Roots Automation at ITC Vegas 2024: Key Takeaways and Lessons Learned

ITC Vegas 2024 marked Roots’ biggest-ever participation at insurance’s premier technology summit. The conference also created unprecedented opportunities for meaningful engagement with insurance innovation leaders.

Here are some highlights

At "Risk Re-AI-magined, Presented by EY," moderator Michelle Collignon from EY was joined by Tokio Marine’s Robert Pick, Matthew Dobrin from Marsh and Roots’ Co-founder & CEO, Chaz Perera to exchange perspectives on how AI is transforming the underwriting landscape.

The session surfaced critical insights on leveraging AI to address the industry's talent challenges while maximizing value in underwriter-agent relationships. Among the salient points was Dobrin’s sharing of best practices for getting data “right” to improve risk prediction accuracy, including guidance on un-siloing data to improve underwriting workflows.

"You Can’t Prompt Your Way to Greatness"

Also, in this session, Perera delineated the difference between AI purpose-built for insurance and public AI solutions adapted for use by insurance customers.

Solving underwriting challenges around unstructured data requires more than prompt engineering or branded public AI solutions. Accomplishing this requires an insurance mindset, AI engineering, and a multi-modal solution trained in deep insurance data. This disciplined approach is fundamental as the industry faces the challenge of quoting and pricing accurately amid rapidly evolving market conditions and regulatory environments.

Championing Women's Leadership in Insurance

As a proud co-sponsor of the Women's Leadership Forum for the second consecutive year, Roots Automation continued its efforts to promote diversity in insurance leadership.

The Forum’s centerpiece, a panel discussion with Alchemy Crew's Sabine VanderLinden, USAA’s Debra Deck and Hosta AI’s Ingrid Flores, addressed a critical industry challenge: the lack of female senior leaders.

Women comprise nearly 60% of the insurance workforce, yet they hold less than 25% of C-suite positions—a disparity even more pronounced in the Insurtech sector. The panel exchanged their strategies for creating inclusive organizations and expanding leadership opportunities, emphasizing the importance of "making the table bigger" to include more voices and points of view and restructuring business functions to ensure equal representation.

The event opened with introductory notes from Roots' Ellen Haas and a video montage from our Celebrating Women in Insurance interview series.

Cracking the Code—Parameters for Attaining Maximum ROI from Gen Ai

Roots Automation hosted a significant Meet-Up and roundtable discussion titled "100x Your Underwriting & Claims Performance." Moderated by Lisa Wardlaw of 360 Digital Immersion, the session brought together industry experts, including Eric Pollock (Erie Insurance), Lynn Thompson (QBE Ventures), Anand Rao (Carnegie-Melon University) and Roots' John Cottongim.

The panelists exchanged views on successfully moving AI into production for high ROI, including the importance of applying human capital best practices to AI. Getting to 100x improvement is a holistic enterprise—one that begins with a focus on use cases where AI can best augment human performance. Like its human counterparts, Generative AI solutions require initial training (training) and continuous upskilling (fine-tuning) to build and grow a "resume" of capabilities. Ultimately, this enables expert performance through sustained feedback and interaction.

Exchanges like these are why ITC plays such a big role for developing and promoting our products, thought leadership and brand. Once again, the event delivered an enlightening summit for engaging and learning at the critical intersection of AI and insurance. We're hard at work planning to make an even bigger impact at ITC Vegas 2025.