If history has taught us anything, it's that big decisions are hard to make for an entire industry.

That's why the great data decision will likely be made for us because technology will get there first.

We won't need to agree on the best standard language for applications.

In half a decade, machine learning algorithms will more than likely be able to handle anything we throw at them.

Ron Glozman, Founder & CEO of Chisel AI, talks about what we can do today to reinvent paperwork and what it should look like in the future.

Joey Giangola: Mr. Ron Glozman, how you doing today, sir?

Ron Glozman: I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for asking.

Joey Giangola: Ron, I want to start here first to kind of ease into things, and really quickly, I want to know what's a feeling that you don't have often enough, like it's a rare thing, but you really probably should have it more often for your personal sanity?

Ron Glozman: Honestly, gratitude. I'm big on meditation and mindfulness. One of the practices that recently has become a little bit more of the forethought of my thinking is about gratitude, because I think oftentimes we can get trapped either in business or in our personal life, just thinking about the past or the future, but never really being present. I find when you're grateful, that's really one way to really live in the now, because that's when you're experiencing that. I was grateful today when I got my air conditioning fixed, and I know that might not be a big thing, but I had no AC for a month, and when the guy finally fixed it, I was just so grateful to him in that moment specifically. It was a good feeling, because it was like somebody helped me out, and it was a good feeling.

Joey Giangola: I mean, listen, being too hot, it's very dangerous. That actually happens, it's a thing. That's a very deep answer, I like that, Ron. For me personally, it's a little shallower, but I would say it's just having enough time, not being rushed. Just having that feeling where, hey, I really don't have to do anything for like 20 minutes, and I'm fine with that. It doesn't happen. It's a very weird set of circumstances that happens. It's not quite just not having something to do, it's just knowing that you could take your time and nothing's going to happen. But, yeah, yours is better, so we'll stick with that.

Let's move that over to insurance. Right? Because, I think the interesting thing is, is that there are many feelings that we wish we could have in the insurance industry, and oftentimes they are lacking and we do not find the ability to have them often. What's sort of at the top of your list? I know you're trying to bring your own set of feelings to the insurance industry, but what's the thing that stands out to you most?

Ron Glozman: A feeling, or what specifically, just to be clear?

Joey Giangola: I mean, just in general about just the overall way that insurance is conducted. The things that we generally take for granted, or again, aren't paying attention to enough to where maybe we are overworking ourselves in certain areas where we could make things easier.

Ron Glozman: Love it, yeah. I mean, my whole life, or not my whole life, but I'll say this. A large part of the last eight to 10 years of my life has been really focused around paperwork. I know paperwork can sound a little bit unsexy, and it's not something that people talk about, but it's something that unfortunately we spend, especially in the insurance industry, most of our day in paperwork, whether that's email paperwork, PDF paperwork, Excel paperwork, Word docs. You name it, it's some type of paperwork. I think there's a great opportunity for insurance to really change the way we interact with documents, because the way that we interact with documents today is very inefficient.

We're basically asking a customer to fill in 50 to 100 questions. Then my favorite part is, only a subset of those questions are actually used for rating. It's like, well, why did we then have to put them through all of the unnecessary questions? Then once you have the rating, you then still have this long quote, which has to be read by an agent, and then multiple quotes, if they're doing a good job to compare against the different options, and then try to explain that to the customer, and all of this is basically people sending paperwork around.

I think there's a much better way to do it, much more intuitive, where instead of having to read Word documents, you can ask questions, like, am I covered for fire damage? Then instead of having to read all of the alarm clauses on all of these things that complicate it, you can just be like, yep, you're covered for fire damage. Here's how much, here's the exclusions, et cetera. I'm very passionate about the ability for insurance and computers and machine learning to really help us interact with machines and paperwork in a much more natural way than we do today, because I don't think anybody likes reading 100 page long or 100 question long Word docs. I'm very excited about that for the industry.

Joey Giangola: Well Ron, I mean, outside of describing the holy grail for insurance, I mean, let's I guess maybe walk that back a little bit. Is there something, which obviously that all sounds fantastic. Is there a simple way to start that, in terms of, let's just say, I know that there's a lot of money being thrown into, we'll call it the insurtech space, right. But, is there a way that you would just say simply back to the simple gratitude of managing that. Is there one way that you've said, how do I limit my interaction with this? How do I manage it more efficiently, with maybe the tools that I already have? That might be an impossible question.

 Ron Glozman: Yeah, I mean, I would start with "the mail room," and I think that's hopefully just a philosophical term and hopefully you're not actually receiving mail. But, I would start there, which is the cataloging, the documentation, the ingestion process of these documents. Good data is the most important thing, because good data allows you to make informed decisions. Before you can get to predictive analytics and customer segmentation and all these cool things that are possible, you have to start with good clean data. I would say make sure that you have good systems, and that you don't have silos. I think one problem that I often encounter when I talk to agents and agencies, is that they're like, yeah, we have six different systems, and this lives over here and this lives over there, and they don't talk to each other, and I got to put the same information into them. All of that is ripe for opportunity.

That's actually where we started, is being able to just read information and put it into as many systems as necessary. Because, it's inefficient for somebody to have to sit there and to do copy paste, which we've seen, unfortunately, is the reality sometimes. It could be as simple as your mail room. Just making sure that you ingest the information and get the data once, and then basically make sure you have good communication via APIs or something else, so that you're not doing data entry multiple times.

Joey Giangola: All right, so let's stay on that single entry sort of thread there. I guess, how far, because if you had to ask me, I would think that there's a lot of agencies that have a long way to go to get there. Right? Is that something that should be a true statement today, or are there opportunities to maybe get there faster in terms of having to only input data once and put it in one place, and never have to really move it around again?

Ron Glozman: For sure. I mean, not to toot our own horn a little bit, but that's sort of where the company that I'm from and what we specialize in, which is [inaudible]. I know there's other competitors out there, so I'll speak more broadly. But, basically, there's companies out there that offer you the ability to ingest documents, we're talking PDFs, emails, Excels, Word docs, everything I named earlier, and they can produce for you an XML, a JSON, or a CSV. All of those are just fancy file types. Really, all that means is it's a well structured format. You can then take that well structured format and feed it into your CRM system; Salesforce, HubSpot. If you use something else, no problem. You can then feed it into your Vertafore, Sagitta, KEEL, whatever else you need to get it into, you can get it there.

I would say it's definitely a reality. There are many, not many. There are many companies who claim they can do it. There are a couple of companies who can actually do it. But, I do think that if you know where to look and you're willing to make the investment, now obviously, there's a little bit of monetary costs attached to it, there's a little bit of process management, there's a little bit of training. There's a couple of things that come along with it, but if you're willing to make those investments, you will reap the rewards. As you said, I think we're very much in the early stages of early adopters or early majority. I think this can be a competitive advantage. I don't think you're behind if you don't have it. I think if you don't have it in two years, you'll definitely be behind. But, right now is definitely the time to be thinking about it.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, and that's a good point in terms of where this sort of is. When you talked about process and training, and what have you found in terms of increasing the efficiencies of, again, the day to day insurance life, when these sorts of things are finally in place and streamlined, what kind of overall impact does, again, not touching this stuff five or six times like we've been conditioned to, what does that do to the workflow of the agency?

Ron Glozman: Yeah, I mean, it gives people time back to provide better customer service. I think at the end of the day, the more time agents can be with the policyholders; in front of them, talking to them, servicing them, advising them, the better it will be for customer retention, obviously. The better it'll allow them to know their customer, be able to advise them. We've seen processes that used to take somewhere between two to four hours, sometimes multiple days, come down to 30 minutes. When you do that time delta, three hours, four hours a day of time saved is worth, you can do the math based on your agency, but it's worth a lot. That time is then spent, again, being in front of the customer, or going out, talking, building better carrier relationships, getting better commission rates, whatever you can do with that time to better service your agency and the policyholder.

Joey Giangola: I want to go back to something real quick around the idea, like you said, everything doesn't talk to each other. It's in six different systems, and again, if you had to take a poll across the industry, I would say that a lot of people think that that is the reality that we're living in. But, how are we getting things to talk to things more efficiently? Do you, in your opinion, think that we do have enough systems talking to each other, or are there still bottlenecks that we need to work through?

Ron Glozman: I'll start with the second one. The answer's yes. Not enough systems, lots of bottlenecks. I mean, I think part of it is it's an age old question that I don't have an answer to. One of which is, what is the right standard? Because, obviously ACORD is something people are familiar with. ACORD's been around for like 30 years. I think they say they have 5,000 member organizations, but that's only 30% of all paperwork, at least based on our experience and everybody we talk to. Only 30% of the paper, and we specifically work a lot in commercial, and we work a lot in the P&C space, so it might be different depending on the book of business and what you write. But, where we write, ACORD's less than 50%. Then you're left with, okay, what standard should we use? Whose standard is it? I don't really have an answer for that, but APIs is definitely the way to go. Then, once we have APIs, then we need a good standard in the middle. That's where we hope Chisel can hopefully become the standard, or we're happy to partner with companies like ACORD and work on a standard.

Joey Giangola: All right, so back to the APIs then. Do you think, because again, everybody sort of either talks about it, like, yeah, we have API integration, but then that's limited. I mean, break that down a little bit more. Also again, agencies do like to toss around I need API, even though they might not necessarily know why or what or all the things. More specifically, how can we have more meaningful conversations around the integration of the data that we should be, a right's a strong word, but really just, I mean, ultimately be able to pass one way back and forth to each other?

Ron Glozman: I think you hit the nail on the head. It comes down to communication would be my word. It's funny, because API literally stands for, it's an automated program interface, or an application program interface. But, it's also basically a communication layer, is a really layman's way to put it. Where many systems fall down is one company or one database refers to company, and another one calls it organization name. Even just that minutia of a difference, to a human you'd be like, of course, that's the same thing, but for a computer it's not the same thing, unfortunately. It's like two completely different worlds.

It comes down to communication, and we spend a lot of our time on the upfront part of a project, specifically defining the API. What keys are we looking for? Okay, you want the name, the organization name. Wonderful. How are we going to call it? Is it called org name, organization, organization name? Is it capitalized? Are there spaces? All of these things when you get down into it, it's more of a science than an art, because a lot of people sort of are like, oh, it's very simple. But, with computers, nothing is very simple. It all has to be very well documented and explained.

I would say any project that you're working on, just to say I need an API is almost not a statement.. You need to say, okay, here are the keys that I want here is how I'm going to name them. Here is how the data's going to be consumed. They're going to have commas, it's going to be accurate to one thousandths of a dollar or 10 thousandths of a dollar, or we're just going to ignore and just going to work with whole dollars. All of these different decisions need to be made and defined. When somebody comes and says I have an API, like you said, it's almost a non statement.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, all right. I mean, I'm getting a lot of anxiety over here as you're sort of talking about, just again, the amount of subtle differences that exist across the insurance, just in the language and the terminology. I'm sure he probably keeps you up at night. I don't know how many times you've woken up with cold sweats, but I would imagine it's a decent amount. I guess what I'm asking is, is at what point, again, establishing that standard becomes at some point maybe a few tile fight. I don't know, like you said, if you can get everybody on the same page, or it's at what point would you think the processing of that subtle variation becomes advanced enough to where it doesn't need to be as precise as it needs to?

Ron Glozman: Yes. That's the other side of the puzzle, is that's where machine learning can come in. Machine learning is very, very good at using statistics and past data to make inference based on future predictions based on new inputs. What that really means is you can be less specific about what you're looking for, and the machine can still find it. I would say, today, we're probably still not quite there. There's still a lot of machine learning, a lot of models need to be tuned specific to the data set. But, I would say in two to five years, we will probably have models that are accurate enough such that they don't have a standard per se. They can read a workers comp policy, and it really doesn't matter who the carrier is or what state it's in, it'll be able to read and understand it, because today a lot of the systems are actually like carrier specific, sometimes even state specific because there's slightly different rules within each. Right? A lot of that else I would say in two to five years will be abstracted away, but today it's not quite there yet.

Joey Giangola: Basically what I heard you say, Ron, is that we will probably have to rely on machine learning to set the standard before we actually agree on a standard.

Ron Glozman: That is, yes, that's a great way to put it. Thank you. See, you make me sound so much more eloquent.

Joey Giangola: Well, I mean, I just want to summarize, because again, like you said, just knowing the way things move in insurance, it would seem logical that ,given that timeframe, I would imagine that we're not going to agree on anything that fast, but I could be wrong. Well, I guess, what do you think?

Ron Glozman: No, I think you actually hit the nail on the head. You're totally right. I think the company, I don't know how many, two or three companies that'll end up winning the space will end up defining the standard before any one organization or any group of organizations comes together, it will be the winning two or three companies who just say, okay guys, here's the API, here's how it's called, here's how it's defined. Everybody's just going to learn to ingest it.

Joey Giangola: All right, so I don't know if we can actually do this, but it sounds fun and we're going to give it a shot. If you had to align a tech stack, technology stack for an agency, things that sort of work nicely and play nicely together, what would be your roll call that you would maybe just say like a little map? I don't know if we can do this, but it sounds fun and I kind of want to see what happens.

Ron Glozman: Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. I've never worked in an agency, so I'm not thinking payroll and billing and all that stuff, but I can speak more on the tech side. What I've seen work well is, it depends on the budget, but I would say big, big, big budget, I know Salesforce is starting to become a real big player in the space with their underwriting desktop. It works pretty well. A lot of obviously solutions are already built on top of Salesforce, so if I was to start today, I would probably use Salesforce as my CRM. Another really good one is HubSpot. That's definitely on more like the cheap side, much more cost-effective. Big fan of HubSpot, honestly. I know that they invest a lot in their product, and that there's a lot of tools that integrate well with it. Then I would also look at things like, you tell me, but can I talk about our product?

Joey Giangola: Yeah, go for it.

Ron Glozman: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I would look at things like automated policy checking, because I know one of the big problems, and same thing with a quote comparison. Any type that you have to do, a lot of reading, I think that's a great use for technology. I have things that seem like automated quote comparison tools, that's something that we offer, automated policy checking tools to make sure you don't have errors and omissions. Anything that you can do to reduce that is a great one. Another one is KYC technology. If you can reduce, and again, this is a little bit more on the carrier side, but still as a broker, if you can pull a lot of the information just based on the address, for example, you can get the land size, you can get what year the building was built, what's the material.

A lot of these things are actually public record, and make it a better customer experience so that they don't have to sit there and actually fill it out themselves. I would look at tools that can do that. There's a couple of them out there on the market that just pull third-party data sources. Literally, you just need a name of a business and the address, or the name of a person at an address, and it will get you almost everything you need to auto-populate a application. Things like that I think will put yo head and shoulders above any of the current solutions or agencies that I've seen out there that aren't tech enabled.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ron, fantastic stuff. I thought that was a fun little experiment. If you had to pick one piece of technology that you thought agents maybe don't utilize enough, or that you don't see implemented enough across the industry, what's that one thing?

Ron Glozman: Honestly, just to start with OCR, optical character recognition. This goes back to the mail room that we were talking about. I've seen a lot of times people will scan things, but they won't digitize things. They don't realize the difference, because when you just scan something to a PDF or PNG, it's just an image, and what it means is it's not searchable. It's basically useless for any real data science purposes. I would say go out there, like Abbyy is a very big company. Google has great OCR technology, like Amazon, IBM, everybody has OCR today. I actually don't know who has the best, do your own trial. But, I would say start with digitizing your documents.

It's not just about scanning. Once you've scanned them, make sure you use OCR. I can't tell you the amount of times I come into an agency and they're like, yeah, I don't know what OCR is, or I don't know how to use OCR. Just that most basic thing, because then you could literally do control+F and search for words. If you have multiple files, you can then search for a term across multiple files simultaneously. It's really, really powerful technology, super cheap, super affordable, not going to break the bank. But, I think it'll make a difference for your business.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ron, I got three more questions for you. First one, very simply, what is one thing that you hope you never forget?

Ron Glozman: How hard it is to go from zero to one. I think you can think about it financially or from experience or from work ethic. To me, it's all of those things. But, it's so hard to go from something to nothing. Because obviously, once you have a million dollars, compound interest, you're good for life. You can just retire, basically. Right? It's very, very easy once you have something to make more of that something. But, when you have nothing it's so hard. I would say staying humble is another part of that. But, I would say I worry sometimes the way society is going that, especially maybe my generation with Instagram and social media and all these things, people are very fake, and I'm not a fan of that. I hope that I never forget like how hard it is, and to be humble and all those things.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ron, now on the other side of that, what's one thing you still have yet to learn?

Ron Glozman: Oh my god. They say that the more you know, the more you know the less you know. I think I butchered that, but basically the more you realize that there is things out there, the less you know. I'll say that the thing that I'm most focused on right now is honestly personal development. I've spent the last eight to 10 years of my life really, really focused on my business, and everything's been about the business. I want to spend the next maybe eight years of my life thinking about me, what I want to do with my life, what I want to do with my family, et cetera. For me, I would say personal development is something that I want to learn, just because I've always been very business oriented, and so I need to work a little bit on the personal side.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ron, last question to you, sir. Now, we might've already scorched this question to the ground because we've talked about quite a bit of it, but if I were to hand you a magic wand of sorts to reshape, change, alter, speed up, really any area of insurance, what is that thing, where's it going, and what is it doing?

Ron Glozman: I would say this. I would say the cost of insurance. It's sort of like a non-answer, but I'll explain to you why. One statistic that's still blows my mind, and I think the company that nails this will be the first trillion dollar insurance company. I don't know, but something big, they'll be extremely successful, is micro-insurance. Because, two-thirds of the world doesn't have insurance. If you think about Africa, or many parts that are not as affluent as we might be in north America where they live on $2, $3 a day or less, those people still need to ensure their goats. A lot of these people are farmers, so they make sustenance to create their wealth, but they can't afford the insurance on crops. That is very sad to me to think about that. It's a problem that I think a lot about. I haven't seen anybody solve it.

I would say if I could magically wave this wand, I would say it be the ability for everybody in the world to get insurance. Now, obviously that'd be very hard to do, because it's cost-prohibitive, I know. This is where part of, I hope my company can help solve it, is if we can bring down the cost of all the backend paperwork, instead of paying somebody $200 worth of time to check a policy, pay us $10, take that $190 and reduce the premium, that's a win for me. If we can do that enough times and drive premiums down, hopefully we can get everybody top insurance, everybody who wants insurance to have insurance. That would be my magic wand.

Joey Giangola: Ron, this has been fantastic, sir. I'm going to leave it right there.

Ron Glozman: Awesome. Thank you for having me.