI is a toolkit, not a replacement robot. Essentially, everyone at an insurance brand has an AI Co-pilot, doing lots of the automatic pilot type flying, while you are free to pursue other things in depth, build relationships, spot potential problems, be more human basically.
And that got me thinking about data – specifically the “data lake/pool” analogy that’s been around for a few years.
What if data could be swirled like water into a Quantum computer AI platform, which had a kind of plughole filter, so that you could predict the strength of the flow, the direction, identify impurities and so on? In the future you could test risk scenarios by placing synthetic markers into that flow and watching how they moved nearer or further from the plug, in the same way that objects in a bath do when the plug is pulled? Repeat tests would highlight which risk markers hit the plughole first or last. This data flow testing could be fine tuned in different scenarios like Cat events, motor, home, Life or health claims etc.
What I’m visualising is something that is infinitely more detailed, more nuanced, than any actuarial table we have right now. More computing power and LLM analytics of that data ingestion process could mean real-time information, from thousands of sources, being overlaid across actual events, and getting accurate predictions on claims costs, call volumes, spikes by location or demographic factors, vehicle and asset repairs/losses/salvage, plus immediately adjusting future pricing – sky’s the limit.
ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?
If so, thank you, because the vague concept I just sketched out in my notebook at the event obviously needs work. But if I was employed at a big insurer or broker, I would not where to start with developing that idea in a Teams or Zoom call. Most likely, I would just forget about it and eat more tasty biscuits during my WFH break times. Meet targets, do my admin.
That’s why events inspire, fire the imagination and spark interest in a way that WFH simply cannot match. You can talk to key people who might be able to make a concept viable, marketable and fundamentally unique from the competition. I think WFH is sometimes a retreat from the world, a means of disengagement. Not good. In reality, for innovation to happen we have to collectively embrace the future. Aim high like China is doing right now. Try to build better rocket boosters that land themselves like Elon does. You may hate the guy but he and his team accomplished what NASA failed to do in half a century.
That dazzling display of AI managed rocket booster landing started with an idea. It might have been in the bath, but it was developed by a team in a lab, or series of labs. Standing on the shoulders of giants only gets you so far.
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