The theme for the episode is 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲.
Marcela and I covered the following topics:
✅ Marcela’s motivation for pivoting to tech/software
✅ Why a software company would need an actuary
✅ The cloud and how it enables insurance modernization
✅ How generative AI can help yield value for insurance companies
✅ Using unstructured data for underwriting, claim, marketing, and distribution
✅ Marcela’s experience learning R and Python
✅ Programming and coding proficiency actuaries need today
✅ Tips for actuaries, data scientists, and data engineers to work collaboratively
✅ Origins and motivations for the Organization of Latino Actuaries
Time Markers
1:30: Transition from consulting to tech/software (impact of legacy systems on consumer sentiment, shifting policyholder expectations, and personalized experiences).
5:21: Where actuaries add value in tech/software (strategic conversations, becoming trusted advisors, speaking language of insurance, and understanding customer pain points).
7:10: Connecting horizontal product features to vertical insurance functions, understanding and quantification of customer use cases.
12:10: Databricks as a data and AI platform for ingestion, transformation, curation, servicing, and consumption into downstream applications.
14:40: Databricks’ compute capabilities (moving beyond batch to streaming), separating compute from storage, and evolving from ETL to business outcomes.
16:11: Global Head of Insurance role (qualifying opportunities, briefing executives, influencing product direction, building solution accelerators, and demonstrating platform capabilities).
24:01: Databricks’ customer profile, the rise of semi-structured data, and integration with other technologies.
30:25: The cloud, the rise of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), modernization, and cloud migration trends.
37:18: Generative AI explanation and homeowner’s premium modeling illustration (GLMs vs. neural networks).
44:10: Generative AI use cases (accident descriptions, product recommendations, coverage verification, underwriting appetite, claim reporting, measuring intent, and customer triaging).
49:36: The importance of programming and coding, open-source (R and Python), and combining programming languages with generative AI (ex. CoPilot).
54:56: Collaborative illustration with actuaries (business hypothesis and analysis), data scientists (model fine tuning and algo testing), and data engineers (building data pipelines).
1:01:18: The Organization of Latino actuaries, origins, and motivations.
If you are an actuary seeking to work in technology/software, you want to listen to this.
My Website: maverickactuary.com
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