ITC Vegas, day 1

November 1, 2023 12:52 PM

The exhibit hall at ITC Vegas in 2023 — The exhibit hall at ITC Vegas on Nov. 1, 2023.

Michael Shashoua, senior editor of Digital Insurance, is reporting on developments from ITC Vegas Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2023.

ITC 23 - embedded life panel.jpg — Brian T. Casey, partner at Locke Lord LLP, and Dawn Goldbacher, vice president and head of simplified solutions for sales and distribution at Prudential, talk about embedded life insurance at ITC Vegas, October 31, 2023.

ITC Vegas began Oct. 31 with sessions sponsored by Sureify, Celent and others.

Brian T. Casey, partner at Locke Lord LLP, said in an Oct. 31 session on embedded life insurance and annuities that brokers of embedded insurance must watch the laws carefully in their jurisdictions, even for actions as simple as recording chats or sessions with customers. Some states, like California, require that both parties consent.

Dawn Goldbacher, vice president and head of simplified solutions for sales and distribution at Prudential, also in the embedded insurance session, said flexibility is very important, as with waivers of traditional premiums for employees who are laid off. That is because many more workers are now freelancers, so documenting a "layoff" is much more difficult. "How do we serve with features that meet their needs?" she asked.

ITC 23 - Pacific Life UM EXL panel-crop.jpg — Daniel Hermansson of Pacific Life, Brett Laker of UnderwriteMe and Kelly Davis of EXL speak in a panel on life insurance underwriting at ITC Vegas, October 31, 2023.

ITC Vegas continued Oct. 31 with a session sponsored by Celent on underwriting life insurance. Executives from Pacific Life and UnderwriteMe spoke about how the insurer's backing of the technology provider helped its operations, as did executives from TruStage, a life insurer, and EXL, the insurtech management consulting company, discussing their partnership.

Pacific Life sought a way for employees and employers to be able to do more themselves as part of the process of underwriting life insurance, according to Daniel Hermansson, AVP, corporate strategy at Pacific Life. The firm needed a "rules engine that could capture the vast majority of cases," he said.

The challenge that UnderwriteMe had was to "get risk assessed without going through risk requirements," said Brett Laker, head of North America at UnderwriteMe.

TruStage, for its part, needed more technological sophistication and API-based systems. EXL presented them a solution that could be modified to meet changing needs, compatible any integrated apps, said Kelly Davis, senior AVP, new business and underwriting innovation at EXL.

Harkaran Singh of Microsoft speaks at ITC Vegas in 2023 — Harkaran Singh, director of digital transformation at Microsoft, speaks in a panel about ChatGPT and LLMs, at ITC Vegas, October 31, 2023.

ITC Vegas continued Oct. 31 with a session sponsored by Celent on the use of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) in insurance. As ChatGPT and LLMs take hold in the insurance industry, speakers from Microsoft and Centric Consulting said these advances are better for some functions than for others.

"LLMs are good to summarize large volumes of structured and unstructured data, and also for doing semantic searches on large data sets," said Harkaran Singh, director of digital transformation at Microsoft. "They're not good for high-level number crunching for risk models. Other AIs are better for that."

Insurers and insurtech professionals should know that certain AI models have certain limitations, according to Joseph Ours, AI strategy and director, modern software development, Centric Consulting. "You need to know the capabilities it has and how to question it appropriately, before acting on its output," he said.

Ours also pointed to Gen AI "hallucination" as a misunderstood concept. "That implies it's thinking and reasoning but it's not," he said. "It's really born out of using the wrong questions."