American Family Ventures welcomes new advisor

American Family Ventures' hiring of Dr. Henna Karna as entrepreneur in residence brings new digital technology, data management and risk management expertise to the carrier's investment arm.

Karna, who has been an executive and advisor for AXA, Verisk Digital Services, AIG and Google's insurance technology unit for over 25 years in all, will work on how AmFam Ventures' potential investments in insurtech startups can benefit the carrier and the insurance industry overall.

"What will get our industry to really, really evolve is the strength of all the players," she said. "It's not bucketing into one area alone. The carriers can go super fast, but if the brokers aren't ready, it doesn't work. If one carrier goes super fast, and the other carriers aren't there, that doesn't work. It's really now a rising tide that lifts all ships' conversation."

AmFam Ventures is one of the longer-tenured venture arms among major carriers, founded in 2013. "It's remarkable, some of the investments that AmFam Ventures has made, broadly for the industry and the industry has welcomed it," Karna said. "Insurtechs have a better lens of what a carrier actually wants. It probably helps with the startups, reigniting some points of view that maybe a carrier like AmFam, which has been there for some time, may not have thought of. As long as those examples, that bi-directional relationship, becomes an example for the industry, then it works."

The first concept Karna is addressing in her new role is the idea of automation plays compared with information plays. While insurance as an industry is getting comfortable with AI-based automation, it still needs to keep "humans in the loop," she said, adding that Google Cloud's insurance unit did so. With human involvement and planning, automation can work better.

"Automation is simpler because we know the steps that we want and we just want to go faster," Karna said. "We want to be more comprehensive, have a better QA process and assess things more quickly."

Working with information should begin by thinking about the entire insurance value chain, from underwriting through to claims, according to Karna. "There's risk and there's reserving and there's pricing, and there's the engineering side," she said. "There's a lot of pieces that actually happen post underwriting that aren't empowered enough to influence as quickly as it should be."