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Transcript

Ryan Eaton: Welcome to the Insurance Leadership Podcast. I'm Ryan Eaton, your host, and honored to have you listening in with us today. We have a special guest, Suril Kantaria who is going to be with us talking about the buying, selling startup of a company. He's also going to be going into what he's doing in the insurance space with AI and the new company he's developed to be able to help insurance agents, insurance carriers, and TPAs automate their processes and make life simpler, so with that, let's go ahead and get started.

Suril, welcome to the show, my friend. I appreciate you being on.

Suril Kantaria Thanks, Ryan. Great to be here.

Ryan Eaton: Look, I know our companies have worked together for several years and my team had always spoken so highly of you. And when I got your bio in, I realized they hadn't built you up enough. You have a pretty impressive resume, I would say.

Suril Kantaria Thank you. I know Morgan White was a great partner for us when we were building our first business.

Ryan Eaton: Oh, I appreciate you saying that but before we get rolling, I really wanted to spend the day hitting on some leadership topics, then get into from there, break in some of the insurance stuff but I had to give a little bit of your background because I know you may not hit all that on yourself so I want to say this. So you graduated from Dartmouth, served as the student body president, if I'm correct. I can say probably from the insurance leadership podcast perspective, that makes you probably the most intelligent person who's been on the show, so honored to have you here. You started a company, Savvy, which was a leader in the ICHRA space. You ended up selling that a few years ago to Take Command, which is the largest in that space. You also held a role in Elon Musk's transition team with Twitter over finance and operations, that we'll stay clear of that from the show today. I know that you got some non disclosure stuff there so as much as everyone may want me to ask you questions, we'll make sure we stay clear of that. But you also now started another company in the insurance space dealing with AI and helping with the administrative processes and so we'll jump into that later in the show, but to get rolling your company savvy, which we worked with you guys on, I'd love maybe if you give like a few minutes overview of how it got started. What was the funding like getting it started? Just some of the nitty gritty there from the background and kind of what led you to that.

Suril Kantaria Dabby was, a lot of you are familiar with insurance. It was a ICHRA company. And for those of you are unfamiliar, ICHRA, it was a new regulation under the Trump administration in 2019 that let employers give tax free cash stipends and put their employees on individual market plans, ACA plans. It was a different way of doing things that really got us excited. We've all heard about just how complicated employer health insurance is. I always believed there's no reason for an employer to be in the middle of an employee and their personal health. I don't think they're doing a great job administering benefits. And I don't think they want to be in the business of administering personal health benefits. But this is just how our system has evolved. What Savvy was a technology platform to make the end to end administration of ICHRA really simple very savvy and tech forward and to also offer a brokerage, a marketplace where all of our users, all of our employees can spend their money, can buy plans. I'll stop there, that was the general premise. And you asked about the journey, happy to talk more about it, but we were a San Francisco startup. We raised money from venture capital as you went through Y Combinator, which is a big incubator out here incubated companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Reddit, OpenAI, many others. And it was an awesome journey. It was my and my co founders first time building a company and we made all the first time founder mistakes.

Ryan Eaton: And that's awesome, and that's what I want to get into with today a little bit. It's hit on that at the beginning. Because I think it's such an awesome story and what you guys did because you were a market leader in that space. When I think about at that time, you and take command were the two in our mind that were the two of the largest out there and how you built it up so quick and from the sales side and operations to, not including employees and paying the bills and dealing with all the startup stuff that there comes with, it was really impressive. I read a publication recently and I wanted to spend the next few questions hitting on some of these, cause they're great trains of thoughts, but you had some different quotes that you put out there and I'm going to read, I'll start with the first one. You said, don't found a startup, find a problem. I love that and reading what you said after that, but I'd love to get your take on that on what you mean, break that down for us a little bit, if you don't mind.

Suril Kantaria So most people think startups are about having a vision for the future. And I challenge this notion. I think startups are not about visions at all. They're about finding a problem. Ideally, one that's really painful, that lots and lots of people have. And then building a solution. And if you found a real problem with a good solution, you'll have a shot at building a great startup.

Ryan Eaton: I love that, you had a quote here that you said visions without defining a problem are dangerous. They are often solutions to made up problems or even worse. Alternate realities to things that are working just fine. I love that. I thought that was a brilliant quote. But it also sounds like you dealt with that potentially from a personal experience. Do you have any backgrounds where maybe had a vision and ran with it before really figuring out that it really was a problem?

Suril Kantaria When we're building Savvy, I can tell you, we wrote a document, in the very early days. Thinking all great companies start with a document or a napkin, right? So we'll tell the story years to come. And we envisioned this world where savvy was just the beginning. So at the bottom we had, horizontal line savvy platform. And on top of that, we thought, we would be in not just health insurance, but we would be in concierge medicine, fertility care, mental health, any single service that someone might want is now going to be, acquired through savvy. So on top of an employer doesn't have to offer any of these things, right? Because you just have a cash benefit and you buy whatever you want. On top of that, we could help the consumer navigate the healthcare system and we can help them with their bills. We could help them get access to drugs so we can become this one stop shop. It's everyone's dream, right? Like you want to be the Amazon of your industry. And we thought we can be the Amazon healthcare. So I'd say that it's very concrete example of a vision that clearly never materialized. It's hard enough to just figure out how to solve a problem in health insurance and to think that you could do all these different things from the beginning is just misguided, right? If we had just sat down with a hundred different employers and listen to their problems, we probably wouldn't have come up with that. That was just us like getting excited about an idea without really talking to customers.

Ryan Eaton: No, I agree. You got another problem first. I think that was a great way to say that. So look, the next quote you had was venture capital funding is a drug. And I thought I find this very interesting because I've never come from the venture capital space or raising money and or private equity, whatever the case may be. If you don't mind, I'd love you to give a few minute overview on what that process is like, how can all that works and then what you mean by venture capital funding is a drug and kind of maybe, I'm guessing you mean by how it hooks you in and how it ties you in and you've got to have more and more, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Suril Kantaria I'm sure you or others who might be listening are familiar with, of investors. VC, venture capital is just one type of investor. And they're very prevalent in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But when you fundraise from these VCs, you end up selling your vision to lots and lots of people with money, lots and lots of people who shower you with praise. You very rarely get negative feedback. It's not in their best interest, right? With these people who have built huge followings on Twitter, who write lots of blog posts and put up market maps, ranking all the startups. And in general, they're just talking about, how great you are and how you have this once in a generation ability, right? You'll actually see them once they invest, they'll write these blog posts or LinkedIn posts, and talk about how unique you are. And it makes you feel amazing, right? You feel like you really accomplished something by going out there pitching your vision and then raising money, it's a real hIgh. What many on the outside don't appreciate is just how much more pressure you end up facing. You have to grow faster. You have to hire faster. You have to spend the money quickly. You can't just sit on it. You have rising valuation expectations, right? Now it's not just your money. You have to make money for your investors too. VCs are not just investing in you, they have a portfolio, right? And so they're constantly letting you know, how you're doing, how you're tracking versus other portfolio companies. And there's a lot of external signaling, right? The VCs are going on podcasts and talking about their top companies. So I think what I meant to say when VC funding is a drug is. Like a drug, you get hooked, you like this feeling, you like the status of being venture backed. You like the ability to go bigger and take real big swings, spend money. Even though it's not, you haven't earned that yet, right? It's not your cash flow it's someone else's money, but you end up being hooked, you need more. And so you're on this VC treadmill and it just keeps going. You do that cycle over and over again.

Ryan Eaton: How often are they coming to you and wanting to report? If you're raising money from John Doe, let's just say he puts in X amount of money, how often is he calling you specifically to be, Hey, what's this looking like? How are we coming? Is he expecting a certain amount of reporting on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? What's that look like?

Suril Kantaria Obviously different VCs operate differently, I think for us we had monthly, a monthly cadence with our investors and some were definitely more involved and wanted, every little detail versus others. I actually think it's important to get in bed with the right people for that reason because, your investors have influence. And so you want to be influenced by the right people.

Ryan Eaton: Oh, that's good. I appreciate you breaking that down. I've always wondered what that process is, what it looks like, how it feels and you hit the pressure and I got another question I want to hit for you in a minute with pressure. But before I get to that one another thing you mentioned, that article was a stealth startup is not a wise idea, so I guess my first question there is, for the audience what is a stealth startup and then why is it a bad idea?

Suril Kantaria So stealth startups are, as the name probably implies, companies that try to be secretive about what they're working on. The founders don't want anyone knowing what they're building. They won't put up anything on LinkedIn. They won't put up a website, nothing public. Now, I think this notion that being secretive will help you in some way is misinformed. Startups are all about building something customers want. You need market signal. You need customers. You should be yelling from the rooftops, trying to get the word out there. By being secretive, I think you're just increasing the likelihood of failure which is already pretty high.

Ryan Eaton: Yep. So that goes to the rising tide raises all boats kind of type thing. So you want people out there talking about it so it helps stir the buzz, so to say in the market. But if you're a stealth startup, it's one of those things that you're keeping it quiet. You're not creating that buzz. You're not getting people wanting to look under the curtain, everything else. Am I correct?

Suril Kantaria That's exactly right. And on the rising tide point, I think when we're building savvy in the earliest days of the ICHRA market. We'd get asked what other companies or startups were doing, and I think it was easy to focus on others. You're always like, look, your instinct is to look around, when we're out there in the market selling, we rarely came up against other ICHRA startups. And it made me realize a few things, one is if you're building something new, you probably aren't running up against startups, you're running up against incumbents, the old school way of doing things and second markets are big. There are 150 million lives in the employer health insurance market. In the first year of your years of ICHRA, any startup might be doing, have thousands of lives, right? So it's a little drop in the ocean. Compared to the overall market. And so I'd say we realized pretty quickly, you got to focus on growing the market. If it becomes tens of millions of lives, everyone will win.

Ryan Eaton: No, that's right, there's a book called blue ocean strategy. I don't know if you've ever seen it before, but. It goes into that said, you wanna get to the spot where you're in the blue ocean, there's the blue ocean and there's the red ocean and the blue ocean is the new ideas, the new concepts where not everybody is and in the Red Ocean, everyone's got the same exact process and they're all fighting and it's bloody because everyone's cutting prices and everything else, so Savvy was one of those things you and take command, were both over here in the Blue Ocean, dealing with the acre space because not everyone had gotten there yet. And brilliant concept, but so look, pressure with the startup, you mentioned this a minute ago, when you're hitting on VC. When I think about the pressure that comes with it, I'm thinking, Hey, not only are you worried about the pay and the bills, keeping the lights on trying to create buzz for your space. But you also got the VCs breathing down your neck, want to return on their capital. But there's a thousand other type pressures that you deal with from a startup standpoint. One, how did you deal with those pressures? And it's a real thing, cause a lot of people push it under the rug they don't want to talk about it, but it's a real deal, how did you handle all the pressure that came with a startup and trying to get it where you end up selling it and building it to that spot?

Suril Kantaria There's probably a couple of things I'd say here, one is you have to realize that what you're doing is a hard thing and hard things are going to be hard. There's no way around that. The pressure is probably, a intrinsic coming from within, or maybe it's external coming from, employees, customers, investors. It's a pressure to succeed and to not fail. And I think I found the best way to deal with this is number one, focus, and number two, relentlessness. I think focus is underrated. At any given time as you alluded to things are going to be crazy, you have so many things on your plate. You might be trying to close a hire. You might be trying to follow up on a sales conversation. You might be trying to give feedback to your engineering team on new features. You might be trying to reach out to regulators but you need to figure out, what is that one thing that you should put all of your attention on at that given time? And usually when you think about it, it's going to be one thing, right? And I think if you could just. Simplify and really bring focus that'll help your business succeed. And then number two, I think a lot of startups is just being relentless. I think people have called it, chewing glass, and I think it's chewing glass over and over again, but there's so much failure and it's so painful. And I think your ability to deal with this pain, to cope with it, to overcome, to get back up, and then to do this over and over again is important to develop. And I think will ultimately lead to you being successful.

Ryan Eaton: So before the podcast started, we were talking about Peloton and working out and other things along those lines. When you felt that pressure, did you find that getting on the bike or something along those lines was a pretty big release for you?

Suril Kantaria Definitely. Yeah I've been doing a lot of trail running and ultra Marathon races and I just think it's such a great release, but there's so many lessons in that physical pain ability to endure. And I think there's a lot of lessons in following athletes too. I always love the quotes from like interviews from great athletes and always take mental notes when they're speaking.

Ryan Eaton: I do as well. So look, one of the earlier points we talked about was finding a problem and creating a solution for the problem. I gotta ask you, healthcare and insurance are probably two of the most red taped industries there are. What made you jump into that space to be able to find a problem? Why didn't you figure out some other type of space that was a little bit easier? What led you down that path?

Suril Kantaria Yeah, what's funny is when we sold Savvy, I told myself, I'm not working in health care again. I just found the red tape to be too painful. You can't get anything done quickly as a lot of you guys listening will know. So hard to innovate. And I think that's just really hard for someone like me and maybe many of you who are just impatient and maybe to a fault. But I signed past, I just realized like the devil, is better than the devil you don't. And so here I am back in healthcare insurance and to answer your question, I think what brings me energy is solving hard problems and working on things that impact all of humanity. I find that healthcare has both. You have massive problems that touch millions of people and incredible inefficiency and waste and all over the place. So I just get excited. I get energized trying to solve these problems with technology.

Ryan Eaton: Yeah, you nailed that. There is a lot of problems in a big market in the healthcare and insurance space, I agree. So look, before we jump into the next part of the podcast today, I'd like to hit, what was it like when you came to the point of selling your company and having venture capitalists involved with you or outside investors involved with you? What was it like when it wasn't just you and your partner saying, Hey, yeah, this is a good deal, let's do it. Walk me through those steps of Hey, do you have to go get approval? What does that whole process look like?

Suril Kantaria For those interested, I wrote about the process in something called Lenny's newsletter. And the article was from startup to exit. So feel free to take a look if you want like the full rundown, but at a high level one realization for me was startups are bought, not sold. But that said, you really have to hustle hard to line up a buyer. And I think what we learned was if you're out there, as a startup actively marketing yourself and trying to sell the company, buyers are going to assume something's going wrong but at the same time, it's rare that companies are just going to come to you because you're a startup, right? Not many people know who you are. So I think you have to hustle hard and as with most things, it comes down to relationships. Have you spent time building relationships? Ideally over the years going to conferences and really getting to know people, going to dinners with your customers. I think at the same time you need to play it cool, it's a bit of a dance. And so I think there's some tension there between those two things. The second thing I learned is you really have to move with urgency because acquisitions are very fickle, so once a company expresses interest, it's going to be a one off event for them, it's not going to be business as usual. It's not topping anyone's priority list. And so naturally this creates a lot of volatility in the acquisition process and things change, right? Like new people will come to the table saying Hey, like talk to this other person, they want to say on what we do here. And I think the lesson for me was you have to roll with the punches and do everything in your power to create urgency, to move fast. So I would push our lawyers to get things back to me within an hour, right? Not a day within an hour. I would personally get back to the acquirer during the due diligence process within hours as well, right? Like I wanted to make sure I was doing everything to show that I'm moving quickly, and I expect that in response, or I hope for that in response.

Ryan Eaton: Set an expectation there. No, I agree. I I appreciate you sharing that, I just always wondered when you had outside investors. Who weren't involved in the daily grind, what that looked like and that's interesting kind of hearing that and I appreciate we'll reference that in the show notes that we put out, Lenny's newsletter, start to exit, we'll make sure we hit on that. So look after you sold the company, you went over with Elon Musk on the Twitter transition, did some stuff over there. And then you decided to jump back into the space and you started a company to help with administrative processes, dealing with AI and the insurance sector.

So before I get into some of those questions, tell us a little bit about your company, what y'all are doing, what the market looks like, who your target clients, customers, et cetera, love to hear more about it.

Suril Kantaria So we're building a company called adaptional, and adaptional builds AI workers that take over all the manual administrative work in insurance and healthcare. I think the story here is we saw firsthand that insurance and healthcare is riddled with administrative work. When we were building our ICHRA brokerage, we were drowning in it. Whether it be, paper applications, faxes, phone calls to submit payments or to follow up on statuses. One funny story here is Our first year, we had no idea that it was going to be this hard and open enrollment comes around. Again, we're first time brokers. We're just, like optimistic entrepreneurs and we do the math. If we work 24 hours a day with our small team, we literally will not get all of our applications processed and submitted and enrollment's done. It was a scary time because we had literally days and I had to actually call up one of your colleagues, right? Ben Marklin, he's amazing person. And he said, don't worry, just send us excel files, we'll literally help you. And he helped us like actually key in every enrollment for dental and vision with Morgan white group. I think many of us have experienced this. The pain definitely comes around during OE. Like the problem is a big one. If you look at the spend in the U. S. healthcare and insurance industries, 15 to 30 percent is administration. That's trillions of dollars. Huge number. And I think it's incredible that there's so much waste in that number. And I think it's holding all of us who work in these industries back. We're building AI technology that takes over and fully automates all this low value manual work that candidly, many of us don't really want to do.

Ryan Eaton: Is it more for the broker? Is it more for the administrative company? Is it more for the carrier? Who do you have it targeted specifically for the end user?

Suril Kantaria It's really all of the above, we're starting with insurance which is what we know, and we're working with, Brokers, carriers, and TPAs.

Ryan Eaton: And so I guess it went, and I think about AI, I was asking some of our programmers, and I mentioned this to you before the call we have probably roughly about 20 to 30 programmers on staff here, and AI is obviously a bigger and bigger discussion point in the market now, and more and more people are trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. Probably about two weeks ago, I asked one of our programmers, I said, tell me your positives, the negatives, the concerns, et cetera. And one of the concerns he brought up, and I've heard this in the markets, I want to get your take on this as well, someone who's dealing with it on a regular basis. He said the concerns that they're seeing around AI is one, security of payment data, PHI. You also get into the kind of the consumer mindset, I guess you would say, of, where there's voice AI. Oh, I don't want to be talking to a robot, right? Like you get some of that from different people. And then you also have kind of the fear of the unknown, right? Like I've heard different people say, and it's a little far fetched, what if AI takes over and takes all of our stuff and, holds us hostage, get to more of the fear of the unknown from your side of it, I would like to know, you mentioned one of the solutions even just a second ago, but what are some of the solutions that you see AI being able to do, that will ease some of those fears and concerns that maybe people have out there in the market right now?

Suril Kantaria It's security is definitely the right thing to focus on. And it's something we're uniquely focused on because we have experienced building technology for insurance and we know how, critical it is to get data security. I want to touch on your broader question about, fears of using AI. AI is a fundamental change in the way we use technology. I think it's like the Internet, like the personal computer, like the smartphone. And when these tools came out, people had many of the same concerns. People weren't sure if the information was safe or if the tools could be trusted. You don't take my word for it, if you look back you'll find newspaper articles that are skeptical about e commerce, right? Like who would give their credit card information to a stranger on the internet? There's literal headlines.

Ryan Eaton: So true, I was thinking that same example when you were talking,

Suril Kantaria So I think with anything new, it's fair to have questions. We tackle this in a few ways. One is we really want to walk before we run. So we encourage folks to start with less risky projects. If you're concerned about clients talking to an AI bot. Which by the way, super reasonable, your customer relationship is the most important thing for your business. So don't start with client facing AI, start with internal tools that will make your team maybe 30 percent more effective.

So example of this might be. Your brokers who own that client relationship, if you're a brokerage might use something that we've actually built, which is a chat GPT, co pilot trained on insurance data that can answer any of the sales questions that come in about a plan. How much is covered? What's covered? Which doctors are in network? I have these three drugs. Can I take them or with this new plan, this is something that, it's not going to touch the client, but will make your frontline agents more productive, right? Because they're getting instant answers to every question a client might be asking. And they don't have to like browse websites or benefit PDFs or formulary data. Now, if you take this 1 step further, right? The AI copilot can just be listening in on calls. And anytime something comes up, you get a notification with an answer. Oh, the client asked are these drugs covered? And the answer is right there for you, right? That would be amazing. And that reality is here, right? We're actually doing this. So I think this is a good way to start with a use case where, you're not really going all in but maybe you can get familiar with the technology and this will alleviate some of your fears. We like to say we're trust first. And we obsess over this question of like, how do you make AI trusted? I think there's simple things you can do. Like one is always give folks an alternative or an eject button. If they don't want to deal with AI, give them another option. So if you have a client calling in to update payment information on the phone and you have an AI kind of phone agent that's responding. You might say, Hey. I'm an AI phone agent that can fix this for you right now. But if you prefer to talk to a human, you can either wait or we'll give you a call back, right? Give people an alternative. And then secondly, I'd say anytime you're interfacing with a eyes, you want to really give source data, right? Back up what you're saying. I think that's super important, especially to build trust, so anytime we're servicing information, we might say, hey, we found this, the AI might say, we found this relevant part of your policy document, here it is and here's a screenshot so you can check for yourself if you want to. I think we really have to be very intentional about how we develop trust.

Ryan Eaton: I like that. Don't force it on somebody. Give them the option, I think that's a great point. And I think also the point too that you said, I remember when the iPhone came out. Everyone, the apps with your banking information Oh my gosh, this is the most unsafe thing. You remember all those type things. I remember I think it was my mom was worried about having one of the keyless door entries where you had the code or you could unlock your door from your phone and she was like, what if someone gets in my wifi? I remember the concern there. So it's one of those things that's a concern out there, but with time, people get more and more comfortable, more and more familiar with it so I think that's a great way to address it and be able to look at it. I love some of the examples you just gave, but how do you say five to 10 years from now? What are you hearing? What are you saying? What are you thinking from how AI will be changing how we do business on a regular basis?

Suril Kantaria What is AI really? It's a technology that makes human like intelligence. More accessible at a lower cost than ever before, when you break it down like that, you realize that all knowledge work and I'd say insurance and it's definitely one category will be transformed. Now you asked about five to ten years. How will this manifest right? What how it's going to play out? I don't think any of us have a crystal ball, but I think there's probably a range of possible outcomes from on one end complete disintermediation and disruption and on the other, like a real catalyst for positive change that makes your business better. I think we're all hopeful for this at the extreme, but I think it could be a combination, depending on where in the insurance industry you play. I'm a broker selling personal lines to make it very concrete. Maybe auto homeowners, I'm probably asking myself, will I be competing with an AI in a few years? And am I prepared for that world? Because, I might be selling something that's fairly simple and already there's some percentage of people like myself that self serve. I don't want to talk to a Geico agent. I want to just self serve. I think on the other side, maybe you have commercial and benefits brokers. And for them find it tough to see as benefits like moment where the business model is completely disrupted, it's adapt or be left behind. I think that's the mantra and carriers and TPAs are probably in a similar boat. For all of these folks, I think there's an opportunity to completely rethink the work of your business, like where do you need humans? And where can you leverage the supercomputers, these AI workers, the last thing I'll say is, why insurance moves slow, right? Like why do this work? And what I think a lot about is, and I'm starting to see this in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but companies will pop up that are AI native, right? These are next generation companies. They're mostly automated from the start and they probably have margins, profit margins that are double or triple the yours within the industry average. So if you're an incumbent, that should scare you. Like you might say, we're in a relationship business. And I agree with you, but if I'm getting invited to three golf outings per year with AI insurance company, and only one golf outing with standard insurance company, I'm probably going to give AI insurance company a hard look. I just think companies with higher profits are going to spend more on sales, they're going to spend more on the customers, they're going to provide a better service and probably do all of that with the same cost. And so I just think, It's really hard to compete against these businesses that will have these structural advantages and so your best bet is probably to adapt. And as a starting point, like you don't have to go all in, right? Begin working with products like adaptional, like what we're doing or just start exploring, figure out what AI can do for you.

Ryan Eaton: One bite at a time, basically. I like that. We always tell our team here, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And that's how you can break into it, I agree with you. Look, we're getting close on time. I wanted to ask you one last question about you mentioned San Francisco in the last question, but you're in the heart of everything going on. What are you seeing right now? Are there any companies, any businesses, any projects, anything to that degree that you're seeing that you think will either have, maybe not even just in the insurance space, but in any market that will have an impact on us five to 10 years from now. Anything major, anything, when I think about major, I think like Airbnb was a huge shakeup. I think, obviously Uber and shipped and different companies like that. Huge, are you seeing anything like that in the market right now or hearing anything about it from a buzz standpoint?

Suril Kantaria So i'd love interest in and in two different ways, one is insurance specific and the other is just

Ryan Eaton: yeah, throw it at me.

Suril Kantaria More broadly. I think just to finish up the kind of the previous thought around insurance, we're seeing some interesting things, companies are doing. I think there's both revenue enhancing things, and probably cost optimizations on the revenue side. I mentioned that, frontline agents using chat bots, right to better support a sales process. There's also the idea of generate automatically generating quotes and proposals from census files. Like that's possible. And folks are doing this, for carriers, we're seeing a lot of interest to self serve users with AI chat assistance and compete against brokers. If you can distribute directly and keep the broker commissions for yourself and you're a carrier. Why not try it? And build that AI kind of assistant, and there's like other areas like non payment, I always laugh, like a signal would send our clients notices in the mail saying we detected non payment. That's never going to stop anyway, who's going to check the mail, right? Is that actually going to stop you from your plan lapsing? No, like the way to do this is probably to have phone calls to the member text messages, call the broker, right? Get them involved. This is all possible now with AI. This could all be automated. On the cost side, there's so much anywhere you look, right? So there's so many systems that talk to other systems and they don't have integrations, right? So you just have workers that are moving data from one system to another. And I think AI is amazing for this and we're already seeing it, right? Whether you have to pull data from different carrier systems, you can automate all of that application data or the status data on your book of business. Or if you have to submit payment to all these systems, like you can just use AI to do that, you don't have to be doing phone calls and faxing things. I just think this world in which you have the teams of humans or BPOs. I think that's all going to be replaced. And we coined a term BPA business process automation, right? So all of this, we'll have like this new category of AI workers. So that's the insurance specific things that we're seeing that I think the real innovative folks are really jumping in on across carriers, brokers, TPAs, the landscape, right?

The question about San Francisco and what we're seeing right now, one thing I'm seeing is a lot more driverless cars cruising around outside of my house. It's crazy. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, you should visit San Francisco because you'll see them all day, 24 hours. And I don't think we'll be driving much in the future. That's one thing. I think the second thing is really, the talk of the town right now, which is what we've talked about on this podcast is AI. What I think is hard to appreciate is that the pace that this little like AI industry that didn't exist before chat GPT was released, perhaps. Two, is it two years? A couple of less than two years, right? Like the pace of development is ferocious. It's an all out arms race, between not just the AI companies, like open AI and Anthropic and X but also the big public tech companies, Meta just had an earnings call this week where they said that they built a $30 billion supercomputer, a data center with Nvidia GPUs. to train models, and they just announced they're going to spend another 10 to 15 billion by the year's end. It is crazy, like companies are spending 50 billion right now to build these supercomputers to build AI models. So what does this mean? And what am I seeing? What am I hearing? I think the deepest pockets. The Metas, the Microsofts, the Amazons, and the smartest minds are all focused singularly on developing AI. I think artificial intelligence is here, and behind all this investment. It's going to improve really quickly. And I think last year you might listen to a podcast with an AI researcher who will tell you human level intelligence or AGI is going to take a decade or two. I'm now hearing very credible people say that it's going to take two years.

Ryan Eaton: Wow, that's a big difference.

Suril Kantaria Yeah. So it's crazy. And I think all that means for any of us who are working in businesses and, out there front lines, like selling products, selling services, I think it's probably time to put on your cowboy boots, giddy up, get in, invest in AI, call us, call me, email me sterile at adaptional dot AI. But I think the businesses that move quickly to adopt AI will ultimately have a better business, and they'll be better positioned to succeed in this post AI world, which may already be here. And I think a lot about, if you're not first, you're last and now is not a good time to be last.

Ryan Eaton: Man, I couldn't agree more. Surreal, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being on the show today, this was great information from your experience and starting a company, selling a company to what you're doing right now in the AI space, super helpful, man. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it.

Suril Kantaria Yeah, it's fun, right?

Ryan Eaton: This is a good time. We'll look for everyone listening in, we sure do appreciate you listening today. And remember the insurance leadership podcast, a good plan today is better than a great plan months from now. Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it.