In the Hot Seat with Steven Abel

Speaker A: Insurance Unplugged in the hot Seat, where the complex world of insurance is laid bare. Hosted by Lisa Wardball, this podcast promises an unfiltered glimpse into the industry like never before. Each episode invites you to listen in on the candid conversations that usually happen behind closed boardroom doors. From deep dives with industry leaders and thought leaders to innovative discussions with minds shaping the future of insurance, we bring the most genuine talks directly to your ears. Our guests take the hot seat alongside me to explore the inner workings, challenges and triumphs of the insurance world. If you've ever wondered what goes on in the shadows of the insurance industry, from the boardroom banter to the behind the scenes strategies, this is your chance for a front row seat. Prepare for unguarded, enlightening and engaging discussions that cover every angle of insurance presented in a way that's both insightful and accessible. Welcome to the conversation. Welcome to Insurance Unplugged in the Hot Seat with Lisa Wardbaugh.

Speaker B: This episode of Insurance Unplugged is brought to you by Oliver Wyman Actuarial, a team not just known for strategy, but for solving what most strategy leaves behind. In an industry full of bloated tech stacks and over promised transformation, Oliver Wyman is doing something different. Building curated solutions that actually execute. Not platforms, not pilots.

Speaker C: Outcomes.

Speaker B: Learn more@oliverweinman.com insurance and now let's get into the episode.

Speaker D: Welcome to another episode of Insurance Unplugged. I'm, um, your host, Lisa Wardbaugh. And joining me this time in the hot seat is Stephen Abel. Steve, I'm so excited to have you here. Steve is the technology partner at Oliver Wyman Actuarial and is joining us for a, I'll call it a spicy episode of in the Hot Seat. We're going to turn up the heat a little bit. What SaaS broke and what business leaders must rebuild. Steve and I have been having this conversation, I'll say, for the better part of five years. And Steve, thank you first of all, because I'm starting to feel a little insane when I say on LinkedIn and it's some of my thought leadership SaaS is broken or SAZ is dying and everyone just thinks I'm crazy. Before we go into that prompt because you and I have a lot to talk about, do you mind introducing yourself to all of our audience listeners and guests who may not otherwise know you?

Speaker C: Sure. And thanks for, uh, having me here. Steven Abel. I work for Oliver Wyman Actuarial and we are changing the way not only that we think about technology and data. As actuaries and strategy professionals, we're changing the way that our clients think about technology and data. It's just too hard and expensive in the market and there are too many companies that believe the software vendor or the SaaS vendor story, which might not be what they need for their business. And so we want to reimagine those conversations with our clients.

Speaker D: Well, I think it's really interesting, right, because I mean, clearly Steve, like I was like one of the first people that was like SaaS and cloud and, and by the way, you and I are both, I would say technology evangelists, meaning I would say that if we want to go back to crossing the chasm, um, we're probably in the visionary evangelical side of that, which for anybody who hasn't read that or thinks it's too, you know, back when the Internet was coming out old to, to resurface, I think it's a great book. But what that means is Steve and I probably share an aspirational, like we want to be on the cutting edge of things. But the lens that Steve and I both share, or I've discovered through the five years I worked on and off with them is the, we also break down the hype of it and the, the non bull part of it and say like, what can we really use in tech? So I think, you know, it's interesting to me about size and where we went with it, right? So for me it was like tech trend. If you implement size, your roi, your total cost of ownership, it was kind of like this decade of check boxes, you know. And Steve, I want to ask you about that because what I've seen, having lived through that is the post I was like eating good food, maybe like the bloat, the fragmentation, the drift, the operational drag. I'm, um, sure many CIOs will sit here, nod their head. The TCO that didn't yield the ROI that we said when we were doing those three year, five year TCO implementation cost analysis. What do you really see as the sprawl in historical sprawl of sass? And what do you think that the, if you will, the um, prescription is to fix it?

Speaker C: I like the analogy of a prescription because it's like a drug. A little bit of it doesn't do anything too much of it, it becomes poisonous and the right amount achieves the business value. And I'll share an interesting edge case. A, um, couple of years ago I was talking with a, uh, technology leader that was proud and he said he had used software as a Service for every single business process to run this business. And I politely asked him because I was in his office, what are the several hundred IT professionals working on? We're sitting on an entire floor of IT professionals and they're all busy. If you've sassed everything out, what are they working on? And he's like, oh, well, I may have underestimated the cost of integration and additional customization because these providers weren't able to customize around my business as in my business evolved. What worked for me in the beginning when I signed these contracts didn't work. As these processes changed and evolved my business. And when software as a service or large behemoth applications were the only choice, well, uh, they were the only choice. Now they're not. Now it's possible to do development quickly at lower price points. It's possible to hyper personalize technology at ah, again accessible price points to match your business process and to match what you need from your business. So this idea that I need to take all the pills in the bottle for SaaS to get better might be poisoning your organization. But the idea that I should be thinking of software or even software as a service for solving targeted business problems that are sort of sustained over time, that's a good use of SaaS. A bad use of SaaS is to say, hey, I don't understand X about my business and X is a very large part of your business and this X part of my business is going to change a lot over time, so I'll just sass this out. Well, the way software as a service works is it's not very customizable. The reason these providers go in this direction is they provide something that they think will work for a bunch of clients. And so if you're CFO or executive that are looking at these solutions, I'm not saying they're all bad and never, never buy them. But I'm saying challenge these vendors to give you something that's exactly what you need. Not too much and not too little.

Speaker D: Yeah, um, I wanna, I wanna kind of wait, loop in on that, throw it in on that. Because there's two things for me that when I started like unpacking this over the last, you know, decade, that really started to resonate. One was the. Because the kind of antithesis to what you were saying is people started to like, I don't wanna use hyper personally is they started to hyper customize. So it was like, well, I'm gonna get what I want and I'm gonna get it around the SaaS tool which created all sorts of integration, fatigue, bloat, regression. You know, it was like you had so many bolt ons that you couldn't actually keep up and that it was like in, in essence it was no longer as the SaaS provider intended it to be. That was kind of in corner number one. In corner number two, we had the SaaS companies being hyper rewarded. So their VCs, their investors, their target market price point was on end to end platform verticalization. So you went up monolithically and you never went out. It was not microservice. I mean if I Hear one more SaaS platform tell me we're microservice enabled, I'm like, yeah, but it's like once I get in, I can't get out. They entrap you. And I don't mean accidentally, it's intentional by their business design. So Steve, I think that juxtaposition in and I want to kind of set the stage with you. We didn't have in my mind a lot of choice as this was being formed. You were kind of like maintaining your old legacy stuff, custom coding, which was expensive and it wasn't necessarily repeatable and scalable. Coming into this world where orchestration is becoming a bigger thing, API started over indexing. We can talk about that in a little bit. And then we had SaaS over verticalizing, in my opinion, you know, ask how many SaaS providers they can go truly headless and then you'll get your answer right then and there. So, and then companies of course saying, oh wait, I didn't want it not to be what I wanted. So then I started customizing on top. It kind of created like in my mind like a big bad concoction. Right. How do you unpack that? With the new, and I want to call them the new era of technology that we're in with like a lot more enablement. I think we've gotten a lot more mature on what microservices are in the kind of that ability to your point, at a price point that can deliver what you want for your business. I love the way you just so simply and articulately put that. How do you offer the listeners like a, uh. Yeah, yeah, we know, but that means customization or I can't do that on top of this SaaS thing. Like how do they, how do they actually get the recipe that works in your mind?

Speaker C: I actually think it's pretty simple what's good for these companies and um, is this idea and I, I don't know if trapping customers is their business plan, but certainly retaining them is to get data calculations and everything that your SaaS platform under one roof. So they'll want custody of your data. They're going to put it in unique formats that they may or may not give you access to. And what happens then is it's hard to leave the SaaS provider. The same thing happens with monolithic platforms is that you move the data into these platforms and it's very hard to get rid of these platforms because everything is attached to the way the platform wants to think about your data. The way out is to think about your enterprise data asset, uh, is being critical to running your enterprise as a separate thing. Don't give it away. And what that may mean is that you use the SaaS provider for something that they're good at. Maybe they perform particular sets of calculations or they, they do something with your data that is not part of your secret sauce of your business. Well, great, use them for that. But then always keep custody of your enterprise data. And then you can decouple or lose your height affiliation with the SaaS provider. So you use them as long as you need to use them. And when your business evolves and you don't need that particular calculation or set of calculations or there's some provider that's better out there, you can swap them out and it doesn't become a traumatic experience. But this idea of being thoughtful about your data turns out to be a minor but monolithic solve to, to this, this problem of, uh, giving everything away to these vendors.

Speaker D: So, and, and I think that that's so important. What are some examples where you are seeing people? Because that's like a lot to think through, right? Like, like if you just kind of put it together and you're like, you know, clearly the technology vendors aren't selling it. The, the CIOs and enterprise architects and business architects are all kind of deep in on these. Like, you know, like, you and I operate at the enterprise level, right? Like we're not talking small mom and pop shops. Like we're talking pretty major technologists. They're just kind of trying to like, give the business what they need and want quickly within the fleet of cars that they have in the lot, right? Like they're, they're, they're kind of trying to keep it together and we're all running numbers and cost of any sort of change is usually expensive. So how does somebody recognize almost like, I'll call it prescription fatigue? Like, what's the first catalytic, catalytic moment that you're like, yeah, they're recognizing it and then how do. Because I think it would be interesting for listeners to hear, like, hey, that thing, like, let's give name to that thing that you're recognizing. And then what do they do about it, Steve? Like, how do they build their way out of this? Like, how do they kind of form a plan?

Speaker C: There are symptoms and they're not subtle. One is a CFO looks at the price tag, either historically or of, uh, building a new thing and says, this is a lot. Why are we spending this much money? It doesn't make sense for us to be spending this much money. Problem one. Symptom two is pain. This is taking too long. Then it seems there are too many steps. This seems too hard. Symptom three, all the consulting organizations are recommending it. And I say that as a consultant. Typically, if advisors are telling you that things are really hard and expensive and they give you an answer that's confusing, uh, maybe that's not a very good answer. Typically if a vendor is telling you that, don't worry, it's confusing. If you write this large check, I can solve this problem for you. That might not be the right answer. So my advice is to pay attention to your instincts. If your instincts are, this doesn't make sense. I don't understand this. This is too expensive, or this seems to be too many steps. It probably is. As a matter of fact, part of what we're working with clients are, is sort of new data literacy. We're training clients to hone their instincts on. Pay attention to your business. Technology is not this outside thing that you can't possibly understand. Technology is becoming more and more accessible. And this idea that there are these specialists that no one understands their language, that go off into a dark dungeon for a year to build your solution, that may have been true 10 years ago, it's certainly not true today. And if you're not able to go and talk to your CTO or CIO or consulting advisor and understand the conversation, then I don't know that you're having the right conversations.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think those are really important. And you know, I kind of always joke with people because a lot of times people say, well, like, you became so technical. And I'm like, I became basically literate in things where I was being tired of talked over. Do you know what I mean, Steve? So like, to your point, there's so many things that help you break things down now and analyze things and interrogate things and speak to fluently about things, and you don't like, not only do you not have to code, but you don't have to be raised as a technologist to talk at or on par the level of technologist. So like, I think it goes both ways. Like to your point about if they're talking in a complicated way, it's probably not right. But I also think a lot of business people, or my experience, because I grew up on that side of the house, I think a lot of business people excuse it like a foreign language that they're not fluent in. And my advice to business leaders is you can like air, uh, quote Rosetta Stone that it's just dialect, it's just words and all of those words, you know, like you can record a lot of things on some sort of a, a proper allowed for recording device and you can throw it into, you know, a, you know, a natural language processor and you can comprehend and say, explain that to me in a business framework. So even if you're technologist isn't doing that, I feel like a lot of business people can do that, Steve. And I think that a lot of the ways that I've seen, because I want to talk to you about what's next. But I think a lot of the success comes from people who, to your point, refuse to not listen to their instincts. It's like, no, I'm a business person. My instincts are telling me this. And I think being a little almost, uh, I'll use the word like dogmatic or insistent about your instincts because you will be glazed, you will be, you know, all the words gaslit. You will be made to feel like you're insane. Maybe you are welcome. Steve and I are happy to like take you if, you know, if you're like, uh, hey, I feel insane. Call us, we live in that world. But I think that there's so much of that that goes on that people lose their almost will to like comprehend it. And I guess my thing for business people is like you don't get to sit on the sideline and claim excuses either. Would you agree with that?

Speaker C: I, I would. And I, I uh, think I've shared this story with you before, but I'll share it with the group now. The thing that got me with feeling on my digital journey, managing digital practices. I used to do finance transformation, actuarial transformation, and a, um, well known CFO of a large insurance carrier asked me, he said why on earth are these programs so expensive and why do I have to do them every decade? And I didn't answer him immediately. I thought about it and I thought that feedback is Incredibly profound. We've accepted as just a matter of course that some things should just be expensive. If you're implementing a claim system or something for finance or you're doing something, why shouldn't that be a multi year journey? Why shouldn't that involve m. Many many zeros in terms of what you pay for that? And uh, what I've discovered over the last 10 years is it doesn't need to cost that much, it doesn't need to take that much time. What the CFO taught me in that moment was to challenge the assumptions, to challenge my own instincts. Because as a practitioner that used to configure this technology, in the back of my mind, it just always bothered me. I'm like, how on earth, why on earth is this all so expensive? Why are these SaaS solutions so unwieldy and hard to configure? So I got taught to listen to my own instincts. So I'm just passing that good advice along to the uh, people that are listening today.

Speaker D: I love that Steve. And I think that there's an interesting other side to this, which is I think a lot of people, right, wrong or indifferent, we all know. One of the reasons, like my hypothesis, I'm curious to know your thought on this. One of the reasons why we may or may not have accepted this bloat and what's seemingly time consuming and expensive and disruptive is because the other spectrum of that is tech that doesn't scale. Because at the end of the day, right, what you and I are talking about are things that are not widgets and bolt on. I mean we work in an industry that's uh, on its principle, simple, but the devil is in the details like the calculations and the way in which we run our, you know, making intangible tangible is what I like to say about insurance. Right. It is inherently, you know, I'll say a financial model technologist is nirvana because it is inherently complicated at all the concoctions we can yield. That's actually my favorite thing about insurance, if I'm being honest with you. So I think the opposite side of maybe our instinct was this robot in the other corner punching at scale and reliability and credibility. And of course not to mention governance and all the things. Cause I mean, Stevie and I both come from, you know, public accounting consulting backgrounds as well. Right. And so I think, uh, I'll say like until recently that scalability risk was as profound as the bloat. Would you agree with that?

Speaker C: I would. And um, a couple of things are changing. The first is the Class of tooling is robust and very inexpensive. Whether that's AI tooling or that's just general purpose data stores in the cloud, they didn't used to be all that robust. There's technology terms like containerization where you put like a little wrapper around something so it will work in different types of environments. We used to worry about that type of technology because we'd say, well, it won't scale. But now even that type of technology will scale to millions and millions of transactions. So I think there are very few companies that can break these modern tools and these modern architectures and then back to this idea. Something that is changing now is with technology becoming more accessible and easier to use and faster to use, there's a reconvergence of business professionals and technology professionals being part of the same conversation and at different conversations. When I'm, um, experienced enough, when I started my career, I would have a conversation with a business person and they would ask me to build something and then I would get a small team together and we'd build it. And handful of days or weeks later we all looked at it and then decided what we wanted to change or build together. And, and we understood business problems. We solved for them. Things were not terribly expensive or hard to build. And then we got this era where we had people not talking to each other, so the person coding something never met the person with the business problem. And then we wondered why things got expensive and hard. It's because people weren't communicating with each other. And at best they were communicating with each other through really, really hard to understand word documents full of like pictures and words and documents on steroids. And it was the epitome of the telephone game. There might have been four or five levels of telephone before the person doing the work. And at no point maybe was the real business problem articulated in a way that was clear to the person doing the coding. And now we're finding that especially at Oliver Wyman Actuarial, we bring our professionals in to talk directly with the people doing the coding and our professionals talk directly with the clients. So, uh, at worst we're one or two telephones away from the work. At best we're zero. That's part of a combined conversation with a client. And amazingly, things are cheaper and faster when we do it that way. We don't require thousands of pages of pictures and diagrams. We just put appropriate audit documentation in place, appropriate process document in place, not all sorts of documentation that is put in place of human communication, which is in my experience, quite good. If we uh, allow ourselves to communicate. Right.

Speaker D: I love that. Not that you and I've ever had this conversation, but in one of my CX transformation roles I eliminated business requirement docs and requirement docs and my technology team got so mad at me and I was like, you're going to have to go talk to the people and I'm not going to allow you to have it in these giants here point like Word Documents and all that. And I'm going to make that person sit beside you when you're showing like what you're doing. And I, I think especially in a world that's really heavily calculation oriented, if you really think about what we do, our world is so much decisions, risk acceptance, calculation, outcome oriented that I think it's hard to capture that and there's also like fatigue of all that. So I, I, I think that's really smart that you also ended up there. I want to know, okay, inquiring minds want to know if SaaS accumulation created, I'll say unintended noise, like accidentally we ended up here, what replaces it? So like, talk to me a little bit about curated, not custom purpose built execution layers, not platforms, but patterns. Can you kind of like share with us your thinking on that to the audience?

Speaker C: Something I regularly ask, uh, clients to do is have some hard conversations with your vendors. And don't assume so if you go to the marketplace and say, I'd like someone to get me a widget that can turn PDF documents into data, I don't know, that's a common thing people ask for and do it in a secure way. So I'm not sending my data to some third party, who knows what they're going to do with that data. So how do I do that in my environment? They're going to have a lot of vendors that'll say, well, send me all your PDF documents and I'm going to do. And then they do the traditional thing because they want to keep you. What I say instead is only ask for the one thing that you need. If you need a calculation that sits on top of your data store, ask the vendor for the calculation, that's it. And they're going to sell you a lot more and say, I don't want to buy a lot more, I just want to buy the one thing. And my clients are often incredibly surprised that vendors are really willing to do that because the SaaS landscape and the vendor landscape has people a little afraid. And the competition is ramping up between not just vendors, amongst themselves, but between shops that are saying Maybe I don't need to buy all this SaaS solutions. Maybe I can do some of this myself. And so these vendors are hungry to add value and to maintain their business model. If you're a customer, leveraging that hunger to get exactly what you need and no more and no less is a really smart thing to do and pays huge dividends in the end.

Speaker D: Yeah. And I love that you say too, like, you have to know what the one thing you want is. So I love that framing on both sides. I love the. I'll call it the appropriate gumption to ask and the resilience to know so many people. And I'm not being rude, but so many people buy tech and they know they need, like, a thing, but they may not be able to get to that. I need this one calculation, which I used to call composing and decomposing tech, Steve. Like, for lack of better phrasing, and I was like, you're only going to buy that little widget, that little Lego block that you actually need, because to your point, you're assembling this other thing in your enterprise. And that thing in your enterprise might only need that calculation logic or that calculation engine or whatever that is. Right.

Speaker C: And I got to tell you, as our consultants regularly are called in to do, is to help a client define that problem.

Speaker D: Yeah. So how does that work? Like, how does that work when they get called in? How does. How do they go through that?

Speaker C: Normally it will start with sort of an amorphous problem or symptoms, and a client will say, I don't know how to. I can describe my outcome, but I can't describe my problem. Can you help me? And what we love to do is come in and clarify that nugget of the thing you need or the problem you're solving. And then more often than not, maybe teaching the client to do that themselves, or how to build it or how to source it in the marketplace, and then we leave. That's an excellent way to use outside expertise. Is if you're having a hard time crystallizing what's the one thing I want to buy in the marketplace? How do I take this really expensive thing and make it cheaper? Well, we do that all the time. And that is a service we love to do because we're not perma consultants staying there for years and years. We're solving these or helping identify these targeted opportunities or problems. And then it allows our clients to, uh, with confidence, go to a vendor landscape or go somewhere and say, I want this one thing. But all these other things you're trying to sell me. I'm not terribly interested, thank you.

Speaker D: Yeah, not to mention I want to get into the reclaiming the P and L next in our next segment. I've been after this thesis for a while, so heads up M our uh, procurement officers and our CFOs and our CIOs and the controllers working in technology that there is also, not only is there bloat in the SAS stack, see, but there's bloat in redundancy of uh, repetitive things you're asking each stack in it of itself to do. So let's. Steve, let's just say geocoding is like an example for this because you know, you and I did a little bit of a good.

Speaker C: It's a good example.

Speaker D: Okay? So every geospatial outcome, whether you're buying satellite imagery, lidar, you know, sar, whatever you're buying, every single person that does anything to do with satellite at all has to do this thing called geocoding. And so you the company, I figured this out and I was like, you the company have a redundancy load of 20 to 30% in every stack you buy if you buy the outcome and not the point solutions team because guess what, they're all geocoding it. And so I, in that situation I couldn't just get the calculation. I needed the like thing. And so I say hold on, I'll do the enterprise geocoding. I'll send you a, if you will, a data file with a geocoded MHM data input and you will not geocode my data file and you will just do the processing with my, you know, my, my portfolio, my investments, whatever it is. So I think Steve, what we don't real. And then by the way, my price is locking down, right? How I think that's a really interesting like reclaiming the P and L because I think part of what we're after is not just the tech, it's also the business sanctity and sanity of saying I'm going to manage my P and L for business related outcomes. So if we move from diagnosis to direction, if I am a cfo, Chief Procurement Officer, coo, PL owner, listening, how do I assess where my current stack might be bleeding value? And what is that intuitive lens, Steve, that I can go after, hey, we may have overbought, we may be under executing and there might be redundancy. Even if I want to keep all the bells and whistles that I have today because I often hear like I don't want to give up the bells and whistles. How do I think about that?

Speaker C: Again, I think the answer is relatively simple. Now, executing on it, uh, is hard. And this started 25 years ago for me, and I was managing at the time, which is called shared services, departments that did these functions. And I asked a Wisden leader in that, uh, function, how do you size these things? And he said, well, you keep asking for efficiencies and increase utility until it stops, and then you back off a little bit. So if you're a cfo, demand of your business that they take out cost, and if you're a CEO, demand your business accelerate revenue and don't accept no for an answer because again, if your answer is really complicated and involves a dog eating their homework and all that, maybe that's not a very good answer. And, uh, that pressure on the organization will cause people to ask hard questions, will cause people to really examine some things they never thought about. So if you're talking about technology, most technology leaders will say most of their calories are spent maintaining stuff that they already bought. Why? That's an interesting hard question. Like, why is that? And is that maybe the most important thing you should be thinking about for cost management if you're a technology professional, is stuff that's not related to new project spend. Why is that not your number one priority? And again, it's a hard question that rarely gets asked because, uh, you go to these companies and. Or I've been part of these companies, and everyone thinks long and hard about new technology that you're. Or a new thing that you're doing. And there's multiple layers of governance, but the old stuff, no governance whatsoever. It's like, oh, I spent $20 million last year, I spent $20 million this next year.

Speaker D: My favorite is, like, there was a CIO at a company that I worked at that said, well, like, you got what you know, you basically got what you asked for. You know, in terms of the maintenance costs. I'm like, whoa, hold on. You're saying that to people out there, like, earning money and driving revenue, like, that's probably not the way you should be responding to that. But I think it's an interesting. Almost like you started this conversation, Steve. It's an interesting level of acceptance that we've come to become, I'll say, comfortable with. When you shouldn't be comfortable, I think is what you're describing. Like, you should not be comfortable with that level of acceptance when you can't fuel new things for the business. Because keeping the lights on costs, uh, X. And if somebody Just says to you, well, that's what it is. I think what you're saying is challenge that. Throw the gauntlet when it's interesting.

Speaker C: I was talking about three years ago to a founder, and he said something that just stuck with me. He said, steve, I was complimenting him on this great company he had built. You seem like you do technology. And I said, I try. And he said, when I started three years ago, I had four people that did technology. And I don't know what happened, but I checked the other day and it's 175, and I have no idea what they're all working on. And that's so common. And then truly. And then the. The answer tends to be, well, I, uh, would be too hard for me to explain that to you. Make them explain what everyone is working on, because those will be really interesting conversations, and that would be my advice.

Speaker D: All right, so, Steve, let's name this shift, because I want to talk a little bit about what you're doing at Oliver Wyman Actuarial. Because, right, you hear the. No disrespect, you hear the name actuarial, and you're like, okay, you don't necessarily think of co build and kind of reinventing business directly. So you're moving from advising, I'll call it consultatively out of the PowerPoint into. Into the ring of fire, which is co building. Why was this necessary? Because I find the business model fascinating. Clearly, I'm a fan of it. I love it. It's a very big North Star for me. In terms of, like, signals, what are you all enabling that piano owners couldn't get before? And how are you doing it? Because I love the kind of connection of this conversation. Like that intuition being ignited, helping kind of see through the fuzzy, creating clarity on it. Knowing what the one thing you need to ask for is, and, uh, not being, I'll call, you know, permanent consultants. Talk to us about that. I think this is a fascinating extension of the business model.

Speaker C: So I'll answer it in two parts. The first is the question you didn't ask, but is probably top of mind. Why actuaries and technology. It turns out that to be an actuary takes a tremendous amount of grit to become credentialed. There's these exams that you take, so it's a factory to distill practitioners that just have grit, that are going to work on a problem until they get that problem solved. And people that like to solve problems tend to gravitate towards that field. The secret sauce in the emerging the new world. Of technology is the ability to define and solve problems. And we have companies that are full of coders and engineers and architects, but not problem solvers. And we have business practitioners that know how to run their business, but might not be the best technology problem identifiers or solvers. And by upskilling our actuaries so that they can sit between the business and the hardcore technologists has unlocked tremendous amounts of value. And I've got to admit, initially it started kind of as an experiment. We didn't know. We said, uh, are we going to be solving small problems or large problems? And it turns out that we're doing small problems, but we're also tackling some of the largest problems in the industry. And we're doing it really well. And we're doing it at orders of magnitude faster and better. And there's an interesting story that goes along with that. Uh, I have a client that wanted to build an AI thing. I won't go into what the thing is. And they talked to an engineering firm and the engineering firm told them, um, well, I can build an mvp, which means just a thing that doesn't really do the thing, but it's enough of it that you can tell what it should be.

Speaker D: The thing that doesn't really exist, but kind of pretend exist beyond the demo, maybe.

Speaker C: And they said to do that, it's going to be at least $3 million, maybe $5 million. And I talked to the same client and they were frustrated. There was sort of this angry thing. And this is. And uh, they were telling me this is why they can't do AI. And I said, would you be interested in talking to one of our actuarial practitioners? I said, well, why? And I said, I don't know. I bet they could come up with another answer. And we engineered this meeting. And between the point where we scheduled the meeting and we had the meeting, this actuarial practitioner, in a handful of days, went ahead and built the mvp. And then a handful of days worth of work did not require $3 million. And in the process of building the MVP, designed, uh, a, uh, quasi training technique for AI that might be net new or patentable. And I was pretty impressed. I was like, well, I didn't think of that. But that everyday innovation is something that we're seeing more and more and it's building upon ourselves. Now we have, uh, a community of practitioners that are all getting upskilled and learning from each other in that role of problem solver and, and understanding person of technology. We're able to solve significant problems. At very different price points and speeds that are, uh, frankly delighting our clients. And it's an exciting time to be working with our clients and to be in the industry.

Speaker D: I mean, I think it's so, so amazing, right? Because to me, it's really not retooling, but it really gets at how do we reconcile the business with itself, which is something that I think we kind of lost sight of as we went deep into the SaaS world. So, Steve, clearly we could talk forever, but as we start to bring this to a roundup, you know, being in the hot seat, you get to answer the kind of three call to action questions. What is something in your call to action that you would ask everyone still listening to us to start doing, stop doing and continue to do so?

Speaker C: Start asking the hard questions. If you're not asking the hard questions, stop assuming everything is going to be hard or expensive or unknowable. Continue trusting your instincts. They got you there. Probably every one of our listeners are impressive people that have had impressive lives and impressive careers. So trust your impressive instincts. That's my advice.

Speaker D: I love that. I always love how you just frame it so, so articulately. So for any of our listeners that do not follow Ste on LinkedIn, please follow him. Please follow all the work that Oliver Wyman Actwarell is doing, and stay tuned. Steven, now, I'm, like, really curious about this AI solution. I feel like I want to see it in action. Maybe we can. Maybe once it's released, we can have a little post showcase of it. But super excited to see how you are, you know, really living what you said to me again probably five years ago. You know, Lisa, all this stuff that we're building, all this SaaS engines, we could just do this in the cloud. We were talking erp. We could do debits and credits and get this stuff done. And I love seeing you fulfill what you knew to be instinctually and directionally correct. So thank you for being a guest today, Lisa.

Speaker C: Thank you. And it's humbling to work alongside such amazing practitioners and appreciate you having me here, of course.

Speaker D: All right, so for all of our listeners, continue to stay tuned, stay informed, and stay curious until next time on Insurance Unplugged. Thank you, Steve.

Speaker C: Thanks, Lisa.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening to another episode of Insurance Unplugged. If this episode pushed your thinking or gave you words for something you've been sensing, thank Oliver Wyman Actuarial. They're not just sponsoring this season. They're proving every day that business led tech isn't a myth. It just needs to be built by people who understand both sides of the table.

Speaker D: For more from the team that's co

Speaker B: building execution, not just advising on it, head to OliverWeinman.com insurance and stay tuned because the next collapse is already underway and we'll be here naming it. Thank you.