RHS 063 - Ron Glozman on a Practical Use for AI in Insurance

RHS 063 - Ron Glozman on a Practical Use for AI in Insurance

September 13, 2020 52m Episode 69
Ron Glozman, founder and CEO of Chisel AI, joins the podcast for a look into how independent insurance agencies and carriers can use artificial intelligence in a practical way to reduce errors and omissions claims. Get more: https://ryanhanley.com/

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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
Before we get to today's guest, I want to do something different. I want to support a good friend and a good cause, and that is Chris Paradiso and his last agent standing magazine that he creates.
This is the fifth edition of the magazine. All the proceeds go to charity.
If you know Chris, you know he's someone who supports our industry as much or more than anyone else. He stands among the giants of the individuals who support our space.
He's doing incredible things. He gets people together.
He gets conversations happening. I've known Chris for almost a decade now, and I just consider it an honor to be in the conversations that he's brought me into.
I want to do my part to support both the individuals who contributed their expertise to this magazine and, and here is the kicker, all the individuals who have ever contributed to any of the magazines. So here's what I want you to do.
I want you to go to ParadisoPresents.com. ParadisoPresents.com.
And Chris doesn't know that I'm doing this. He has no idea.
Go to ParadisoPresents.com and share that link. Share it on social media.
Share it on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn with the hashtag Last Agent Standing. Hashtag Last Agent Standing.
Okay, so this has nothing to do with the podcast. This is everything about this magazine, the people who contributed, and just getting the word out.
Share that link and just put in there, purchase a copy I did. Put some peer pressure, put some social pressure on your peers to go buy a copy.
I bought six copies of the latest episode, which I did contribute to, but that's not why I bought them. I bought six copies and I have copies of every, so basically I have six copies of every, of each of the five editions.
And what I'm going to do is for everyone who goes out and shares the link to ParadisoPresents.com where you can purchase your copy of the magazine and hashtags it Last Agent Standing. I'm going to start randomly picking people and sending them, mailing them all five copies of the magazine.
So share the link, put some pressure on people, hashtag Last Agent Standing. You can tag Chris.
You can tag Paradiso Presents. You can tag me.
Tag anyone who contributed. Bob McCool, Daniel Sung, Bob Klinger, Joe Hollier, Jeff and Una, Roy, Frank Setner, you know, Ron Gloseman, who's our interviewee today.
Do this. Share it.
Get the message out. There's, you know, Bradley Flowers contributed.
Susan Shaw contributed. There's amazing contributors.
Carrie Wallace contributed. There's amazing contributors just in this latest episode.
I'm going to send you all five episodes randomly, six people, if you do this. So it's about getting people to purchase more copies because then more money goes to charity.
More people see these stories that everyone is sharing, thoughts they're sharing. It's about spreading ideas throughout the community.
And I just hope you'll do this. I don't do a lot of this kind of stuff on the show, but I want to be supportive of Chris.
And like I said, he has no idea that I'm doing this. Okay, so that's a long intro to get to Ron Gloseman.
Ron is a technologist and he's a thoughtful guy. I love the way he's coming at the industry.
He is the founder and CEO of Chisel AI. Chisel is a provider of AI powered solutions for commercial insurance brokers.
Basically guys, he's come up with some machine learning and natural language processing software, which allows you to track differences between maybe how a policy was bound and how it was issued, how renewals are issued versus what was quoted. He's basically created a software that helps drastically reduce the chance of errors and omissions claims because of differences in bound, quoted, signed policy docs and what's actually issued by a company.
Also helps with endorsements, helps with all that kind of stuff. It's really interesting.
He talks a lot about what AI is and how it can be used in a fundamental way in our industry, in a very practical way in our industry. And I think you're going to love this episode.
So Share Parody So Presents, listen to this episode, hashtag Last Engine Standing. And I'm going to pick six of you over the next couple of weeks randomly to send all five editions of the magazine.
All right, let's get to Ron. Hey, Ryan.
What's going on, man? Good, how are you doing? I'm good. I appreciate you letting me push 15 minutes.
Yeah, no worries. Today has been a day.
There's no doubt. A good or a bad day? Good.
I would say good and bad. The full spectrum of day.
I've written in business today, which always makes a day a good day. And I've had some conversations I wish that I hadn't had today.
So the full spectrum, which brings us to you and our conversation, which I am excited about. And, you know, I like to get right into it with these, you know, I think, um, you know, I, I'm just interested, man.
Like I'm interested in what you guys are doing. And I, and I've looked at the website.
I know a little bit, you know what I mean? Tracy emailed me, talked a little bit, like just, I maybe just start to break it down for me. Like, you know, I think, um, one thing I will say, and this is one of the things I love about the insurance industry is anytime you throw anything that asks it, like, like the, the URL is chisel.ai.
And as much as I would love to believe that I am this like forward thinking tech guy, as soon as I see the letters AI next to each other, I immediately like two I'm like wow I bet this is super cool or it's complete bullshit so which one is it no for sure I think I mean I think it's important to define what artificial intelligence maybe is because it's really been around for a long time a lot of people have misconceptions and there's many types of ai maybe i'll start there so there's um machine learning which is probably the most academic aspect there's a lot of really good research there a lot of people study machine learning or study a branch of machine learning as an area of expertise then there's things like um you know text to speech and speak speech to text which is like siri i think everybody's used to siri and like hey alexa and hey google and nobody finds it scary i don't think but it's all artificial intelligence because it can understand you it can translate it into um text effectively you can then take that text do a question answer search generate an answer and then take that text, do a question answer search, generate an answer,

and then take that answer from text and generate speech to read it back to you. So that's like four types of machine learning right there, just to accomplish what might seem like a really simple task.
And so, you know, when we talk about what we do, which is like policy checking and the intake of submissions for the insurance industry um that's again maybe people think it's scarier it's complex but when you break it down there's a lot of small problems that together add up into maybe a complex yeah it's funny when you're breaking down like and when you really think about when you stop and you really think about how much technology goes into, hey, Siri, where's the closest pizza joint? You know what I mean? Like, and Siri's like ready to rock. I just have her on mute.
You know, you say that, and then, and then literally you get an answer back, like down the road on the left is the best, you know, 400 five star reviews, you know, Johnny's pizza, like the amount of technology that goes into that. And we, you know, to us, it's like, oh, Siri, like, you know, we don't even think twice about it.
And it's just crazy that, you know, then we think that now mapping this to the insurance industry, right? So, so this, this, Siri, I'm pointing at this, even though we don't do video, everyone knows I do things with my hands, and then they can't actually see me. So we have this incredibly powerful, built out technology delivering real time responses in what would have to be considered a fairly accurate manner.
And then we contrast that against the things that we deal with today in the insurance industry. And like, I had a 45 minute bitch session with a buddy of mine about agency technology today.
And like, it's insane. It feels almost like we're like, why not just go out with an actual club and actually club the client and then actually drag them back to the office? Like, like, like physically do that, Like that might be more efficient than how we operate.
For sure. I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunity for efficiency.
I hope it doesn't have to come to clubbing them over the head. I would hope we can have other solutions, but for sure.
I think it starts with being able to intake digital documents.

I know one of the great things that I personally like is PDFs, especially because everybody's working from home. And DocuSign seems to be getting more accepted and all of these e-signature solutions.
And so I think it's really a great step forward. um and so looking at that i'm i'm hopeful that that is a catalyst of the beginning of a transition

to a more digital way to deliver insurance and to buy insurance. To your point, if we have to club them over the head and drag them to our office, it doesn't scale.
And it's not a pleasant experience, not for them, not for us. And I think that's where I can help.
It would be pretty badass, though, if you did that. You literally just had someone by the collar and you dragged them to the door and they're like, who's that? And you're like, that's our new client.
He's got a fleet of vehicles and a nice plumbing business. You know, like, okay, so getting back to reality here.

So you talked a lot about PDFs.

I mean, it feels like to me,

this world, COVID world is not going away, right? I think that's probably been beat up that idea quite a bit.

I'm sure we will adjust.

The pendulum will swing back.

I mean, I can't wait until I can actually meet

at least some people in person.

But I have a lot of, I haven't, I've sold.

So my agency has existed since March 9th

I'm going to go say that I've sold like a thousand clients. But I've only had two of them.
One asked for an in-person meeting and we just didn't do it. And the other was an in-person meeting that I sold.
Every other client I had has happened through the phone, text message, email, and e-sign. I haven't even sold anybody through Zoom.
I haven't even needed to. They haven't even needed that.
Phone, email, text. What comes next? I'm going to send you an e-sign document.
You sign it, you send it back. Done.
So that part, you know, I think we'll have more human experiences to build trust into our process because that's always going to be important. But the delivery, the exchange of information, the capture of information, that part being 99% digital, it doesn't feel like that's going away.
It doesn't feel like we're going back to handwriting on the cord forms and stuff. Right.
And I'm personally excited for that. I think that allows us to then do a lot of cool things.
I mean, one, one interesting thing that, um, is just an interesting statistic is that 50% of people in the United States specifically are underinsured, at least when it comes to the commercial space. And so my favorite is like a farmer who, you know, bought a property, let's say in California.
And so he bought a farm with like a plot of land with a farm, half a million dollars. And then obviously due to appreciation in California, that land is not worth a lot more.
And so because he's just getting his policy renewed year over year, it's at the, it's been at the same limit, and nobody ever catches that they should increase it. And that's 50% of people in the United States, actually.
And so I think when the information comes in digitally, and we can start looking at things like, well, what is the property value in that zip code or postal code look like? Is it in a flood zone or hurricane zone like there's lots of cool information that we can then do but it all has to start with getting that information into some type of digital format yeah and then cool things can happen yeah then you can pull in i mean there's so many data i don't want to, you're going to, you're going to maybe some of the stuff I say is silly and kind of the more technical vernacular, but there's so many lakes or whatever of data that stored in different places that you can suck in and, and, and ping against what you actually have. I mean, this is, I was talking to a carrier one time and they asked me like, if you could have one thing, anything, what would it be? And I'd say, when I have an account, I would like to be able to push a button and have all the nonsensical information that I have to ask them about sucked in so I don't have to ask them about that.
Like, when was the last time that your roof was done? 2015. That's what I put, 2015.
It was done in 2015. Unless I know it's super old, 2015.
Or, you know, if I did 2015 for the electrical, then I put 2017 for the roof. You know, and that's every, because what are you going to do? You're going to waste all your time, the valuable time that you get of your client's attention on when was the electrical last done? Now, I get it.
If there's, you know, you need to know if there's like circuit breakers or fuses or whatever. I mean, that kind of does make a difference.
But some of this, and then we're talking about building code information and ISO information and how far is it from a, from a fire hydrant. And I'm not saying that stuff isn't important, but it is certainly not important to talk to your client about, right? That is not information that we should be wasting our client's time on.
And this to me feels like one of the magic pills to moving forward. A hundred percent.
I mean, my, one of my favorite statistics is, you is you know we do i talk to a lot of carriers and um on average like the average questionnaire can have like 100 plus questions and they're typically only using 15 to 50 of those and like a lot of those are just throw away and so to your point like you're probably beating your client over the head saying, when was the electrical last done? And unfortunately, they actually don't even capture that information because we're back to point A. That information today needs to be manually typed into some type of database on their end.
Sorry about that. That's the lovely powers of work from home internet.

Yeah.

All good.

How many clients have you tried to sell and they had the internet die?

I, I thankfully, my internet has not been a problem here. I have had my AC unit at the house go during the middle of summer.

So I've worked out of the house and it was about a 100 degrees in here. I have had to deal with that.
But thankfully, the internet has not been an issue. Great to hear.
So you were saying that companies have apps that have 100 plus fields, but they're only taking in 15 15 to 50 of them and then even some of those they're not using because in the end we all have to uh all that information has to be plugged in manually into the system and that's where we lost you yeah 100 and so i was going even further to say as're probably familiar with, many carriers have their own portals or their own forms that they ask you to fill in when you're sending in submissions or applications. And so it can be very time consuming.
And so on the flip side, they receive a variety of formats because they work with so many agencies and brokerages. And so, again, artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing, which is the ability for a computer to read and understand text just like a human, is the application or the artificial intelligence that can really help bear.
And I've personally seen a lot of success in that area. So before we go too much further, I'd like to discuss natural language processing.
Because, you know, like you kind of started, when people think about anything that has to do with artificial intelligence, I think machine learning is what they're really, that's what they're really thinking about. They're thinking about a computer, you know, taking certain number of iterations in and each one of those iterations teaches them something.
And over time they develop an optimization to that process in a very broad strokes way of defining it. But this idea of processing language, like, and turning it into data, or being able to take data and turning it into language, just talk to me a little bit about that process.
Because, you know, I know it's, it's one of the, or at least I've read, it's one of the faster growing areas, you know, where artificial intelligence is being used. And at the same time, I don't know that I know that much about it or probably anyone who's listening knows a tremendous amount about it or its power you know when actually used.
Sure so natural language processing as mentioned is really just a way to say teaching computers how to read. And there's more, like, branches of natural language processing.
For example, we talked a little bit earlier about question-answer systems. That's an example.
Another example is like translation. So back in the day, the way translations like Google Translate used to work was it was really like a dictionary.
and it went English to French, English to Spanish, English to Chinese, and it ended up being a huge like hundred plus gigabyte. Hopefully I'm not losing you.
That was very, very large because it was just a mapping of each language. Nowadays Google, for example, uses what's called an auto encoder.
So it takes English, translates it into a bunch of numbers, and then those numbers can be translated into any other language. It's like having a cipher, kind of.
That's exactly it. That's a great word.
It's a cipher. That's a great word.
And so that's another example, machine translation, right? And we're all used to it. You go to Google Translate, you're lost, or you're traveling traveling around the world you take a picture of a menu and boom escargot that means um snail in french for example right so um that's another cool one and so other examples specifically of natural language processing where they can apply to insurance include entity extraction and classification.
So that's the ability, for example, to extract names, dates, financial information, and then classify them. Because it's good to know, for example, that this is a number, like 1,000, 10,000, 1 million are in here.
But it's also important to know, is it a limit? Is it deductible? Is it a premium? And if so, like, what is it related to, right? Is this a limit for the property? Is it a limit for the shrubbery, for the flood? Like, is it a sublimit? So on and so forth. And so that's where machine learning can come in is the ability to take this contact basically you give it a body of text in

this case imagine a pdf an email an application form because you hear all the names here are all the dates here are all the numbers here are all the relationships between them and here's like what type of date it is it's an expiry date an effective date a retroactivity date etc and so So it really comes down to math and statistics and sort of just like you can teach English to anybody. Effectively, you can teach a machine English.
So how does this relate to the like, you use the idea of getting so okay, so so talk to me, talk to me, let's, let's transfer this over to chisel. So talk to me a little bit about what chisel does.
What, what is this tool? I mean, I've read through most of the site. I've heard your guys' name tossed around a little bit, but you know, if I'm being completely honest, I don't, I don't have a real firm grasp on exactly what problems you're solving and how you're solving them, but it sounds sexy as hell.
Thank you. Sure.
So, I mean, we are at the core natural language processing company, and that's our specialty. We have two solutions today that we're focused on helping the industry solve.
One is focused around the problem of errors and omissions. Specifically, we call it policy check, and it allows you to take a policy and compare it against some type of source of truth documents.
For example, it can be an expiring policy if this is an existing client, or it can be a binder or a quote, depending on what you have. And the goal there being, as you know, errors and emissions is costly and an unfortunate reality of the industry.
And so we can help not only reduce the time it takes to do policy checks to catch E&O, but also help you catch more E&O mistakes. That's one of them.
The other one on the flip side is focused on helping carriers be more efficient on responding to submissions. And so as we talked about, they can receive, you know, a thousand plus submissions a day from a variety of agents and brokers, all coming in in different formats.
And they're manually typing that information into their clearance and registration system, into their rating engine, and into their whatever systems they might have. And so we allow them to intake this email, all of the attachments, for example, a statement of values, a schedule of vehicles, a list of properties, a jewelry list, the contractor's equipment list, whatever it might be.

Extract all of the information.

How old is it?

Who's the manufacturer of the tractor?

When was the last service?

All of those fun questions we were just talking about.

If it's present, put it into the rating engine to help them basically kickstart the process,

saving them typically two weeks of time.

Not two weeks, obviously, of effort, but two weeks of elapsed time,

as you've probably experienced.

It takes time for an agent to respond or an underwriter to respond to you.

And we want to help them be faster about it.

And what are you seeing from an adopt,

like when agents hear this pitch,

like who's using it?

Is it bigger brokers today?

Is it networks of agents? like from an from an agent perspective what is the um what's the persona what's the what's the breakdown of someone who digs into this tool and starts to put it to practice yeah so i don't think size is necessarily the right way to look at it.

But really, the people that are using this are, it depends.

So typically, some companies don't actually do policy check, which is an unfortunate reality.

And it's not something I love to see.

But some companies, for example, have a decentralized system.

So what that means is they can be like they have seven offices with 100 hundred agents spread out across those offices and each agent has access to the app and they're just you know checking one two three four five whatever policies a day or on the flip side you can also have a centralized system in that case they uh have somebody whose full-time job is to check policies.

And so somebody will go in and they'll check typically, you know, 10, 20 policies a day rather than two, three, four policies.

And so, yeah, as far as size, I mean, typically we do see the big brokers are the ones who are typically purchasing the technology, but I think it just comes down to budget.

And not because it's cost prohibitive, but simply because they have a procurement process that is a little bit more formal and more standardized. where sometimes when we go to a smaller agency, it's somebody who does, you know, everything, and they might not have the time to see the value in this.
And so, all that to say, anybody who wants to reduce their errors and omissions is the right size. And really the person who ends up using it is the broker themselves or a dedicated full-time policy checker within the brokerage if you have such a person.

Yeah, I know a lot of agencies do it.

A lot of agencies do it on the back end too.

They wait till the policy is actually issued and comes in and they check what's downloaded versus what was actually initially bound. And it feels like that part of the process could be automated with a tool like this very, you know, I don't want to say easily, but it definitely creates the opportunity versus having a human being like eyeballing downloads versus, um, bound, bound, bound policy.
You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly it.
So on the flip side, go ahead. Yeah.
And I'm, and so just on the flip side, um, typically when we, when we do a lot of work with our carrier partners, the person who's using it there is actually the underwriter. So they're receiving the email, for example, from an agent, and they're forwarding that email to some type of centralized inbox or, you know, could be an API, just depends how the carrier has it set up.
And then 5, 10, 20 minutes later, all of that information gets pre-populated automatically into all of the applicable systems, and they can just pick it up from there, saving them typically two to four hours. And so it's with the underrated friends of using it on the flip side.
Yeah. You know, it is one of the things that slows down the process immensely is the fact that every, this, this idea that every carrier has their own intake form, right? Like, you know, and every carrier's intake form is highly optimized for their agents.
And, you know, is this thing and they get to update it every six months and do a big release of the new updated agent portal. And, you know, everyone is exactly the same.
It's a bunch of boxes that you plug information into. And, you know, there are some tools like Tarmica, which I'm not sure if you've heard of them, that I'm a big fan of,

because it starts to reduce that, you know, I think any, any tool that, you know, again, thinking about what would make if there was like a, like a Chrome extension that would allow me to suck in all the information I needed from people, you know, emailing me their policies, or just emailing me answers to questions I had.

And then like, you know, emailing me their policies or just emailing me answers to questions I had. And then like, you know, like then I would go to a carrier's backend and then just hit a button and it would just push all that information in.
And then I could log into the next portal and push all that information in because, you know, this multiple entry like destroys, destroys your profitability and your time. I mean, it's why small commercial, I've said for a while now that I think Tarmica as a tool is one of the tools that is going to make small commercial profitable.
And I said that because it's a single point entry to multiple quotes, right? And that, that idea, just the, just the fact that I don't have to go into uh for like I have I'll give you an example I have a commercial auto account that just came in um their general liability is pretty small but their commercial auto risk is a little bigger so I have three carriers that I'm going to go to I have to hand type in all the information for a four vehicle fleet for three carriers. That's two hours worth of work, at least at a minimum.
That's not to mention if any of them are competitive, if I still have to sell it, like the pricing still has to be good. They can't, you know, hopefully I don't get 45 minutes into one of the, into one of the systems.
And then they just kick me out because I've triggered some declination thing that, you know, I didn't realize was coming. And it's like, you think about that process.
And then what ends up happening is you just go to the one or two carriers that you know how to use fast, whether they're the best or not becomes less important.

It's how fast can I get the information in and get a quote back?

And that's not in the best interest of the client.

It's not in the best interest of your agency.

And it's certainly not in the best interest of the carriers when that's what ends up happening.

Exactly.

So now imagine a world where instead of having a portal, you can just email submissions

Thank you. exactly it so now imagine a world where instead of having a portal you can just email submissions at carrier.com and 20 minutes later you get a quote back yeah and you know i think that you know and the thing i like about what you're talking about, and the reason that I'm, you know, I've talked to some people, and, you know, there are people who are skeptical, and there's people that obviously don't trust, they trust a human eyeballing something more than they trust technology.
And there's part of me that I understand where that's coming from. I don't know that I necessarily agree with it, but I understand the philosophy.
But, you know, all of these, and some of the pushback you get is like, I think people are worried that tools like what you're describing, you know, or, you know, what you're describing when you describe Chisel, that, you know, it's a replacement for humans. And what I see is, you know, Johnny or Sally or Tammy or whoever is whose job it is, is to eyeball, you know, these two things all day.
Instead of them spending their time on that job, you don't have to get rid of them. Put them into a job where they actually are helping people.
Have them be a second set of hands answering phone calls or packaging up, you know, make them into the person who sends your onboarding welcome package or any number of things that you never get to because you don't have time. You know, I feel like this new age of technology, now that we're past the like disruption phase, I feel like we've gotten into a phase where tools are starting to emerge that allow us to optimize the humans, not replace the humans.
And that to me seems like what the ultimate goal should be. That's exactly it.
And I think another interesting piece is, you know, looking at you, you're a quite young man, and I'm also a rather young man and um the statistics though say that we are by all accounts like a statistical anomaly so um statistics show that in the next 10 to 15 years i believe it's something like uh 50 something percent of the people in the industry are going to retire because they're above the age of 50, which means they're going to be eligible for retirement, assuming 65 or 67. And so the amount of college grads that are entering the industry are only 4% of the graduating class.
And so long story short, if you work out all the math, there will actually be a crunch. And so that also means that unless we find ways to be more efficient, everybody's book of business is going to shrink.
We're just not going to be able to keep up. And so to your point, I don't believe at all.
It's about taking people's jobs away. There's people retiring.
And there's anyway people who are coming in to the industry who aren't interested in just doing data entry.

They're trained actuaries or licensed brokers or agents. And so they want to be doing the actual upselling or maybe not the upselling, but the value add, the coverage suggestion, all of those things that they come to you looking for that advice.
And so I 100% agree. I don't think AI or any type of technology is an enemy.
If anything, I think it's a benefit to the business. It's the only way forward.
So as you look at the industry and you just mentioned one of the things that I think, um, creates incredible opportunity where, you know, when you're, when you're using your brain, you know, with your, and I, and I mean that from this using your, obviously using your brain, using the type of, you know, the way that you view it, right? Like I view everything pretty much as a salesman or a marketing person, right? Like everything comes to that context. I know I have other friends every day think of everything like an accountant would think of it.
You know what I mean? Like being more of a technologist and you're looking at our industry and you're saying, okay, um, there is going to be a, be a major generational transition in terms of leadership in the space. As the baby boomers roll off, we have an incredibly small number of Gen Xers and then a larger number of millennials that are going to be rolling into these leadership positions.
And they're going to be the ones that are driving the ship and making

decisions. We're looking at that world.
Where are you seeing opportunity? Like, where are the places where you're like, man, this trigger and this trigger fall into place and we can go, you know, we can go a hundred miles an hour to the promised land right here. Like what, what gets you you excited yeah so it's interesting there's so many thoughts I'm just trying to think so one of the ones that comes to mind the foremost is a couple more studies that really speak to some of what you shared so one study KPMG did in October of last year said that 97, 97% of insurance companies or CEOs know that artificial intelligence is going to change their business.
And 87, 87 are willing to, are going to take change today. They're basically not waiting for the next person.

And so that to me is really, really inspiring

because it means that change is going to happen today.

It's not the next necessary generation,

but it is going to happen today.

And that really is showing that people are open to change

because change can only happen from within, I think.

I'm not the first person to say that for sure.

I'm not the first person to say that for sure. I can't take credit for that, but change has to happen from within.
And I think it's a testament that the companies are willing to, and the time is right. And so, yeah, yeah.
So go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.
I was going to say, so what can, um, so a lot of the agencies that listen, uh, or a lot of the listeners to the show are agency, I'd say middle market to, you know, kind of even single location, single person shops like me, startup agencies. So, so you have a wide spectrum.
A lot of people are in the agency space or in carriers or vendors that specifically serve, I'd say that market, not the, not the big broker market, but that market. So someone's listening and, and they're saying themselves, geez, you know, I, I really see this, you know, maybe today my agency is not set up properly, but, you know, moving into the future, I see this.
I see that these, there are a lot of processes that need to be automated so that my people can be better. Okay.
Let's say they're having that thought as they're listening to this episode of the show. What are some of the things that they, how do they start to prepare their business? How, what are the, what can they do? How do they, what are some of the first steps they can take things they should read resources they should engage with? Like if from your perspective, how do they start down this path to, um, to, to, to taking this on to setting their business up for what I think we all feel is the future?

Great question.

So I think I'll start by saying it's easier than you think. And it should not be anything that you don't necessarily already have.
Really, and obviously there are varying levels of complexity. So I'll start with what I would call the MVP or the minimal viable product.
So with that mindset, all you need is your documents in some type of digital format. And you talked about a lake earlier, like that's's perfect so all that means is it could be a dropbox it could be a google drive could literally be a usb stick like honestly like as long as it lives on a computer it's digital um and so have a repository of them now one step further step further, and I think most people have this,

is a breakdown of their policies in force,

ideally by line of business and carrier. So, for example, I write 1,000 small commercial fleet a year.

Let's say 200 with Chubb, 200 with AIG, 200 with Traveler,

100 with Liberty, so on and so forth. And that's really all you need.
As soon as you have that, you can identify the biggest ones, the most important ones for your business. Most of the time we find that it follows an 80-20 rule.
So 20% of those lines of business and carriers intersections or what we call coverage. So for example, Chubb, you know, small fleet or AIG small fleet, each one of those being one coverage, 20% of those coverages will be 80% of the volume on average for any brokerage, whether it's one location or multi-location, doesn't really make a difference.
And so once you've identified the 20% that are the highest volume, you start with automating those. Because if you get those out of the way, that's the most bang for your buck, and it's the best proof point, and then you can decide how far you want to turn the lever.
Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah, it does.
I think, you know, I was talking to a good friend of mine who's building his own technology product. And we talk every couple of weeks just about the business.
and we were talking about, you know, I was bitching at him about being busy all the time and how I hate being busy. Because when I'm busy, I'm not doing the things that grow my agency.
I'm doing things that don't grow my agency. Because when I'm doing things that grow my agency, I don't feel busy.
I feel like, um, you know, does that make sense what

I'm saying to you? I, you know, I can, there's shit where you just feel like you're just,

you're just doing it and you get to the end of the day and you're like, Oh, what did I even do

today? And then there's days where like, especially for me, if I'm leaning into sales and marketing

and selling and, um, you know, I, I get at the end of the day and my wife's like, what's wrong

with you? Like, I'm still full of energy. Like I wasn't, you know, and, um, and you know,

Thank you. you know, I, I get at the end of the day and my wife's like, what's wrong with you? Like, I'm still full of energy.
Like I wasn't, you know, and, um, and, you know, we were taught, I was bitching at him like that. And then he was asking me some questions and I just said to him, you know, I think, I think one of the things that a trap that it's very easy to fall into specifically for agency owners in the, the spectrum that I described is it's very easy to find yourself busy all the time.
And what happens when you're busy all the time is you don't start to make, you don't have time to consider what I would consider smart decisions. So smart decisions would be things like, like we had a, I had a guest on here.
His name is John Mason. He runs a wholesaler.
And one of the things that he said during his episode was some of the smarter agency owners and by smart, I don't mean intelligence. I just mean, you know, men and women who are willing to make decisions that ultimately are in the best interest of rapid growth of their business is if you were to define smart in that way, they will put some of their commercial auto through his wholesale shop, even if they have an available market to help reduce the potential for major losses and ultimately boost their loss ratio so that they can maximize their contingencies with a particular carrier.
That to me is a very smart decision, but it takes time. You actually have to be willing to think a little deeper about your business.
A lot of what you are describing here feels to me like something, it would be very difficult for someone to listen to this episode, to come to your website, to read the article that you wrote in, uh, in Chris Paradiso's Be the Last Agent Standing Magazine. It would be very difficult for, I think for someone to spend time with some of the, from, with your content, with your ideas and not go, this feels like the right, this feels like a, like a positive move for my agency.
I think the issue that people are going to have, and this isn't your issue. I'm, I'm kind of speaking to the audience at this point.
I think the things that we have to determine as agency owners in general is, are we willing to take a step back to think through the positive impact that AI, you know, be it a tool like Chisel or some other tool, can we give ourselves the time away from busy work to make these decisions? Because I feel like the agency owners that do are going to be the winners 10 years from now. And you won't necessarily be able to see a specific point in the next 10 years where they, you know, but these are the decisions that get you there.
And I'm just super appreciative that you took this time with us, man. Thank you.
I really appreciate that. I was smiling as you were saying those things.
Yeah, Chris and the last man

standing love that.

Love what they do over

there.

I'm with you. I think

small steps, as you

said, like in 10 years, it's not necessarily

like flipping on a light switch.

It's more like

just life. It's like learning to crawl and then walk and then run.
And really, you can't start running. It's not like in 10 years you suddenly say, oh, wow, I see what that guy over there is doing.
And I want to do it too. Because the problem is he's invested years into building foundations, into having the data in a digital format so that he can do for example predictive analytics and say these are the right customers for me and then boom you see his business is growing 200 year over year you're like i want that too how can i buy it and no money in the world's gonna get you that because it comes down to just time.
The person who made the investment first. And so I could not agree.
I don't mean to cut you off. And I apologize that I just did that.
But I just I wanted to jump on that point. I will tell you a lot of my business plan for this agency was built on the belief that because I knew the tools that we were supposed to use and I had some of the background and I knew the right people that could help me learn the tools, that somehow I was going to be able to jump the line.
And if there's anything I've learned over my first seven months as an agency owner, that is impossible. You have to take the lumps.
You have to spend the time. You have to learn the processes.
You have to do it. You have to go through that that thing even if you know exactly what to do so I agree with you those who are you can wait and see in a prudent way but at some point you have to make the move because there will not there is no if I put this system in place everything changes that is absolutely not what happens exactly yeah

well Ron That is absolutely not what happens. Exactly.
Yeah. Well, Ron, I want to be appreciative of your time.
I appreciate you coming on here and talking to us about this. I love that you support agents.
I love that you are in Be the Last Man Standing or Be the Last Man Standing. I want to be respectful of all our female and, I guess, non-binary listeners of the show.
You know, I want to be respectful of it. But, you know, Be the Last Agent Standing, you know, I think it's incredibly important for agents who do not have a technical background to mix with individuals like yourself who are pushing into the space with a technical background, just to expose, you know, for everyone to be exposed to, for you to learn more about what it means to be a grinding old school agency and for them to learn what it means to be digital and fast and connected and using the, the intelligence and abilities of different, um, of different computer systems to drive them forward.
That mixing I think is incredibly positive. And, uh, it's why I love having people like yourself on.
So where can people learn more about chisel? Where can they learn more about you? Awesome. Well, thank you for having me.
Yeah. If people want to learn more, they can check out our website.
It's www.chisel.ai. You can find, as mentioned, a bunch of thought leadership there.
We published weekly blog talking about how you can improve your agency, how you can be forward thinking. And I think that's really a great place to start if you want to learn more.
And we're available on LinkedIn. And then if you want to find me, you can find me as well.
Ron Glossman on LinkedIn. Awesome.
I appreciate it, man. You have a tremendous day.
Best of luck on Chisel.

I'm looking forward to the next time we can connect. And thanks for everyone for coming.

Thank you. You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass.
Thank you. Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles?

Yes. Thank you.
Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie

Take it easy, buddy, fucking Charlie Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles?

Yeah.

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