Bethany Jansen, strategic technology program manager at
Jansen's team developed a large language model that she brought to the sales insight and analytics team, a group of 36 analysts with different specialties, like profit and growth, agency reporting and Tableau dashboard tools.
"Within all of that, there's 413 tables in which any of this data can exist," Jansen said in an interview. "And when people leave their position, some of that institutional knowledge is lost. So utilizing the LLM to recall where that data is stored when they're viewing a certain report is helpful."
The analysts use a chat feature to look at a Tableau visualization and type in specific questions about the data and its provenance —– sometimes it comes from a mainframe or other company system, sometimes it's hosted on personal spreadsheets.
Jansen is well aware of the risks of
"Generative AI is still fairly new, within the industry and within American Family Insurance," she said. "Right now, we're pretty careful and cognizant of implicit bias that can occur within AI models and how we can be more responsible with the data that we're utilizing to train the model."
Another way American Family, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, is using
American Family works with a third party, Millennium Information Services, to handle home inspections. Millennium is facing some talent acquisition issues, Jansen said.
"The market is just not there for people to be inspectors," she said.
This creates a challenge of cases where insurance policies are in place and inspections have been ordered, but haven't yet taken place.
To let people do self-inspections, American Family asks the homeowner to take pictures of the inside and outside of a home. Reflect's computer vision and machine learning model analyze the contents of those images and whether they match the policy information. For instance, if a photo shows a freestanding structure in the backyard, that might call for additional coverage.
"By taking certain photos, you're bringing your customer through their house, you can then help identify future issues," Jansen said.
Jansen is also an enthusiastic mentor. She has five mentees who have all received promotions in the last 11 months.
"When I work with people, I want to know about them even outside of their job because I'm spending more time with them than my own family," she said. "It's important for me to make those connections. I think it's important, especially as women, to show that you can still be a high achiever and have a great career, and also be a mom, and be a good friend and a good partner."
She tries to set aside time every week to connect with some of her mentors and mentees. Sometimes this is her personal time.
"A lot of times, it's calling them and we're having a chat when we're both commuting home from work, or if something comes up, we're both logged in later in the evening," Jansen said. "I try to find at least an hour a week to devote to them based on what they're looking for and what their expectation is."
Jansen gave birth to three-year-old twin girls in December of 2019. She took four months maternity leave and came back in April 2020, after the company had gone into work-from-home mode.
"I returned to work by returning to my dining room table," Jansen said. Because of the childcare crisis across the Midwest and across the country, and because her husband, a police officer, doesn't have the flexibility to work from home, she had to be a full-time mom and a full-time remote worker.
"That I think is what really stretched me and made me a better leader and more successful in my career, and really helped me step into my own confidence and power because I had these two little girls and we had no family near us to support us and there was no daycare," she said.
"It was me and my kids and I had to make it work," Jansen said. There were times when she was presenting in meetings with the whir of a breast pump going in the background.
But she was determined to not slow down at work.
"When you become a parent and a mom, people immediately start to think, maybe you'll take a step back in your career," she said. "And for me, it was actually, no, I'm going to take a step forward and I want to push myself to do more and to be better about it. And because I also want to be a great example for my children, and I want to set an example for other women as well, that you can have the family, you can make it work, as long as you have a great supportive employer and leader. And so why not still try to get to that C-suite without having to wait until your kids get older?"
