Alex Schmelkin: Transforming Insurance Underwriting with GenAI and AI Agents

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Alex Schmelkin, a visionary entrepreneur who's reshaping the future of insurance operations. Alex is the Founder and CEO of Sixfold, a company at the forefront of harnessing Generative AI to empower insurance underwriters with groundbreaking tools and capabilities.

Today, we'll explore how Sixfold is leveraging Generative AI to transform underwriting practices, the challenges and opportunities in implementing AI at scale, and Alex's vision for the future of insurance operations.

KEY TAKEAWAYS         

• There’s close to $7 trillion of premium written around the globe every year. That equals 7% of global GDP, it’s an enormous amount of premium that’s needed for the world to function and for people and businesses to take risks. The most underserved population are the underwriters, the people making decisions day in day out on that $7 trillion worth of business trying to figure out the good and bad risks and why. There’s so little support for these unsung heroes.
• The typical underwriter is reading the equivalent of a novel every 2-3 days in documentation. These are not interesting fiction novels, they’re information-dense losses, statements of values of property and exposures. We’ve expected them to consume more and more but it’s information overload. Enter language models and AI, in the first time in human history we have the ability to take in a nearly limitless volume of data and help the underwriter to see through that to find the patterns without having to read every single word on every single page and free them to do the extra research at the end to find the best result for the end customer.
• Regulators understand that AI is here and have already embraced it. They’re not as ahead of it as we would like them to be, as an industry, and they’re not getting everything right. But by putting a few fence posts around the problem we’re trying to solve they’ve forced the conversation and the industry to respond to it and to start rolling out the way we are with some of these AI transparency partner models.
• The single challenge we run into everywhere is underwriter trust. The underwriters, despite being overworked, there not being enough of them, and despite it being a challenging job, are really good at what they do. The reason is they’ve been trained over the years to do everything they can to get the right answer. They’re the front line protecting insurance companies from bringing on bad risks. The hardest thing is to convince them is that AI is accurate. If they have a bad experience with AI first time they may not go back ever.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘I found insurance – or it found me – almost 20 years ago and I’ve never looked back, and it’s all underwriting all the time.’
‘The biggest use of GenAI today is helping underwriters to find more accuracy, be more effective, and more transparent in their underwriting efforts.’
‘We attempt to arm the human with a bevy of different things for the that are the less value-producing part of their jobs.’
‘The human is so much more effective when they’re working beside a robot that helps them be more accurate and more efficient at their job.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Alex Schmelkin is the Founder and CEO of Sixfold and is at the forefront of revolutionizing how insurance underwriters operate through Generative AI—a game-changing approach that not only enhances decision-making but also streamlines processes for a more efficient future.

His knack for identifying industry pain points and transforming them into innovative solut