June 11, 2025 • 39 mins
Summary:
In this episode of Insurance Unplugged, host Lisa Wardlaw interviews Drew Morse, Director of Innovation at Andover Companies. They discuss the challenges and strategies of fostering innovation within a traditional insurance company, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Drew shares insights on the importance of communication, the role of generative AI in enhancing innovation processes, and the need for a focus on core business opportunities rather than solely non-insurance ventures.
The conversation emphasizes the significance of collaboration, understanding organizational needs, and creating a repeatable innovation process that adds tangible value.
Takeaways:
Drew leads the innovation team at Andover Companies, focusing on human-centered design.
Innovation in traditional companies requires constant communication and collaboration.
COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity for the innovation team to establish itself.
It's essential to focus on core business problems rather than solely non-insurance opportunities.
Incremental improvements are valuable and should be part of the innovation process.
Understanding the problem is the first step in any innovation initiative.
Custom solutions are often unnecessary; partnering with existing solutions can be more effective.
Generative AI can enhance the innovation process by providing new perspectives.
Involving colleagues in the innovation process generates momentum and goodwill.
Creating a culture of innovation requires ongoing engagement and support from leadership.
Sound Bites:
"We need to make it real for them."
"Innovation is this really intangible thing."
"We always start from what's the problem."
"Our job is to solve problems."
"We built out a suite of custom GPTs."
"It's nice to have another voice in the room."
"Focus on generating momentum."
Keywords:
innovation, insurance, generative AI, traditional companies, communication, COVID-19, core business, repeatable process, custom solutions, workflows
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Insurance. Unplugged in the hot seat where
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(00:23):
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(00:44):
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(01:49):
on Insurance Unplugged. Welcome to another episode of
Insurance Unplugged. I'm your host, Lisa Wardbaugh.
And this week joining me in the hot seat is Drew Morris.
Drew is the director of Innovation Andover Companies and
I got the pleasure of hearing him present at a conference I
attended. And I will say I have
shamelessly asked him to be in the hot seat with me so you all
(02:14):
can hear his perspective directly.
Today we're going to be coveringfrom concept to capability,
building real world innovation inside a traditional Drew.
Welcome to the Hot Seat. If you don't mind introducing
yourself to all of our listenersworldwide, a little bit about
yourself, your background, and yeah, a little bit of your role
in Andover. Welcome to the Hot Seat.
(02:35):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a long time in the
making that conference seems like it was a long time ago now
at this point, but no happy, happy to be here.
Like you mentioned, I lead the innovation team at the Andover
Companies, which is a 200 year old regional mutual property
insurance carrier based out of Andover, Mass Hustetts, hence
the name. So a company with a lot of
(02:55):
tradition, a lot of success and in and over years the innovation
team is still relatively new andwhat we focus on is running a
human centered design focus innovation process.
So that involves a lot of end user research with our policy
holders, our agents and our fellow employees and we're just
trying to collaborate with thosestakeholders to find new ways to
(03:17):
create value for them. Lucky enough on the podcast that
I get to have so many guests, you know, and, and I myself
prior to kind of going on my own, Drew worked at a very, you
know, Centurion old company. And, and I love the discussion
of, you know, not to say that it's easy, but it's a totally
different dynamic when you're trying to create innovation in
(03:41):
something that's new. And I'm not saying you don't
have like budget issues. You don't have like, you know,
like every day that we call it adulting, right?
Every day we have our innovationhurdles, which is how do I make
this new thing work or etcetera.But you're not dealing with, and
we're not talking decades. We're talking centuries,
centuries of muscle memory, centuries of organ rejection and
(04:01):
fatigue, centuries of being toldit's the new thing, centuries of
being told it's going to die if we don't do this thing.
So I really love and appreciate your perspective.
So, you know, I think it's like if we keep it real and you think
about like you and the role and the way you've approached it,
you've really taken kind of a different approach.
(04:22):
And like when I heard you talk, I was like, so relatable to like
what I was doing at a very centurion old company as well.
How did you come into this position and what are you doing
in the context of innovation? And how do you really embody
that in the context of your role?
Drew Because I, I used to have all these titles and I'll tell
you why I asked this question like head of innovation.
(04:44):
And then one of my titles was like global transformation or
something like that. I'm like, we'll take the word
transformation out of my title. And I kept like joking with my
titles for everyone and listening.
This was before ChatGPT, and we couldn't just ask ChatGPT what
the word should be, right? But no, I mean, to keep it real,
I was always kind of trying to find how I described my approach
(05:06):
in my role in title. And I would love to hear from
you. Like, what were the gaps you
were seeing, how people were actually approaching change, and
then how are you thinking about that in your role at Andover?
Yeah, I hear you totally on the communication piece because
again, you mentioned right off the top the companies that you
worked at and certainly and over, you know, centuries of
(05:28):
success. So I constantly had to remind, I
still remind the team that, you know, Andover existed and did a
pretty good job for a very, verylong period of time before there
was an innovation team. So we're new.
We have to constantly remind people what we do, how we fit
in, how we can help them, and weneed to make it real for them
because innovation is this really intangible thing.
(05:51):
You know, when people, a lot of people think innovation, they
think about companies, you know,creating tech that's never
existed in the world before. And that's certainly not what
innovation means at the Andover Company.
So one of the things I mean, I guess just in happenstance kind
of by chance that you know, I put in place at the beginning of
the team was I just started having regular check insurance
(06:12):
with all the department leaders.And it was a, a chance for me to
get a feel for what what was important for their area of the
business, what problems they were hoping to solve,
collaborate with them on how ourteam might be able to help solve
them. Because if they were important
to the business units, they should be important to the
innovation team. And it was also a chance to just
continually reinforce what innovation at Andover meant.
(06:33):
And again, it was just one of those things that the team
started, you know, right in COVID.
I, I honestly believe thinking back, the innovation team was
announced to the organization onMarch 1st, 2020.
And then we all went remote, forI think we know.
How to date your team right It was like.
Right. It was it's pretty memorable.
It's like, hey, we're doing thisinnovation thing and then I
(06:54):
think it was 10 days later we the company went remote for 10
months or something like that. So it in my mind, it was very
simple. Having played in bands growing
up, it was like, well, you know,for this new team and we're new
band, however you want to do it,you got to hop in the van and go
play some shows. Our version was let's hop on
some webexes and, you know, get in front of these other business
units and remind them what we'reall about and show how we can
(07:15):
prove value. And those meetings haven't
fallen off the books. I still touch base with all the
department heads regularly to again, assess their priorities,
let them know what we're workingon, find ways to collaborate.
Yeah. And I think that's really
interesting. And there's been so many studies
done about, you know, does innovation sit inside or
outside? And you know, like in the
context of this podcast, I wouldjust say, you know, I think
(07:39):
everything is theory until you get into reality.
And then I think reality is, it's not this binary, this or
that. It's, it's always like making a
special recipe. It's a little bit of an
ingredient. It's a little bit of this.
True. And I, I think you're
articulating that quite, quite wonderfully here, which is, you
know, yes, innovation team, but we're here to support the
(08:00):
business. And even if people try to set it
up like that, it's really the ingredient of the leader and of
the participants of the team that make that happen.
I remember Drew, I set up a SWATteam and one of these century
old companies that I work for had never had a SWAT team.
And I remember the P&L owners were really aggressive towards
me. Like this is our money and you
(08:22):
know, we're having whatever makeit up.
We're having a fight to hire underwriters and data scientists
and you're going and setting up a SWAT team.
And what does that even mean? We don't even have those roles
here. Like who are you?
What is this? And I'm like, call whatever you
want. I'm setting up in a business
enabler and I'm just like makingthe gears go faster.
Like like we could call it whatever you want, but I
(08:43):
remembered you specifically. I spent so much of my energy and
time kind of debating the titling, the role, the
structure, the racy charts, you know, like like insert all the
isms, the corporatisms. And I was like, don't you
actually want me to spend my time solving for the things that
(09:05):
are important to you as AP and Lowner, that your people don't
have the capacity in all of their day-to-day jobs to focus
on it. And it's not like we're separate
and apart. It's like saying to somebody,
Hey, like, I know this thing is going wrong.
No, we don't have time to deal with it.
But I need this thing to be better because I need to make
(09:26):
money. I need to make ROII need to do
all the things like whatever those things are.
And I, I wanted like, I didn't realize that you started at like
the onset of COVID. Do you think that, you know,
everything being thrown into like that kind of chaotic moment
maybe enabled an opening for your team?
Like I'm curious to know if you think that that helped catalyze
(09:48):
some of the leverage or receptiveness to your team.
Again, you and I are covering this live because I didn't know
that. Do you think that that helped
you all? I do think provided us with some
cover in a little bit of distance because that was very
much when we were going through everything you just described
where it was like let's charter this team, let's figure out what
the focus is, Let's figure out the roles and the
(10:09):
responsibilities. So it was nice to kind of, I
guess in hindsight, have some time to ease and talk that and
get it all squared away and mostimportantly, get our messaging
around it. Because the culture at Andover
is, you know, if I just forwarded that chartered off to
all the business unit leaders, like they they would have read
it. But it's really here and
(10:30):
rightfully so. You have to prove it.
You know, like, OK, you can sendme this Word doc, but what does
it actually mean? What does it mean to me?
What do you need from my team? So again, that's where that
communication piece came in, where in hindsight, yeah, it
might have. It was probably nice to have
that time to pull it all together and pull the messaging
around it. But going back to another thing
you mentioned about the approach, it is funny looking
(10:52):
back after a couple of years nowon what we thought innovation
was going to be and how we should approach it versus what
the realities were and what it is now.
And I've talked to a lot of other innovation leaders at
other carriers and we all seem to have followed the same
journey, just on different timelines where again, a lot of
innovation teams were stood up to initially look at non
(11:13):
insurance opportunities. You know, what's the next big
thing beyond insurance? Let's go.
The horizon three kind of stuff,yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so.
Wait, hold on, for those of you who don't know, Horizon 3 is
like, you know, 3 plus years outand we have these rings of
horizon planning. Yes.
And and so I, I love talking to my strategy innovation people
about that Drew, because some people in the audience would be
(11:34):
like, that's the most interesting thing.
We didn't know there was like this thing called Horizon plan.
And I'm like, OK, just think of it as out years in terms of
what's going to be the next big thing.
And then how do we plan for that?
So I just wanted to give our listeners that little voice
over. Drew back to you.
Yeah, for sure. And I, I can't remember, I
think, I don't quote me on this,but I think Horizon was the
McKinsey model and we teamed up with Deloitte and we're building
(11:57):
out the team. And so we have 3 Horizons, but
we don't call them horizons, we just call them because.
You would call them like something different so that you
weren't. Yeah.
Yeah, same concept. And so, yeah, we thought we were
going to spend, you know, X percentage of our time focused
on these transformational non insurance type initiatives.
And what we found out very quickly was, yeah, we could do
that and we could also be the silo team in another building.
(12:20):
But that's just not the model that was ever going to work for
Andover and hasn't worked for a lot of other insurance carriers
that I found where, you know, insurance is, is tough enough.
There's a lot of opportunities and a lot of problems to solve
in the actual core business. And that's where, you know, we
focus the majority of our time. You know, if we went off to some
other building and worked on noninsurance things like maybe we'd
(12:41):
come up with some really neat ideas.
But you know, the execution fromthe organization, I don't know
if it would necessarily be there.
And again, rightfully so because, you know, there's
things that we can improve and our current ways of doing
business that can add a ton of value.
And those are closer to home. And those are the ones that are,
you know, more pressing and it'seasier to get by in because, you
(13:02):
know, we don't want to be a think tank.
We want to be a team that goes out and does some of the initial
research and design, gets peoplebought into what the future
could look like. And then we help, you know, the
execution. Because at the end of the day,
that's what it's all about. It's not about just coming up
with great ideas. It's actually getting those
ideas into production and creating value for the company.
Well, and I think that's so important, right?
(13:23):
Like I, I, we'll get into this one.
It's kind of like this rent lease buy concept, right?
There's certain people. I'll make it up, you know, space
companies that like focus on satellites and that doesn't mean
that an insurance company shouldgo build a satellite and all
that doesn't mean we can't use geospatial imagery to solve
certain problems, but that doesn't mean we should be out
(13:43):
there defining, you know, the, the satellite network and all
those things as well. I always say like, know your
strengths, should know, know, know what you should and
shouldn't do. But I think a lot of people miss
that, you know, like, how do youbuild the repeatable process?
That's not, and I'm going to usea word here like not just Six
Sigma, not just lean, not incremental improvement, which
(14:05):
I, which I think a lot of innovation people like that is
innovation, but that's like something we should always be
doing. We should always be making
something incrementally better. But how do you build innovation
as a repeatable process that isn't just incremental
improvement, Drew, how do you focus on that?
Because I think that's one of the really unique things that
your team is executing at Andover.
(14:27):
Yeah. So, I mean, we do a lot of that
incremental as well because, again, there's a lot of value
there. And I think the innovation team,
in many ways, we're almost like a team of internal consultants.
We know about Andover, We know the context, we know the
organization's priorities. But if we go into underwriting
our claims, we're still bringingthat somewhat outside
(14:49):
perspective. We're collaborating with those
departments. So we might be able to help them
maybe do more ambitious incremental improvements.
But the way we approach our process is we always start from
what's the problem, whether it'san incremental or a more
ambitious, slightly more transformational type initiative
where we always engage the end users, whether that's an agent,
(15:11):
a policy holder, a fellow employee, and we figure out what
their view on the problem is or the opportunity.
And we work backwards from there.
You know, we always, you know, start very broad in exploring
the problem space. Then we hone in on what's most
important to solve, and then we go broad again and identify as
many potential solutions to thatproblem as possible.
(15:32):
And then we narrow in on the best fit, and then we start
slowly testing those concepts again.
The end user, whether it's an employee policy or agent,
they're involved every step of the way and that's how we find
solutions. But to loop back on what you're
talking about, about like the the whole build buy conundrum,
I, I cannot agree with you more that you know, when we find a
(15:53):
solution, especially in the innovation space, I feel like
there is that urge to say like, well, OK, well we found the
solution. We should custom build it and
make it very specific. I use the big C word for custom
equivalent to cancer in my dictionary.
Like nobody is gonna bring that out baby.
Like no we do not need to go build the Tesla battery for.
(16:14):
The so that's the thing, like I have our team constantly reminds
ourselves and others that yeah, there's a company out there that
all day, all all day, all they do is focus on this one
specific. They build that part exactly.
So why would we ever think that we could build it better?
You know, we might be able to build something similar, but
like the faster path to value isjust to partner with the
(16:36):
company. That's all they do all day is
solve that specific problem, youknow, like, and that goes back
to the execution piece. You know, there's no, I guess
for lack of a better term, there's no ego in this.
It's our job is to solve problems and if someone's
already solved it, then let's partner with them and get this
thing solved. It doesn't have to be our
solution with our fingerprints all over it.
(16:56):
You know, we're just trying to get to the right solution
quickly so we can start seeing that value.
Well, two things that I found very complicated when I was
sitting in a role like yours, Drew.
The juxtaposition was I always thought of myself as basically
building a Lego set, if if you will humor me for a moment.
And I was like, there's this really special pieces that only
(17:18):
come in certain boxes, right? You know what I mean?
Like the ones that like, and I viewed my role as basically
like, to your point, like take the problem, what are we trying
to solve? The first thing is it's like
latitudinal thinking, not longitudinal thinking because I
think insurance sneeze are really good at depth, really
good at longitudinal thinking. And a lot of times I felt like
(17:39):
my role in innovation was latitudinal.
Like how do I come across it andrecognize the patterns?
And then the reusability of I would see the same problem
cropping up. And we'll see this with AI right
across underwriting, across claims, across policy
administration, across all thesethings.
And then if I flip it to like toyour point, like part shopping,
I was like, OK, you know, Ivan, Tesla, humor me.
(18:01):
They built the battery. And then all the other parts of
the Tesla are not like really built by Tesla.
They're wholesale parts, right? Like they, they're brought in to
assemble the car. And so I would spend a lot of
time, Drew, composing and decomposing functionality,
longitude and latitude and then solutioning.
And the contradiction when I would try to go buy a part is
(18:26):
that a lot of these startups hadbeen told you have to go fully
vertical. So they would wrap the one part
that I wanted in these layers ofthings that I already had, if
you will, UIS or this or that, right, like.
And so I would spend most of my time Drew telling the vendors,
well, I just want this one sliver of your part telling the
business like I want this over here.
(18:48):
And then like in my role in innovation, transformation,
whatever word you call it, I wastrying to like mainly like
orchestrate all that together. Meaning if you went to market,
you couldn't like on the outset by what I was decomposing
because I had to negotiate, navigate how to decompose it.
If you went to my business, I had to identify the, the part
that would fit all those constituents, right.
(19:09):
And then my team was trying to like be the people, like putting
that together. And I find that most of my
colleagues enrolled like yours, Drew I that's the part that I
think is most relatable that we spend our time doing.
Would you say that like, that's the culture and the mindset of
what your team tries to do and orchestrate and bring together?
(19:31):
I'd love to hear like how you deal with that both from the
like I'll call it like vendor solutioning side and then
internally that thinking, how doyou put all that together?
Because that's really the magic.Yeah, I can relate with that,
that Lego analogy you had up thefront, up front there.
And yeah, top of mind, we just did a project where we went
across the entire organization and looked across every single
(19:56):
workflow and process and lookingfor ways to enhance
efficiencies. And unsurprisingly, like like
you identified when you were in the role is that a lot of the
departments have similar problems that they're.
Solving in different ways and they don't even know that they
have similar problems. So our team, we we're kind of
like that connective tissue. We're kind of the messengers
that go across and say, well, I see the problem you're having
(20:18):
here in claims and Billings already solved that this way.
And then yeah, our role is to kind of find the best way to,
you know, solve those organizationally in terms of how
we pick the vendors. That's always the very last part
of our process. You know, again, we are very
problem focused. You know, we obsess over the
problem that we're trying to solve.
We we break it down, we decompose it and then we go, you
(20:41):
know, another thing we do is once we've decomposed it, we're
we found that it's never usuallyjust one solution to solve it.
It's usually an orchestration ofdifferent solutions.
So it's usually some type of experience that that solves the
the problem there where it's. You build your own, record it.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. You you build your own Lego kit,
(21:01):
you build that experience, and that's the best way to solve it.
So again, we hold off on engaging vendors until we're
very clear on what the experience should be, what that
Lego set should be. That will actually best address
the problem we're trying to solve.
Which I think also solves the problem.
Humor me for this for a second. You know, back in my day five
(21:23):
years ago when I was running thethese, everyone's like, well, I
don't want to use that part if they're using that part because
then there won't be an IRP and our uniqueness.
That's where the big cancer C word comes in.
Customization. I'm like, hold on, right?
But I'm the only one building that Lego set.
So yes, yes, yes, they could go in and decompose all of our
problem, abstract it, figure it out, and then they could go to
(21:43):
the market and decompose all thevendors and then they could go
find the Lego set at each vendorand then they could go put their
own Lego kit together. But like, right, but they could
also build it the same way I could build it, right?
Like at the end of the day, like, so I found you and I'm
curious to know what you think. I found to me that that was like
a culture thing. And I want to get into Gen.
AI on this too, because I was like, listen, at the end of the
(22:04):
day, that requires IP, that requires that you have the
intellectual mindset that we as a company and we as a team have.
And that you're seeing the problems in the same way and
that you're sourcing them in thesame way and that you're
assembling it in the same way. And so that was my way around
build it all in house, like in the secret room.
(22:25):
Are you finding kind of similarities in that patterning?
Because like, I'm like, nobody else is going to have my Lego
set. Right.
So I mean there are certain things that as a company, if
they're really differentiators that are capitalizing on a core
capability of ours that we probably do want to do some
level of customization. But there's very few of those
(22:46):
and we have to be mindful of where those actually are, you
know, But I mean, if we're say, we're using the same tech as
every other carrier out there, OK, yeah.
That doesn't mean we're competing in the exact same way
as then we still have all these other differentiators that they
don't have, whether it's our IP or our people or our experience
that again are kind of that wrapper around the whatever the
(23:09):
tech is. You know, to an agent, the tech
might look the same, but it's everything you bring to the
table. In addition to that, you know,
it's, it's the culture of your company, it's the people you
have, it's your relationships you have with your vendors.
So I've definitely in the past gone and hung up on that where
it's like, well, if these other carriers use the exact same
tech, there's gonna be no differentiation between our
(23:30):
companies. But again, it's so much more
than that. It's a.
Car has spark plugs. OK, right.
But it's a dramatically different car, just like Andover
is dramatically different from our competitors.
And again, it's, I found that the more I've done this, the
less hung up I've become on, youknow, well, all these other
(23:51):
carriers are using. And I've almost flipped the, the
mindset of, well, a lot of othercarriers are using.
It's probably a very useful tool.
And again, they've probably figured out how to solve this
problem really well. So why would we go and try and
build it ourselves? Yeah.
No, I, I, I was curious to know because I had to again, when
you're working with very long standing companies, it was like
(24:12):
it was a huge mindset shift not to unappreciate for anybody
listening how long it takes to get somebody over that.
And to your point, Drew, to go through your own, I'll call
leadership maturation curve on that too, because we all enter
it with different ideas and principles.
And we all kind of, you know, gothrough the spin cycle on it and
come out the other side and say,and, and we, we change our
(24:33):
evolution on it, which, which now I want to get into yet
another spin cycle that we're all in, which is on Gen.
AI. And I really love how you're
focused on it, which I, you know, you've integrated Gen.
AI into your innovation process,but not yet the core business.
You know, as you and I were planning for this, which most
carriers are kind of like putting it in POC isms, core
(24:57):
business. You know, we can talk about all
the the flip flops and lessons learned, but when you thought
about it, you really input it into your internal work flows
and your optimization as an innovation team, as business
unit, as processing, as efficiency and tooling.
(25:17):
You know, like you, you know, eat your own dog food, so to
speak. Like start with it first.
What lessons did you learn? How are you thinking about it,
thinking partner prototyping, accelerator prioritization?
How are you seeing that and why did you take that approach?
I think it's really interesting.So yeah, I'd love to say there
was some grand plan where as an organization we're going to say
(25:39):
we're going to start experimenting with Jen, AI and
the innovation team in our process.
But it was really just me looking at the potential of Gen.
AI and saying like, that'd be awesome for our team to get our
hands on and just kind of selfishly wanting to inject it
into our process. Because from the very beginning,
we were sitting on a pile of, ofcustomer research.
We had, you know, policy holder journey maps, agent journey
(26:01):
maps, policy holder personas, agent personas.
And, you know, that was all locked away and Word doc
transcripts and, and PDFs and, you know, PowerPoint decks.
And I wanted to be able to take that, you know, data set that we
have of research and be able to interact with it in new ways.
So we partnered with Board of innovation and we built out a
(26:23):
suite of custom GPTS where we are able to interact with our
personas, interact with our research and have it almost
become a new teammate for us, A new perspective in the room
where we can interact with our customer personas and have them
generate ideas for us. We can pitch ideas to the the
personas and have them, you know, validate them.
(26:44):
So it really has become in many ways that yes, it's a tool, but
it is really a new perspective that's in the room for the
innovation team, which allows usto, you know, generate more
ideas, validate more ideas and do it all more efficiently.
And one interesting thing that we found was when we did this,
our agent research and we had the personas and the journey
(27:05):
map, we shared that with the organization.
We ran workshops across the organization to generate ideas
to improve the agent experience.And then we, you know, took all
that input and then on the side,we ran the the same workshops
using AI within our own team andgenerated hundreds of ideas.
And when we went through and validated all the ideas
(27:25):
generated by the organization and all the ideas generated by
our custom GBT is 6 out of the top ten ideas were were AI
generated. And again, it's just a very
efficient way to both source newideas and validate them.
And it's a nice complement to our human incentered process
where we're always going to go out and talk to our end users.
(27:47):
We're always going to prototype and test ideas with our end
users and, you know, have their feedback in the loop.
We're never just going to take an AI generated idea and put it
right into production. But the real value for us and
having these generative AI toolsor innovation process now is
that, you know, if we're gettingsignals from our custom GPTS
that whatever idea we're we're riffing on is, you know, seems
(28:11):
promising to our agent or our policyholder personas, whoever
we're trying to solve a problem for.
You know, maybe now instead of going out and talking to 50 or
75 or 100 agents to validate that idea, maybe now we can take
the concept to 15 or 20. And if they're also saying that,
you know, it's something worth pursuing, we can just move more
(28:31):
confidently faster. So yeah, the AI has really
become a pretty essential tool for us and it helps us keep our
core team small and just do morewith the resources we have.
Well, I think a really two really important things that you
talked about there. 1 is I just want to emphasize for anybody
listening, Drew is when he's saying custom GPTS, he's saying
(28:53):
those that were built and in theconfines of and over meaning
they're not putting this out in the public.
So just I just want to I just want to clarify that to anybody
listening. I always say cuz Oh my gosh,
Drew the things I see on LinkedIn, people are like, let's
just scan this in to chat DPT. I'm like, do you not do that?
You're. Not yeah.
But the word customized there means Andover owned and
(29:16):
restricted within the walls and boundaries of the company.
So for anybody listening, they did not pump decades and decades
and decades of information into open source.
Like for any of you using, I think open source to do what
Drew is talking about, you will in fact get like regression to
the mean because it's just sourcing from whatever's out
there in the open public. OK, sorry.
That's my that's my like added on Drew.
(29:38):
And because I loved what you were saying.
But the other point that I love when you're in the confines of,
you know, I would call it like some sort of a confidence bound
border. Like, you know, it's your data,
you know, it's your source information.
I love the fact, and I do this as well.
Drew of using GPT as a researcher.
So often when you're in innovation or transformation or
(29:59):
business process improvement, like whatever you're in, you go
and you meet with stakeholders. They're like, Oh my God, how
many times am I going to have totell this person how we do our
business, right? Like, you know, you know, their
eyes are glazing back in their heads, right?
Here we go. Where we.
Go every 5 or 10 years here we go again.
And you know, the business has the people that remember that
(30:21):
often my team was relatively newand they're like, we got to
teach them how we do everything.So I love leveraging GPT as a
really never ending research associate, meaning it's
capturing decades and decades and decades of documentation.
It's. Reminding you like, hey, you
(30:43):
know, and it's not going back tostatus quo, but it's bringing in
the data and the research and then you're able to kind of
interrogate it, which is what you're describing.
You're kind of punching back andforth with it.
Like what about this? What about that?
And if it's trained properly, IEnot ChatGPT with its memory, but
if it's trained properly in your, in your org, I love the
(31:03):
fact that it's like, Hey, you got to remember that it's doing
this thing or whatever. So I think it's such a
fascinating use case. Have you seen other people in
the business say, Hey, Drew and team, how can we have this for
our department so that, you know, like we can leverage this
when we're doing our own ideation or thinking And, and
how like have they asked you forthat?
(31:24):
Your, I'll call it your, your, you know, innovation GPT agent
to come participate in any of their meetings.
Like have they asked for that yet?
There was definitely some intrigue, I would say more than
folks asking for the innovation GPTS that we built out.
It was more once they saw how wewere using it, it got them
inspired in thinking about ways that they could build out their
(31:47):
own custom GPTS in their areas of the business.
So, you know, I think us sharinghow we were using generative AI
within the innovation team and our process made this thing that
everyone had been hearing about a little bit more tangible.
And it was also, I think, reassuring to folks across the
business that, you know, we're not, you know, we're not data
(32:07):
scientists, we're we're not veryin when we started this project,
we weren't even particularly well versed in using generative
AI. And in a very short period of
time, a matter of weeks, we wereable to spin up these these
tools that were adding value to our process immediately.
So I think it made a little bit more tangible and they'll let
people better understand what itit would take to build something
(32:28):
like this into their process. So I think it created a little
bit of momentum where other departments have gotten
interested in incorporating it to solve, again, problems within
their own processes. So yeah, again, made it a little
bit tangible and inspired some other teams on how they could
customize it for their purposes.I love that.
I would love to like be like a, you know, a volunt old outsider
(32:50):
to like see. So you're you're I think that's
really interesting the way the way you can interrogate it and
ask it questions. I mean, I use my own as a
sparring partner. I don't use it to do work.
I use it to interrogate my thinking or my rationale around
something and give me you're just like you would maybe like a
professor in school. Like, OK, what?
What other angles have I missed?Right.
(33:12):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that one of the, so we,
you know, built these GPDS for our own innovation process, but
then we also built some additional ones where they're
almost like project management GPTS where it's our, we have
this concept that's coming out of our innovation process that
we want to pursue. How do we take it from an idea
to an actual project plan that can actually get this thing
(33:33):
executed? And a lot of what those project
management GPTS are really thinking through the risks and
kind of doing that pretty mortemand saying like, Hey, we're all
the ways that this could go wrong.
So that's where we use it as like that, that's barring
partner, but then also within the innovation process itself.
You know, we have our GP DS thatare based on our customer
research, kind of try to poke holes in concepts that we're
(33:55):
pitching. So again, it's just nice to have
another voice in the room, another teammate, another
perspective that just happens tobe powered by AI that can kind
of just easily push back on these ideas and really ensure
that you're validating these concepts from all angles before
you jump into something. And it's a no brainer to do
(34:17):
because again, these custom GPDSare on demand.
So there's really no reason to get that perspective.
I love that and I also love the the way you're thinking about
it. As you know, we we have to say
human in the loop. And sometimes I kind of like, I
roll when people say like, like,yes, but what you're really
doing is you're including it as a resource, including it as a
(34:42):
number, another member of the team.
And I think that as people culturally start to say, OK,
it's another member of the team,you then start to understand,
oh, I benefit from asking it a question in addition to asking
Drew a question. Like it 1 doesn't replace the
other. And I think psychologically we
start to then understand that like, OK, now how would we
incorporate that into a process into a.
(35:02):
So I, I think it's really a unique perspective, Drew and I
like the way you all have tackled that.
OK, So with all insurance unplugs, all the discussions are
always fascinating and thank youlike so much for all this
insight and culture and innovation and how you create a
viable, you know, approach in such a long standing
(35:24):
institution. How do you think about a call to
action? So I always ask everyone, Drew,
if they took one thing away fromthis podcast and nothing more,
they just fast forwarded througheverything you and I said, shame
on them. But you know, they can get AI to
read the transcript and they getto the end and they what's the
one thing that you would say your call to action for them to
start doing, stop doing and continue to do to create, I'll
(35:50):
call it penetrable innovation inside long standing
institutions like insurance. Right.
So the one thing I would say in new innovation teams should
start doing is focus on generating momentum.
You know, involve your colleagues across the
organization, figure out what's important to them, figure out
what problems they're trying to solve and help them solve them.
(36:12):
I mean, that's how you make thisintangible innovation process
very tangible to them. They start seeing output.
It's, you know, solving something that is important to
them. So it's it's creating value.
So I would say, again, involve your colleagues, generate that
momentum and focus on what's important to them.
And that's how you build that goodwill and that momentum
(36:33):
towards having them help you on some maybe more innovative, more
ambitious projects down the line.
In terms of what carriers shouldstop doing when they're thinking
about innovation teams is again,insurance is tough.
So having the innovation teams and embedded into the the core
business, again, having it closeto the the real problems that
are important to the organization, that's the recipe
(36:55):
for success. And also, I would say stop
calling things innovation labs. I'm only half joking on that.
I feel like that makes it a little bit more, you know, less
tangible. And it also makes it seem like
you have to have a really specialized skill set to do this
innovation thing, where in reality the most of the
innovation comes right from the front lines, folks who are close
to those opportunity areas. And then finally, in terms of
(37:17):
what to continue, just keep it simple, keep focusing on your
end user and your customer, whether that's agents, policy
holders, employees, all the above.
You know, if you have your end user at the center of your
innovation efforts and again you're solving problems that are
important to them, that's that'sa recipe for for long term
success there. Thank you so much for that.
(37:37):
Thank you for being a guest today.
And by the way, I chase Drew down at conferences.
He's he's really, I would say ifyou don't follow him on
LinkedIn, definitely do follow the work that they're doing at
the Andover companies. And I am lucky enough that I
usually get to interact with himat a couple generative AI
conferences. So I'm sure he'll be hopefully
(37:58):
popping back up. And Drew again, thank you so
much for, you know, lending yourinsights and your experiences
today. Huge fan of your perspectives
and what you all are doing at the Andover companies.
And I look forward to seeing more outcomes and what you all
like get to experiment with. So thank you again for being a
guest on Insurance Unplugged andto all my guests.
(38:19):
Continue to stay informed, stay curious, and stay plugged in.
Thank you so much. Today's episode of Insurance
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(38:41):
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From deep dives with industry leaders and thought leaders to
(00:23):
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(00:44):
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Welcome to the conversation. Welcome to Insurance Unplugged
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(01:06):
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(01:26):
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(01:49):
on Insurance Unplugged. Welcome to another episode of
Insurance Unplugged. I'm your host, Lisa Wardbaugh.
And this week joining me in the hot seat is Drew Morris.
Drew is the director of Innovation Andover Companies and
I got the pleasure of hearing him present at a conference I
attended. And I will say I have
shamelessly asked him to be in the hot seat with me so you all
(02:14):
can hear his perspective directly.
Today we're going to be coveringfrom concept to capability,
building real world innovation inside a traditional Drew.
Welcome to the Hot Seat. If you don't mind introducing
yourself to all of our listenersworldwide, a little bit about
yourself, your background, and yeah, a little bit of your role
in Andover. Welcome to the Hot Seat.
(02:35):
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a long time in the
making that conference seems like it was a long time ago now
at this point, but no happy, happy to be here.
Like you mentioned, I lead the innovation team at the Andover
Companies, which is a 200 year old regional mutual property
insurance carrier based out of Andover, Mass Hustetts, hence
the name. So a company with a lot of
(02:55):
tradition, a lot of success and in and over years the innovation
team is still relatively new andwhat we focus on is running a
human centered design focus innovation process.
So that involves a lot of end user research with our policy
holders, our agents and our fellow employees and we're just
trying to collaborate with thosestakeholders to find new ways to
(03:17):
create value for them. Lucky enough on the podcast that
I get to have so many guests, you know, and, and I myself
prior to kind of going on my own, Drew worked at a very, you
know, Centurion old company. And, and I love the discussion
of, you know, not to say that it's easy, but it's a totally
different dynamic when you're trying to create innovation in
(03:41):
something that's new. And I'm not saying you don't
have like budget issues. You don't have like, you know,
like every day that we call it adulting, right?
Every day we have our innovationhurdles, which is how do I make
this new thing work or etcetera.But you're not dealing with, and
we're not talking decades. We're talking centuries,
centuries of muscle memory, centuries of organ rejection and
(04:01):
fatigue, centuries of being toldit's the new thing, centuries of
being told it's going to die if we don't do this thing.
So I really love and appreciate your perspective.
So, you know, I think it's like if we keep it real and you think
about like you and the role and the way you've approached it,
you've really taken kind of a different approach.
(04:22):
And like when I heard you talk, I was like, so relatable to like
what I was doing at a very centurion old company as well.
How did you come into this position and what are you doing
in the context of innovation? And how do you really embody
that in the context of your role?
Drew Because I, I used to have all these titles and I'll tell
you why I asked this question like head of innovation.
(04:44):
And then one of my titles was like global transformation or
something like that. I'm like, we'll take the word
transformation out of my title. And I kept like joking with my
titles for everyone and listening.
This was before ChatGPT, and we couldn't just ask ChatGPT what
the word should be, right? But no, I mean, to keep it real,
I was always kind of trying to find how I described my approach
(05:06):
in my role in title. And I would love to hear from
you. Like, what were the gaps you
were seeing, how people were actually approaching change, and
then how are you thinking about that in your role at Andover?
Yeah, I hear you totally on the communication piece because
again, you mentioned right off the top the companies that you
worked at and certainly and over, you know, centuries of
(05:28):
success. So I constantly had to remind, I
still remind the team that, you know, Andover existed and did a
pretty good job for a very, verylong period of time before there
was an innovation team. So we're new.
We have to constantly remind people what we do, how we fit
in, how we can help them, and weneed to make it real for them
because innovation is this really intangible thing.
(05:51):
You know, when people, a lot of people think innovation, they
think about companies, you know,creating tech that's never
existed in the world before. And that's certainly not what
innovation means at the Andover Company.
So one of the things I mean, I guess just in happenstance kind
of by chance that you know, I put in place at the beginning of
the team was I just started having regular check insurance
(06:12):
with all the department leaders.And it was a, a chance for me to
get a feel for what what was important for their area of the
business, what problems they were hoping to solve,
collaborate with them on how ourteam might be able to help solve
them. Because if they were important
to the business units, they should be important to the
innovation team. And it was also a chance to just
continually reinforce what innovation at Andover meant.
(06:33):
And again, it was just one of those things that the team
started, you know, right in COVID.
I, I honestly believe thinking back, the innovation team was
announced to the organization onMarch 1st, 2020.
And then we all went remote, forI think we know.
How to date your team right It was like.
Right. It was it's pretty memorable.
It's like, hey, we're doing thisinnovation thing and then I
(06:54):
think it was 10 days later we the company went remote for 10
months or something like that. So it in my mind, it was very
simple. Having played in bands growing
up, it was like, well, you know,for this new team and we're new
band, however you want to do it,you got to hop in the van and go
play some shows. Our version was let's hop on
some webexes and, you know, get in front of these other business
units and remind them what we'reall about and show how we can
(07:15):
prove value. And those meetings haven't
fallen off the books. I still touch base with all the
department heads regularly to again, assess their priorities,
let them know what we're workingon, find ways to collaborate.
Yeah. And I think that's really
interesting. And there's been so many studies
done about, you know, does innovation sit inside or
outside? And you know, like in the
context of this podcast, I wouldjust say, you know, I think
(07:39):
everything is theory until you get into reality.
And then I think reality is, it's not this binary, this or
that. It's, it's always like making a
special recipe. It's a little bit of an
ingredient. It's a little bit of this.
True. And I, I think you're
articulating that quite, quite wonderfully here, which is, you
know, yes, innovation team, but we're here to support the
(08:00):
business. And even if people try to set it
up like that, it's really the ingredient of the leader and of
the participants of the team that make that happen.
I remember Drew, I set up a SWATteam and one of these century
old companies that I work for had never had a SWAT team.
And I remember the P&L owners were really aggressive towards
me. Like this is our money and you
(08:22):
know, we're having whatever makeit up.
We're having a fight to hire underwriters and data scientists
and you're going and setting up a SWAT team.
And what does that even mean? We don't even have those roles
here. Like who are you?
What is this? And I'm like, call whatever you
want. I'm setting up in a business
enabler and I'm just like makingthe gears go faster.
Like like we could call it whatever you want, but I
(08:43):
remembered you specifically. I spent so much of my energy and
time kind of debating the titling, the role, the
structure, the racy charts, you know, like like insert all the
isms, the corporatisms. And I was like, don't you
actually want me to spend my time solving for the things that
(09:05):
are important to you as AP and Lowner, that your people don't
have the capacity in all of their day-to-day jobs to focus
on it. And it's not like we're separate
and apart. It's like saying to somebody,
Hey, like, I know this thing is going wrong.
No, we don't have time to deal with it.
But I need this thing to be better because I need to make
(09:26):
money. I need to make ROII need to do
all the things like whatever those things are.
And I, I wanted like, I didn't realize that you started at like
the onset of COVID. Do you think that, you know,
everything being thrown into like that kind of chaotic moment
maybe enabled an opening for your team?
Like I'm curious to know if you think that that helped catalyze
(09:48):
some of the leverage or receptiveness to your team.
Again, you and I are covering this live because I didn't know
that. Do you think that that helped
you all? I do think provided us with some
cover in a little bit of distance because that was very
much when we were going through everything you just described
where it was like let's charter this team, let's figure out what
the focus is, Let's figure out the roles and the
(10:09):
responsibilities. So it was nice to kind of, I
guess in hindsight, have some time to ease and talk that and
get it all squared away and mostimportantly, get our messaging
around it. Because the culture at Andover
is, you know, if I just forwarded that chartered off to
all the business unit leaders, like they they would have read
it. But it's really here and
(10:30):
rightfully so. You have to prove it.
You know, like, OK, you can sendme this Word doc, but what does
it actually mean? What does it mean to me?
What do you need from my team? So again, that's where that
communication piece came in, where in hindsight, yeah, it
might have. It was probably nice to have
that time to pull it all together and pull the messaging
around it. But going back to another thing
you mentioned about the approach, it is funny looking
(10:52):
back after a couple of years nowon what we thought innovation
was going to be and how we should approach it versus what
the realities were and what it is now.
And I've talked to a lot of other innovation leaders at
other carriers and we all seem to have followed the same
journey, just on different timelines where again, a lot of
innovation teams were stood up to initially look at non
(11:13):
insurance opportunities. You know, what's the next big
thing beyond insurance? Let's go.
The horizon three kind of stuff,yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so.
Wait, hold on, for those of you who don't know, Horizon 3 is
like, you know, 3 plus years outand we have these rings of
horizon planning. Yes.
And and so I, I love talking to my strategy innovation people
about that Drew, because some people in the audience would be
(11:34):
like, that's the most interesting thing.
We didn't know there was like this thing called Horizon plan.
And I'm like, OK, just think of it as out years in terms of
what's going to be the next big thing.
And then how do we plan for that?
So I just wanted to give our listeners that little voice
over. Drew back to you.
Yeah, for sure. And I, I can't remember, I
think, I don't quote me on this,but I think Horizon was the
McKinsey model and we teamed up with Deloitte and we're building
(11:57):
out the team. And so we have 3 Horizons, but
we don't call them horizons, we just call them because.
You would call them like something different so that you
weren't. Yeah.
Yeah, same concept. And so, yeah, we thought we were
going to spend, you know, X percentage of our time focused
on these transformational non insurance type initiatives.
And what we found out very quickly was, yeah, we could do
that and we could also be the silo team in another building.
(12:20):
But that's just not the model that was ever going to work for
Andover and hasn't worked for a lot of other insurance carriers
that I found where, you know, insurance is, is tough enough.
There's a lot of opportunities and a lot of problems to solve
in the actual core business. And that's where, you know, we
focus the majority of our time. You know, if we went off to some
other building and worked on noninsurance things like maybe we'd
(12:41):
come up with some really neat ideas.
But you know, the execution fromthe organization, I don't know
if it would necessarily be there.
And again, rightfully so because, you know, there's
things that we can improve and our current ways of doing
business that can add a ton of value.
And those are closer to home. And those are the ones that are,
you know, more pressing and it'seasier to get by in because, you
(13:02):
know, we don't want to be a think tank.
We want to be a team that goes out and does some of the initial
research and design, gets peoplebought into what the future
could look like. And then we help, you know, the
execution. Because at the end of the day,
that's what it's all about. It's not about just coming up
with great ideas. It's actually getting those
ideas into production and creating value for the company.
Well, and I think that's so important, right?
(13:23):
Like I, I, we'll get into this one.
It's kind of like this rent lease buy concept, right?
There's certain people. I'll make it up, you know, space
companies that like focus on satellites and that doesn't mean
that an insurance company shouldgo build a satellite and all
that doesn't mean we can't use geospatial imagery to solve
certain problems, but that doesn't mean we should be out
(13:43):
there defining, you know, the, the satellite network and all
those things as well. I always say like, know your
strengths, should know, know, know what you should and
shouldn't do. But I think a lot of people miss
that, you know, like, how do youbuild the repeatable process?
That's not, and I'm going to usea word here like not just Six
Sigma, not just lean, not incremental improvement, which
(14:05):
I, which I think a lot of innovation people like that is
innovation, but that's like something we should always be
doing. We should always be making
something incrementally better. But how do you build innovation
as a repeatable process that isn't just incremental
improvement, Drew, how do you focus on that?
Because I think that's one of the really unique things that
your team is executing at Andover.
(14:27):
Yeah. So, I mean, we do a lot of that
incremental as well because, again, there's a lot of value
there. And I think the innovation team,
in many ways, we're almost like a team of internal consultants.
We know about Andover, We know the context, we know the
organization's priorities. But if we go into underwriting
our claims, we're still bringingthat somewhat outside
(14:49):
perspective. We're collaborating with those
departments. So we might be able to help them
maybe do more ambitious incremental improvements.
But the way we approach our process is we always start from
what's the problem, whether it'san incremental or a more
ambitious, slightly more transformational type initiative
where we always engage the end users, whether that's an agent,
(15:11):
a policy holder, a fellow employee, and we figure out what
their view on the problem is or the opportunity.
And we work backwards from there.
You know, we always, you know, start very broad in exploring
the problem space. Then we hone in on what's most
important to solve, and then we go broad again and identify as
many potential solutions to thatproblem as possible.
(15:32):
And then we narrow in on the best fit, and then we start
slowly testing those concepts again.
The end user, whether it's an employee policy or agent,
they're involved every step of the way and that's how we find
solutions. But to loop back on what you're
talking about, about like the the whole build buy conundrum,
I, I cannot agree with you more that you know, when we find a
(15:53):
solution, especially in the innovation space, I feel like
there is that urge to say like, well, OK, well we found the
solution. We should custom build it and
make it very specific. I use the big C word for custom
equivalent to cancer in my dictionary.
Like nobody is gonna bring that out baby.
Like no we do not need to go build the Tesla battery for.
(16:14):
The so that's the thing, like I have our team constantly reminds
ourselves and others that yeah, there's a company out there that
all day, all all day, all they do is focus on this one
specific. They build that part exactly.
So why would we ever think that we could build it better?
You know, we might be able to build something similar, but
like the faster path to value isjust to partner with the
(16:36):
company. That's all they do all day is
solve that specific problem, youknow, like, and that goes back
to the execution piece. You know, there's no, I guess
for lack of a better term, there's no ego in this.
It's our job is to solve problems and if someone's
already solved it, then let's partner with them and get this
thing solved. It doesn't have to be our
solution with our fingerprints all over it.
(16:56):
You know, we're just trying to get to the right solution
quickly so we can start seeing that value.
Well, two things that I found very complicated when I was
sitting in a role like yours, Drew.
The juxtaposition was I always thought of myself as basically
building a Lego set, if if you will humor me for a moment.
And I was like, there's this really special pieces that only
(17:18):
come in certain boxes, right? You know what I mean?
Like the ones that like, and I viewed my role as basically
like, to your point, like take the problem, what are we trying
to solve? The first thing is it's like
latitudinal thinking, not longitudinal thinking because I
think insurance sneeze are really good at depth, really
good at longitudinal thinking. And a lot of times I felt like
(17:39):
my role in innovation was latitudinal.
Like how do I come across it andrecognize the patterns?
And then the reusability of I would see the same problem
cropping up. And we'll see this with AI right
across underwriting, across claims, across policy
administration, across all thesethings.
And then if I flip it to like toyour point, like part shopping,
I was like, OK, you know, Ivan, Tesla, humor me.
(18:01):
They built the battery. And then all the other parts of
the Tesla are not like really built by Tesla.
They're wholesale parts, right? Like they, they're brought in to
assemble the car. And so I would spend a lot of
time, Drew, composing and decomposing functionality,
longitude and latitude and then solutioning.
And the contradiction when I would try to go buy a part is
(18:26):
that a lot of these startups hadbeen told you have to go fully
vertical. So they would wrap the one part
that I wanted in these layers ofthings that I already had, if
you will, UIS or this or that, right, like.
And so I would spend most of my time Drew telling the vendors,
well, I just want this one sliver of your part telling the
business like I want this over here.
(18:48):
And then like in my role in innovation, transformation,
whatever word you call it, I wastrying to like mainly like
orchestrate all that together. Meaning if you went to market,
you couldn't like on the outset by what I was decomposing
because I had to negotiate, navigate how to decompose it.
If you went to my business, I had to identify the, the part
that would fit all those constituents, right.
(19:09):
And then my team was trying to like be the people, like putting
that together. And I find that most of my
colleagues enrolled like yours, Drew I that's the part that I
think is most relatable that we spend our time doing.
Would you say that like, that's the culture and the mindset of
what your team tries to do and orchestrate and bring together?
(19:31):
I'd love to hear like how you deal with that both from the
like I'll call it like vendor solutioning side and then
internally that thinking, how doyou put all that together?
Because that's really the magic.Yeah, I can relate with that,
that Lego analogy you had up thefront, up front there.
And yeah, top of mind, we just did a project where we went
across the entire organization and looked across every single
(19:56):
workflow and process and lookingfor ways to enhance
efficiencies. And unsurprisingly, like like
you identified when you were in the role is that a lot of the
departments have similar problems that they're.
Solving in different ways and they don't even know that they
have similar problems. So our team, we we're kind of
like that connective tissue. We're kind of the messengers
that go across and say, well, I see the problem you're having
(20:18):
here in claims and Billings already solved that this way.
And then yeah, our role is to kind of find the best way to,
you know, solve those organizationally in terms of how
we pick the vendors. That's always the very last part
of our process. You know, again, we are very
problem focused. You know, we obsess over the
problem that we're trying to solve.
We we break it down, we decompose it and then we go, you
(20:41):
know, another thing we do is once we've decomposed it, we're
we found that it's never usuallyjust one solution to solve it.
It's usually an orchestration ofdifferent solutions.
So it's usually some type of experience that that solves the
the problem there where it's. You build your own, record it.
Exactly. Exactly.
Yeah. You you build your own Lego kit,
(21:01):
you build that experience, and that's the best way to solve it.
So again, we hold off on engaging vendors until we're
very clear on what the experience should be, what that
Lego set should be. That will actually best address
the problem we're trying to solve.
Which I think also solves the problem.
Humor me for this for a second. You know, back in my day five
(21:23):
years ago when I was running thethese, everyone's like, well, I
don't want to use that part if they're using that part because
then there won't be an IRP and our uniqueness.
That's where the big cancer C word comes in.
Customization. I'm like, hold on, right?
But I'm the only one building that Lego set.
So yes, yes, yes, they could go in and decompose all of our
problem, abstract it, figure it out, and then they could go to
(21:43):
the market and decompose all thevendors and then they could go
find the Lego set at each vendorand then they could go put their
own Lego kit together. But like, right, but they could
also build it the same way I could build it, right?
Like at the end of the day, like, so I found you and I'm
curious to know what you think. I found to me that that was like
a culture thing. And I want to get into Gen.
AI on this too, because I was like, listen, at the end of the
(22:04):
day, that requires IP, that requires that you have the
intellectual mindset that we as a company and we as a team have.
And that you're seeing the problems in the same way and
that you're sourcing them in thesame way and that you're
assembling it in the same way. And so that was my way around
build it all in house, like in the secret room.
(22:25):
Are you finding kind of similarities in that patterning?
Because like, I'm like, nobody else is going to have my Lego
set. Right.
So I mean there are certain things that as a company, if
they're really differentiators that are capitalizing on a core
capability of ours that we probably do want to do some
level of customization. But there's very few of those
(22:46):
and we have to be mindful of where those actually are, you
know, But I mean, if we're say, we're using the same tech as
every other carrier out there, OK, yeah.
That doesn't mean we're competing in the exact same way
as then we still have all these other differentiators that they
don't have, whether it's our IP or our people or our experience
that again are kind of that wrapper around the whatever the
(23:09):
tech is. You know, to an agent, the tech
might look the same, but it's everything you bring to the
table. In addition to that, you know,
it's, it's the culture of your company, it's the people you
have, it's your relationships you have with your vendors.
So I've definitely in the past gone and hung up on that where
it's like, well, if these other carriers use the exact same
tech, there's gonna be no differentiation between our
(23:30):
companies. But again, it's so much more
than that. It's a.
Car has spark plugs. OK, right.
But it's a dramatically different car, just like Andover
is dramatically different from our competitors.
And again, it's, I found that the more I've done this, the
less hung up I've become on, youknow, well, all these other
(23:51):
carriers are using. And I've almost flipped the, the
mindset of, well, a lot of othercarriers are using.
It's probably a very useful tool.
And again, they've probably figured out how to solve this
problem really well. So why would we go and try and
build it ourselves? Yeah.
No, I, I, I was curious to know because I had to again, when
you're working with very long standing companies, it was like
(24:12):
it was a huge mindset shift not to unappreciate for anybody
listening how long it takes to get somebody over that.
And to your point, Drew, to go through your own, I'll call
leadership maturation curve on that too, because we all enter
it with different ideas and principles.
And we all kind of, you know, gothrough the spin cycle on it and
come out the other side and say,and, and we, we change our
(24:33):
evolution on it, which, which now I want to get into yet
another spin cycle that we're all in, which is on Gen.
AI. And I really love how you're
focused on it, which I, you know, you've integrated Gen.
AI into your innovation process,but not yet the core business.
You know, as you and I were planning for this, which most
carriers are kind of like putting it in POC isms, core
(24:57):
business. You know, we can talk about all
the the flip flops and lessons learned, but when you thought
about it, you really input it into your internal work flows
and your optimization as an innovation team, as business
unit, as processing, as efficiency and tooling.
(25:17):
You know, like you, you know, eat your own dog food, so to
speak. Like start with it first.
What lessons did you learn? How are you thinking about it,
thinking partner prototyping, accelerator prioritization?
How are you seeing that and why did you take that approach?
I think it's really interesting.So yeah, I'd love to say there
was some grand plan where as an organization we're going to say
(25:39):
we're going to start experimenting with Jen, AI and
the innovation team in our process.
But it was really just me looking at the potential of Gen.
AI and saying like, that'd be awesome for our team to get our
hands on and just kind of selfishly wanting to inject it
into our process. Because from the very beginning,
we were sitting on a pile of, ofcustomer research.
We had, you know, policy holder journey maps, agent journey
(26:01):
maps, policy holder personas, agent personas.
And, you know, that was all locked away and Word doc
transcripts and, and PDFs and, you know, PowerPoint decks.
And I wanted to be able to take that, you know, data set that we
have of research and be able to interact with it in new ways.
So we partnered with Board of innovation and we built out a
(26:23):
suite of custom GPTS where we are able to interact with our
personas, interact with our research and have it almost
become a new teammate for us, A new perspective in the room
where we can interact with our customer personas and have them
generate ideas for us. We can pitch ideas to the the
personas and have them, you know, validate them.
(26:44):
So it really has become in many ways that yes, it's a tool, but
it is really a new perspective that's in the room for the
innovation team, which allows usto, you know, generate more
ideas, validate more ideas and do it all more efficiently.
And one interesting thing that we found was when we did this,
our agent research and we had the personas and the journey
(27:05):
map, we shared that with the organization.
We ran workshops across the organization to generate ideas
to improve the agent experience.And then we, you know, took all
that input and then on the side,we ran the the same workshops
using AI within our own team andgenerated hundreds of ideas.
And when we went through and validated all the ideas
(27:25):
generated by the organization and all the ideas generated by
our custom GBT is 6 out of the top ten ideas were were AI
generated. And again, it's just a very
efficient way to both source newideas and validate them.
And it's a nice complement to our human incentered process
where we're always going to go out and talk to our end users.
(27:47):
We're always going to prototype and test ideas with our end
users and, you know, have their feedback in the loop.
We're never just going to take an AI generated idea and put it
right into production. But the real value for us and
having these generative AI toolsor innovation process now is
that, you know, if we're gettingsignals from our custom GPTS
that whatever idea we're we're riffing on is, you know, seems
(28:11):
promising to our agent or our policyholder personas, whoever
we're trying to solve a problem for.
You know, maybe now instead of going out and talking to 50 or
75 or 100 agents to validate that idea, maybe now we can take
the concept to 15 or 20. And if they're also saying that,
you know, it's something worth pursuing, we can just move more
(28:31):
confidently faster. So yeah, the AI has really
become a pretty essential tool for us and it helps us keep our
core team small and just do morewith the resources we have.
Well, I think a really two really important things that you
talked about there. 1 is I just want to emphasize for anybody
listening, Drew is when he's saying custom GPTS, he's saying
(28:53):
those that were built and in theconfines of and over meaning
they're not putting this out in the public.
So just I just want to I just want to clarify that to anybody
listening. I always say cuz Oh my gosh,
Drew the things I see on LinkedIn, people are like, let's
just scan this in to chat DPT. I'm like, do you not do that?
You're. Not yeah.
But the word customized there means Andover owned and
(29:16):
restricted within the walls and boundaries of the company.
So for anybody listening, they did not pump decades and decades
and decades of information into open source.
Like for any of you using, I think open source to do what
Drew is talking about, you will in fact get like regression to
the mean because it's just sourcing from whatever's out
there in the open public. OK, sorry.
That's my that's my like added on Drew.
(29:38):
And because I loved what you were saying.
But the other point that I love when you're in the confines of,
you know, I would call it like some sort of a confidence bound
border. Like, you know, it's your data,
you know, it's your source information.
I love the fact, and I do this as well.
Drew of using GPT as a researcher.
So often when you're in innovation or transformation or
(29:59):
business process improvement, like whatever you're in, you go
and you meet with stakeholders. They're like, Oh my God, how
many times am I going to have totell this person how we do our
business, right? Like, you know, you know, their
eyes are glazing back in their heads, right?
Here we go. Where we.
Go every 5 or 10 years here we go again.
And you know, the business has the people that remember that
(30:21):
often my team was relatively newand they're like, we got to
teach them how we do everything.So I love leveraging GPT as a
really never ending research associate, meaning it's
capturing decades and decades and decades of documentation.
It's. Reminding you like, hey, you
(30:43):
know, and it's not going back tostatus quo, but it's bringing in
the data and the research and then you're able to kind of
interrogate it, which is what you're describing.
You're kind of punching back andforth with it.
Like what about this? What about that?
And if it's trained properly, IEnot ChatGPT with its memory, but
if it's trained properly in your, in your org, I love the
(31:03):
fact that it's like, Hey, you got to remember that it's doing
this thing or whatever. So I think it's such a
fascinating use case. Have you seen other people in
the business say, Hey, Drew and team, how can we have this for
our department so that, you know, like we can leverage this
when we're doing our own ideation or thinking And, and
how like have they asked you forthat?
(31:24):
Your, I'll call it your, your, you know, innovation GPT agent
to come participate in any of their meetings.
Like have they asked for that yet?
There was definitely some intrigue, I would say more than
folks asking for the innovation GPTS that we built out.
It was more once they saw how wewere using it, it got them
inspired in thinking about ways that they could build out their
(31:47):
own custom GPTS in their areas of the business.
So, you know, I think us sharinghow we were using generative AI
within the innovation team and our process made this thing that
everyone had been hearing about a little bit more tangible.
And it was also, I think, reassuring to folks across the
business that, you know, we're not, you know, we're not data
(32:07):
scientists, we're we're not veryin when we started this project,
we weren't even particularly well versed in using generative
AI. And in a very short period of
time, a matter of weeks, we wereable to spin up these these
tools that were adding value to our process immediately.
So I think it made a little bit more tangible and they'll let
people better understand what itit would take to build something
(32:28):
like this into their process. So I think it created a little
bit of momentum where other departments have gotten
interested in incorporating it to solve, again, problems within
their own processes. So yeah, again, made it a little
bit tangible and inspired some other teams on how they could
customize it for their purposes.I love that.
I would love to like be like a, you know, a volunt old outsider
(32:50):
to like see. So you're you're I think that's
really interesting the way the way you can interrogate it and
ask it questions. I mean, I use my own as a
sparring partner. I don't use it to do work.
I use it to interrogate my thinking or my rationale around
something and give me you're just like you would maybe like a
professor in school. Like, OK, what?
What other angles have I missed?Right.
(33:12):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that one of the, so we,
you know, built these GPDS for our own innovation process, but
then we also built some additional ones where they're
almost like project management GPTS where it's our, we have
this concept that's coming out of our innovation process that
we want to pursue. How do we take it from an idea
to an actual project plan that can actually get this thing
(33:33):
executed? And a lot of what those project
management GPTS are really thinking through the risks and
kind of doing that pretty mortemand saying like, Hey, we're all
the ways that this could go wrong.
So that's where we use it as like that, that's barring
partner, but then also within the innovation process itself.
You know, we have our GP DS thatare based on our customer
research, kind of try to poke holes in concepts that we're
(33:55):
pitching. So again, it's just nice to have
another voice in the room, another teammate, another
perspective that just happens tobe powered by AI that can kind
of just easily push back on these ideas and really ensure
that you're validating these concepts from all angles before
you jump into something. And it's a no brainer to do
(34:17):
because again, these custom GPDSare on demand.
So there's really no reason to get that perspective.
I love that and I also love the the way you're thinking about
it. As you know, we we have to say
human in the loop. And sometimes I kind of like, I
roll when people say like, like,yes, but what you're really
doing is you're including it as a resource, including it as a
(34:42):
number, another member of the team.
And I think that as people culturally start to say, OK,
it's another member of the team,you then start to understand,
oh, I benefit from asking it a question in addition to asking
Drew a question. Like it 1 doesn't replace the
other. And I think psychologically we
start to then understand that like, OK, now how would we
incorporate that into a process into a.
(35:02):
So I, I think it's really a unique perspective, Drew and I
like the way you all have tackled that.
OK, So with all insurance unplugs, all the discussions are
always fascinating and thank youlike so much for all this
insight and culture and innovation and how you create a
viable, you know, approach in such a long standing
(35:24):
institution. How do you think about a call to
action? So I always ask everyone, Drew,
if they took one thing away fromthis podcast and nothing more,
they just fast forwarded througheverything you and I said, shame
on them. But you know, they can get AI to
read the transcript and they getto the end and they what's the
one thing that you would say your call to action for them to
start doing, stop doing and continue to do to create, I'll
(35:50):
call it penetrable innovation inside long standing
institutions like insurance. Right.
So the one thing I would say in new innovation teams should
start doing is focus on generating momentum.
You know, involve your colleagues across the
organization, figure out what's important to them, figure out
what problems they're trying to solve and help them solve them.
(36:12):
I mean, that's how you make thisintangible innovation process
very tangible to them. They start seeing output.
It's, you know, solving something that is important to
them. So it's it's creating value.
So I would say, again, involve your colleagues, generate that
momentum and focus on what's important to them.
And that's how you build that goodwill and that momentum
(36:33):
towards having them help you on some maybe more innovative, more
ambitious projects down the line.
In terms of what carriers shouldstop doing when they're thinking
about innovation teams is again,insurance is tough.
So having the innovation teams and embedded into the the core
business, again, having it closeto the the real problems that
are important to the organization, that's the recipe
(36:55):
for success. And also, I would say stop
calling things innovation labs. I'm only half joking on that.
I feel like that makes it a little bit more, you know, less
tangible. And it also makes it seem like
you have to have a really specialized skill set to do this
innovation thing, where in reality the most of the
innovation comes right from the front lines, folks who are close
to those opportunity areas. And then finally, in terms of
(37:17):
what to continue, just keep it simple, keep focusing on your
end user and your customer, whether that's agents, policy
holders, employees, all the above.
You know, if you have your end user at the center of your
innovation efforts and again you're solving problems that are
important to them, that's that'sa recipe for for long term
success there. Thank you so much for that.
(37:37):
Thank you for being a guest today.
And by the way, I chase Drew down at conferences.
He's he's really, I would say ifyou don't follow him on
LinkedIn, definitely do follow the work that they're doing at
the Andover companies. And I am lucky enough that I
usually get to interact with himat a couple generative AI
conferences. So I'm sure he'll be hopefully
(37:58):
popping back up. And Drew again, thank you so
much for, you know, lending yourinsights and your experiences
today. Huge fan of your perspectives
and what you all are doing at the Andover companies.
And I look forward to seeing more outcomes and what you all
like get to experiment with. So thank you again for being a
guest on Insurance Unplugged andto all my guests.
(38:19):
Continue to stay informed, stay curious, and stay plugged in.
Thank you so much. Today's episode of Insurance
Unplugged, the AI and distribution series, is proudly
sponsored by Iris and Suretech, your gateway to the future of
insurance distribution. Iris harnesses the power of
generative AI to transform data processing and decision making
(38:41):
across the distribution landscape.
The Iris platform integrates AI driven decision engines, dynamic
form generation and configurableworkflows, all underpinned by
continuous data quality management.
Discover how Iris is powering smarter operations and more
efficient distribution with cutting edge AI setting a new
(39:02):
standard of excellence across the entire industry.
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