Special Ep Arun Balakrishnan CEO Xceedance: AI and Insurance - everything you need to know

Today’s guest is an insurance technology entrepreneur with a
great story to tell. Arun Balakrishnan started his career at sea
but went back to business school, became an internet entrepreneur
and ended up captaining Berkshire Hathaway’s foray into the
Indian insurance market. Ten years ago he founded Insurance
technology firm Xceedance and the growth has been rapid. But
that’s just a bit of background because the main purpose of
today’s podcast is to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
in particular the generative AI that has exploded onto the
world’s consciousness in the past six months. When something has
been this hyped having someone like Arun on the show is an
absolute godsend. Arun is a great explainer and first helps
educate me about what the terms bandied around in AI really mean.
Then we start to get to work on decoding what the best
applications are going to be in the insurance world. This is
fascinating stuff and we soon get down to the fundamentals of
what machines and humans are really best at. I won’t spoil
anything by saying that the humans in insurance really shouldn’t
worry about being made redundant by this new technology – there
are some things that AI can’t do well, and even if it could, we
probably wouldn’t want it to do them for us. This is far more
about improved accuracy and vastly increased productivity. Arun
says we should think of it a bit like being allocated a smart
intern, apprentice or an indefatigable underwriting assistant.
Arun is a great teacher and I can highly commend this episode to
anyone feeling bewildered or daunted as to how to start to engage
with this exciting new technological development NOTES,
ABBREVIATIONS AND FURTHER READING Arun mentions Word2Vec, which
comes from ‘word to vector’, a technique whereby words are
transformed into a numerical representation – ie. a vector, and
is at the heart of the development of this new form of Artificial
Intelligence. Another concept mentioned and worth reading up
about further is Zero-Shot classification, which is all about
creating a tool that can do a job that it hasn’t been
specifically trained to do. An example might be for the AI to
have learned a lot about football and then use this insight to
classify an article about basketball, upon which it has never
been trained. LINKS & CONTACT https://xceedance.com/


As Arun said, you can contact him directly on arun@xceedance.com