#164 Harnessing AI: Transforming the Future of Surety

Well, you know, I guess AI is here, right? But what does that mean? I mean, what is artificial intelligence? You know, there's a lot of promise and there also seems to be a lot of misconceptions.

Would anybody want to kind of delve into what you're seeing and why that might be a misconception? So what is

AI? Well, if you believe the movies, it's something that we're all going to end up dying for.

I do not believe that.

Artificial intelligence, I think, are computer systems that can help us organize vast amounts of information and data and use it to our advantage, stated very simply.

So what we've seen is the ability for AI to consume massive amounts of data and put it in a place where we as humans can understand it and use it and figure out a way to be better at our jobs than what we are today.

There's a lot more to it.

It's a very deep topic, but that's one of the big values we see.

And

the surety industry has a lot of data, right? Absolutely.

We're data-driven.

But we need to be more efficient,

perhaps? Yes.

If you look at surety companies and even the surety space, there are a lot of jobs where there's just manual data entry.

You look at the amount of data that passes through a surety transaction and the fact that you have four different parties involved in that transaction, what kinds of problems does that present? Well, now I've got that data being entered once, twice, three times.

So how do we solve those kinds of problems that get that data to flow? And we see some promise with AI being able to help us get across some of those hurdles and sharing that information across the industry.

I also think, Mark, that while Surety started with efficiency and still have lots of opportunity there, we're now moving into Using AI more for the knowledge management or knowledge management in addition to make better informed decisions, bringing analytics and all the other information that can be gathered in the underwriting decision, not to make the decision for the underwriter, but to enable them to make a better decision and possibly make it faster.

Facilitate, augment maybe.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that AI is allowing us to do is take that unstructured data.

So the documents, right? So nobody wants to go through a hundred page contract to pull out the various information that they need.

I mean, it

sounds fun.

Yes,

it does.