The Ryan Hanley Show - Redefining AI: Boosting Your Business and Navigating Potential Blind Spots
Episode Date: October 9, 2023Became a Master of the Close: https://masteroftheclose.comPrepare to redefine your perception of AI as we delve into its influence in the industry and expose the potential blind spots you never saw co...ming. ** Connect **▸ Website: https://findingpeak.com▸ Instagram: https://instagram.com/ryan_hanley▸ Subscribe to the Podcast: https://findingpeak.com/podcast*** More About the Episode ***Get ready to utilize AI to elevate your human touch in your agency rather than allowing it to replace you. On this journey of discovery, we share our personal experiences using AI-enhancing tools, such as Wonderchat, and provide insights on how it's changing the face of our agency. An important conversation is on the cards about the impact of groundbreaking companies like Lemonade and Snapsheet on the industry.Our mission is to encourage you to experiment with AI and highlight the importance of setting aside a “mess around” budget for testing new tools, technologies, and techniques. You'll hear the success story of our guest, who dared to test a new tool and won big, emphasizing the need to keep an open mind to excel. We conclude by dissecting how to use AI as a lever for success in the industry, offering valuable insights for those looking to harness the power of AI in their businesses.This episode is packed with thought-provoking discussions, from implementing AI as an amplification tool to introducing you to the concept of a human-optimized insurance agency. We reveal how AI can revolutionize customer experiences, expedite claims, and make policy and underwriting decisions faster. Our chat about the use of AI tools in automating tasks, saving time, and providing invaluable insights is not to be missed. It's time for you to learn, experiment, and thrive in the AI revolution. So, buckle up and join us on this AI adventure!#ai #leadership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
Today we have a tremendous episode for you.
This is a brand new keynote that I did for Inditech 2023.
Now, I have shared previous keynotes that I've done on the podcast,
and this is one you've never heard before.
And the reason for that is I was asked by Jason Kass when he had kind of brought me in to be the keynote,
and he had said, you know, I want you to do something on technology
and something that you've never done before. And I was up for the challenge. I was
excited. I hadn't created a brand new keynote in a while. And I was very happy with the way that
this came out because it outlines what I see as a potential blind spot for our industry and really
anybody. So if you are not part of the insurance industry
and you're listening to this podcast, understand that take out insurance agency and input your
business. This is not necessarily specific to the insurance industry, although I was
speaking to a insurance specific audience, so it's tailored for them um there is a blind spot that i see in the use of
ai now i love ai i use it in my personal work i use it at rogue risk we we you know big fan of ai
there's no debate on whether it's coming or not the ai is here it is going to be part of our
lives it's going to be part of our business lives and i think to avoid it is to move forward in kind of intentional ignorance. And that's not
a place that I ever want to operate. And I nor do I think you should. So I think we should know
what AI is, how you implement it, where you implement it, that's your choice. But I think
you should at least know what's going on. That being said, there are some blind spots, and we
highlight a huge one. And I was really happy with
the way that it came off. I'm going to make you listen to the podcast so you actually get what
that blind spot is. But guys, I think you're going to like that. Now, a big, big change here. You may
be seeing new artwork, new name of the podcast, Finding Peak. The artwork has changed. The name
has changed. And the reason is I kind of wanted to get away from this being like the Ryan Hanley show, like all about me. I want it to be about you. All my work, I want to be about
you, the audience. And with finding Peak, really, you know, this is kind of, I don't want to say
documenting, but it's a derivative of the things that I do in my own life to find Peak performance
in all aspects of my life. I want to be the best dad I can be. And if I'm in a relationship, I want to be the best partner I can be. If I'm as a leader,
I want to be the best leader I can. If I'm speaking, I want to be the best speaker I can.
These core things to who I am, I want to be the absolute best version of them that I can be,
that I am possible of being. And that journey has taken me to a bunch of different places,
met a bunch of incredibly interesting people.
And I want to start to share that journey with you.
And it's going to take two forms.
One is going to be the Monday mindset.
I've been a little sporadic with that.
That's on purpose.
I wanted to kind of tease out that idea.
But every Monday moving forward,
we're going to have a short form video
that's going to come out on YouTube and through the podcast.
All of it will always be free. I'm kind of breaking down one of these concepts, just tight, punchy, bam, this is get
your mind right kind of thing. And then on Thursdays, we're going to have interviews with
thought leaders from all over the world, all over the country, every different industry. These are
people who are dominating what they do and have something that they can share with you guys that will help you find the best version of yourself.
I'm very excited about this transition.
Also, guys, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, the newsletter is completely unique
content.
You will not see this content in other places.
This is content that I am delivering to people who've kind of invested in Finding Peak. Now it's free,
absolutely 100% free. You just go, you plug in your email. But guys, when other people have
hobbies that they do and things that they do, what I do is I write, I read and I write. That's like
my hobby. So, you know, at 5am when I'm up getting my reading in and then I have some thoughts,
I mean, the next thing I do is I take those,
I kind of get whatever the derivative ideas are and then I share them.
I share them on Instagram.
So if you're not following me on Instagram,
you know, really short form, punchy stuff on Instagram,
putting in a lot of work there.
Been picked up by a couple of big channels.
We're now, we're close to 70,000 followers on Instagram,
which is really cool.
That's been a fun experience.
And then the newsletter. So it's gonna be the podcast, the newsletter and Instagram. That's been a fun experience. And then the
newsletter. So it's going to be the podcast, the newsletter and Instagram. Those are gonna be the
three places I'm gonna spend the most time with this type of content, right? Obviously our strategy
for rogue risk is completely different and platforms are different and messaging is different.
But for this kind of peak performance stuff, those are the places if you enjoy it, would love it.
Tell a friend, um, guys, if you haven't, there's thousands and thousands and
thousands of you that listen to this show. But we only have 45 reviews on iTunes. And I know this
seems like kind of a trite ask. But if you listen on iTunes or you listen on Spotify, leaving us a
rating and review, leaving us, I keep saying us, leaving me a rating and review of this show
helps me get bigger guests. Like literally some of these guests, they look at your ratings and reviews
and they're like, ah.
So it would be an enormous solid for me if you listen on Spotify
or you listen on iTunes to just jump over there,
leave a rating and review of the show.
It helps me tremendously bring in new guests.
I don't need it for my ego, frankly.
If I had zero ratings and reviews, I would still do the show.
But it does help me get some bigger and badder kind of guests because you know they they
have limited time and they want to spend their time with people who they know are legit and
and it just helps show that so I appreciate the hell out of you guys for listening to us I hope
you enjoy this keynote on artificial intelligence growth and building margin in your business
and as always this is the way.
When Cass asked me to talk about tech, I was actually surprised. It's not in my core. I use it.
I understand it. When I speak to you today, it is solely because the things that we do
at Rogue Risk and the things that I've done in my career, they work for us, right? I have no intrinsic love for technology. Truth, I was born in the woods. I'm a country kid by heart. I would
rather not use tech, much to probably your surprise considering how much I post on social media.
I actually hate the fact that I carry around this phone in my pocket. I would rather people didn't
call me, didn't text me, and that I was unavailable. So what we're talking about here, the things that we're going to talk about, the tools, the technology, we'll see. It seems to work.
This is all from my own beats. These are things that I've tested, that I've put into my agency,
or have worked with companies that I've seen actually work in mine. So when I titled this
presentation, Growth Margin and World Domination, that's all that I really care about is growing my business, separating myself from my competitors
and making all my own wildest dreams come true. So if these work for you, I hope that you'll try
them. If they don't, they don't, but we're going to find out how I got to these solutions at the
end. Is that fair? And if you have any questions, and I know Big E down here in the front will most likely have some questions, raise your hand, right? It's a lot more
fun when I get to answer the things that you actually are interested in and not just the
things that I want to blather about. Is that cool? Is that a good agreement? We feel good about that?
You guys seem super jacked, right? Super jacked so far. Okay. So let's get into this.
I focused most of my time on AI mostly because I think there are plenty of technologists out here,
some of which are doing things with AI, some aren't, that can give you a lot better feel for
kind of the tried and true technology that we've dealt with. What I am the most interested in currently is AI tools, tools implementing AI, or whatever we want to call AI. I'm sure there's some nerd
out there who's like, Ryan, it's not really AI. It's machine learning, and you don't understand.
It's all just decision trees. Yeah, I get it. But again, not a technologist. I just use it,
and it's really fun that I can now say AI without you thinking I'm crazy. Because 10 years ago, when Cass and I would talk about AI, literally,
we'd have articles written about us in the insurance journal and IA magazine telling us
that we were jerks and that we were setting you all on the wrong path. So it is fun that we finally,
we were right the whole time and they were actually the jerks, not us. So when I think
about this technology and how implementing it, I don't think
of it as replacing humans. I think of it as amplifying humans, right? I think that this is
how we think about it in our own agency. I do a lot of testing in my own personal side work with
my own clients. These are amplification tools, not tools to replace our people. And we're going
to get to why I think that is so important in a second. But if we start thinking about the technology that is available,
particularly artificial intelligence, and ways in which we can replace the people in our agency,
I think that's how we lose. That's how we fail. Because what artificial intelligence is trying
to do, what everyone who is involved in this industry is trying to do, is become more human.
And if we make the mistake of becoming less human to try to add technology, that's where we fail.
Does that make sense?
When I see people who are struggling with this, when I see people who are having a hard time implementing,
when I see technology that is implemented into our space and doesn't work, it's because it is taking a step away from what makes us
so special, what makes us so unique, why we have thrived in local communities across this
country for so long has been us.
It's been the little idiosyncrasies, the fact that Mitch decided to show up with sparkly
vans today, right?
There is someone who does business with him that appreciates about him, that makes him special,
and that is something that triggers a thought in their mind. It makes him human. That he would wear,
I think they're beautiful, some of you may think they're disgusting, who knows? It doesn't matter,
it makes him him. And what we do not want to do with any technology that we implement into our business, be it our AMS system, our phone system,
how we text, our marketing automation systems, or the new AI tools that have come down the pipe,
we never want to take a step back away from the human aspect of our business. Now at Rogue Risk,
so again, we're going to have to change
our things. At Rogue Risk, we think of it as human optimized, right? When I first started my
agency, so I'm a CEO and founder of an agency called Rogue Risk. We founded March 9th of 2020,
seven days before the zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York. I'm not allowed to say the
C word or YouTube will not cast down a couple
points if this ever gets posted. So we'll just call it the zombie apocalypse. And I'm seven days
into my business and about $50,000 in the hole. And my business got shut down right in front of
me. We work only with small businesses. That's what we were founded on. And every single small
business in the country was now had its doors shut, its phones off, and everyone was at home.
That was a dark, dark day.
And while I probably kept the bourbon business going during that time in order to mentally cope
with the depression that I was feeling,
I also got to spend a large amount of time
thinking about who we wanted to be, really.
And the first thing I wrote down
was the term that you see on the screen,
currently human optimized.
What I wanted to do was build an agency that allowed our people
to be at their best as often as they could be.
Because when I think about the struggles that we have,
the stuff that Keith just talked about, right?
The stuff Keith just talked about, using your AMS.
When we make mistakes, when we diminish our agency,
it's because we have our people doing transactional tasks that add no value to our customers,
right? Collecting data is not a value proposition for our agency. Transacting a car change is not
a value to our agency, right? Taking payment information is not a value to our customers. Our customers place zero value on that activity.
They don't go, you know what, Mitch?
He takes credit card payments like no other agent in the country.
You should hear the way he repeats my credit card number back to me on the phone.
It's amazing. I love it. It's why I do business with him.
No one says that.
They can't wait to get through that part of the process. Yet we'll take, if we, you know,
in a way that I wrote this down, this is how my brain worked through this process. So you
understand. I thought of a 20 minute time block that we have, say, say every employee is a 20
minute time block to spend with a customer and free automation, free, you pre-AI wasn't a thing then really.
What we would do in a traditional process is we would take 15 of those minutes
and we would struggle through the first five with the customer as fast as we possibly could
because we knew we needed 15 of those minutes to actually do the transaction that they needed us to do.
So now we're not building rapport.
We're not building relationships.
We're not asking them questions about their favorite color or who they think is going
to win the Super Bowl.
We're just gathering information, ripping through that communication and getting them
off the phone as fast as possible because then we got to log into some archaic crazy
system, figure out how to navigate the spider web of clicks and forms that we have to get to just to input their credit card number in. What I wanted to do was build a
system and we're gonna walk through the exact system that and so you know Rogan
only three years old something we're doing today is still aspirational in its
completion but we'll we'll talk about that what I want to do is flip that on
its head I wanted my team members, and at the
time it was just me, so myself, I wanted to be able to spend 15 minutes on the phone with that person,
getting to know them, what they're interested in, what other things could I possibly ensure
from them, what other business problems did they have. I wanted to be able to spend 15 minutes on
the phone with them and create systems, processes, automations, outsourcing,
so that I only need to spend five minutes on the transaction. And to me, what I called that
was a human-optimized agency, where the humans got to do what they do best, which is be human.
Because we do business with people that we like and trust and know. And if we're only spending five minutes on the phone with somebody, we have to have multiple interactions in order to build that trust, in order to like them, in order to get to know them.
Where I wanted to have one call, one singular call, you liked me, you trusted me, and you knew me.
And the only way that was possible is if I didn't have to spend all that time on the back end.
And when I think about what's coming down the pipe in terms of technology,
that becomes a reality.
We can use some of the systems that are out here.
We can use some of the systems that are, that you can,
SaaS tools that you can just purchase online.
We're going to talk about a few of those that we use in our agency. And we can create an agency where our humans are actually on display.
Now, you may be going, I don't, Tommy's a little nuts. I actually don't want him talking to people.
You know, I get that. But we can get our humans in a position where they can really do what they
do best, which is build relationships? And that's why people stay.
That's why people refer to us.
That's why people buy more stuff from us.
Is that a value proposition we can buy?
Some of you are nodding.
Some of you are still hungover.
I can't tell which it is.
Mitch looks hungover.
All right.
So here is just a, you know, kind of when I think about margin and I think about growth, I drew this.
I'm not a drawer.
But I wanted to add a little bit of humanity to my presentation, a little counterculture against this tech stuff, Cass.
This is what I see.
When we look at best practices and we look at, you know, I'm not a big fan of best practices because if you operate a best practices agency, I know how to beat you.
Right?
I know your battle plan.
Right?
You follow the best practices that everyone else follows.
One, you're just following along.
You're not unique.
And two, I know exactly what you're doing and how to beat you.
That's just my take.
That's a little sidebar.
That's a little bonus on the talk.
That one wasn't in the slides.
But two, I know that you probably grow at a fixed rate,
somewhere between three to 10%.
And if it's a good year or it's a hard market like it is now
and rates go up, maybe you grow a little more.
But when you talk in actual account size growth,
like account number growth,
you just have a nice linear incremental growth
because you are
spending 15 minutes transacting and five minutes relationship building. And when you flip that
number on its head, when you build a true human optimized agency, what you start to see is
geometric or even exponential growth. And you start to build that space between you and
the competition because now, now you're, you might feel like you're spending more time with someone,
right? Like that 15 minutes, but out of that 15 minutes, you're rounding out a whole account.
You're asking for referrals. You're locking that person in for three, five, seven years of renewals
because they know you, They know you wear sparkly
vans and they love that about you. And why would they go to an agency who's unwilling to wear
sparkly vans? And that gap starts to grow and build. Now, now you can start to put a gap between
yourself and your competition because you know they're growing linearly or not growing at all.
Most of our, most, you know, not the people in this room because we are spending this time and growing so
i'm kind of preaching to the choir but most of our peers i don't want to call them competitors
they're not even growing so we are putting real space between not just ourselves and most of our
peers but ourselves and the agencies that are actually held up
in the traditional community as best practices agencies.
We're outgrowing them.
We are putting in place humans and putting them in positions
where they can do what they do best,
round out accounts, build relationships, retain business,
ask for referrals, go after larger target accounts, right?
Not just take what comes in the door,
but actually do strategic outbound prospecting.
These are all things that we can build into our day
if we're not spending time transacting business.
And to do that, we have to think through this process
of building a human optimized agency.
So just a little history lesson,
and I know Keith went further back,
but Keith was selling insurance when I wasn't even born.
So I don't understand.
I don't even remember all that time.
But for me, when this started,
it was 2013 and McKinsey came out with this report
that we're all screwed.
It's over for us.
Pack it up.
Our model was toast.
Have a nice day.
Thank you.
Please hand us your hat on the way out the door.
Right?
And it didn't really happen.
And then in 2016, all the NBA dicks came into town.
All these coastal elitists from Silicon Valley and Harvard came in and said,
Hey, you bumpkins, you're not doing business the right way.
We're going to show you.
We did a regression analysis in our 201 finance class,
and it says that you guys aren't optimizing your model,
and we're going to show you how it's done.
And then for some reason in 2021,
Coverger, who I love, the people at Coverger,
Sheffy is awesome.
They announced that the insure check revolution is dead,
and now it was agent enablement.
And once again, we had survived the storm and come through it, okay?
And that's great.
Never once did I believe that we were going anywhere.
Did anyone ever hear say to themselves, we're screwed, it's all over, time to find a new job?
No, right?
But it was never about surviving.
You guys didn't come to Indianapolis and aren't sitting in
this room for survival. It's about kicking ass. And where we're at today, why these guys are here
and what AI can do for us is not just survive. It's about growing our businesses and packing
it full of margin so that we don't just have one seven series in the driveway.
We have a fleet of seven series in the driveway.
That's what it's about, right?
Are we doing this for the love of the game?
Are we doing it to provide our families with everything they need to build the lives that
we wanted?
This is the original lifestyle business.
When all these internet kids that would sat on the beach with umbrellas in their drinks
were taking pictures of them.
We've been doing that shit for 400 years.
So I don't think in terms of survival.
That nothing about this presentation, nothing about what I want to teach you here is about survival.
It is about growing your business and packing it full of margin so that we can make real money. And in order to do that, we do have to step away from the traditional model of spending too much
time transacting business and move towards a model which utilizes tools from the other half
of this room and some of the things that I'm going to talk about, thinking, changing our mindset
to a human optimized model. How do we do 3X, 5X, 10X,
what we're doing today with the same number of people?
How do we do that?
That's where our goal should be.
Not getting rid of people,
not dehumanizing our business,
if anything, making it more human
through the use of artificial intelligence,
technology, automation, et cetera.
Can we buy that?
You can give me a hell yeah. Mitch wanted to say hell yeah, but then he held it in.
Hell yeah. Come on. Give me something here. All right. So I'm going to walk you through this.
I have a couple of different ways that I visualize it. I'm also going to talk about this chart in
terms of like a waterfall as well. It looked a lot better on my like iPad thing
when I was drawing it
than I'm looking at it right now.
It looks like a child.
But I want you to think through the idea.
So the vertical access is the difficulty of the task
and the horizontal access
is how much money it costs us to transact that.
So when we think through our model,
we think in terms of passing a series of filters. Filter number one is can they do it self-service, right? Can they do it self-service?
You know, there's the Glovebox app, which is tremendous. You know, there's also some of the
AMSs have self-service tools. You have to find a self-service tool. Pick the one that works for you.
But if they can do it self-service,
that is the cheapest way to have someone transact business.
Now, there's the cost of you have to teach them how to do that, right? You can't just be like, hey, we have an app now.
That doesn't work.
We have to build it into the culture of your onboarding,
your communication process.
You have to explain to them why you use it,
not because you're trying to pass off the work, right?
When we get pushed to an app,
think about your own experiences.
When you get pushed to an app,
don't you immediately go,
ah, they just don't want to talk to us anymore.
That's why.
They just don't want to talk to us.
But that's not the case, right?
In our mind, we're like,
I want to give you availability.
I want you to be able to do this on your time.
We have to communicate these things to them.
We have to onboard them.
We have to make it part of our culture saying,
look, we don't want you to use the app for everything,
but there are three, five, seven, whatever things
that you can use this app for on your time
and get it done quick and easy.
And it's a value to you and explain that to them.
And if they can do that for us
and our human optimized model,
right, the more functions that we can both physically and culturally build into using the app,
that is the least amount of cost to our business, right? So that's number one. And it's removing those transactions from our people. Because the most expensive thing, as you can see on this list,
the most expensive is in the upper right hand corner, that big box, that account managers are expensive as hell. They are for good reason.
They're licensed American humans that live in the community most likely or live in a community and
understand what that person is going through. They're the most expensive part of our business.
So as much as we can take this off.
So we start with our self-service feature, whatever that is.
Next is going to be automations and artificial intelligence.
Maybe things like RPAs, right?
We're going to talk about RPAs in a second.
If you can have a transactional task, you know, like.
What's up guys.
Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show.
And in exchange for that, I need your help.
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But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information
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All right, I'm out of here.
Peace.
Let's get back to the episode.
So we're working with Alleviant
is the RPA company that we're working with.
There's a bunch of them out there.
Fusco referred us to Alleviant is the RPA company that we're working with. There's a bunch of them out there. Fusco referred us to Alleviant.
Not saying better or worse, any of them,
just that's who we're talking to.
But like simple things like finding all the errors,
duplicates, missing information on a constant basis
in your database and pulling that information out
and delivering it to you, right?
That's something that could take a VA,
even a VA could take them days, hours. There's cost to that, right? Setting up your renewal process,
onboarding your self-service stuff. These are all things that bots, automation, and potentially
artificial intelligence tools could do for you that we would have to do as humans in the past.
And that time eats at our ability to interact with our customers, right? So the next phase is a
little more expensive. There's a little more cost
to setting up some of these automations,
some of these tools.
If you are using something like an RPA or a bot
to do some of these tasks,
there's a little more cost,
but they can do slightly more difficult tasks.
So that's a positive, right?
The next phase is going to be our virtual assistants,
outsourced help.
I use the term virtual assistant here.
Cass uses, what do you use? Virtual employee.
Our actual, the people that we have, we have five, we call them processors. That's what they like.
We ask them, what do you want us to call you? They like to be called processors. So that's what
we call them internally. I just used VA so that we're all speaking the same language, but our
processors are a little more expensive, but they can do even more sophisticated
tasks. I still haven't gotten to our account managers yet, right? Between self-service,
automations, AI, and RPAs and VAs, we can remove something like 75% of the tasks that our account
managers are doing. Not to replace our account managers, but so that our account managers can
start doing things like midterm calls. Hey, how you doing? What's going on? You know, we had talked back in the fall
about you potentially buying a truck for your business. You ever do that? You did? Great. How
come you didn't call us? Well, I just went, let's leave that taken care of. Right. And you told me
you had a buddy who did similar work who you thought might be, can we do, these are the calls
that are not happening today.
And some of you are going, no, Ryan, I run the, you know, we all run this perfect agency, right?
When we sit here in these rooms, all of us, all our agencies are amazing when we sit here.
Ryan, you don't understand.
We already do that kind of stuff today.
These are the kind of things that we can start to do.
We can do, we can actually, actually hold people's hand through a claim.
How many of us have actually hold people's hand through a claim. How many of us have
actually hold someone through a claim? Don't, just because you know the claim happened, that's not
what I'm talking about, right? I'm talking about walking the person through the claims process,
following up with them, making the extra call, right? Making sure they got paid, maybe sending
them flowers or something to say, hey, we're sorry, or if we can help.
These are things that we do lip service to,
but we don't actually invest in.
And if we're removing the transactions
through self-service, through automations, AI, and bots,
and through VAs, we're removing those transactions.
It doesn't free up time for us
to replace our account managers.
It frees up our account managers
to actually do the jobs that we know they can do and to be the humans. And they are our most expensive thing. So if we're thinking
about the cost of service in our business, how many of you track cost of service as a metric
in your finance? Keith was talking, you can keep talking about finances and stuff like that. How
many of you track cost of service? Next time you do, no one is raising their hand. I'm hoping
that's, I'm assuming that's because none of us are actually doing it and you're not just not
responding. But cost of service is a really interesting number to track because you want
to be down under 10%. That's where you want to be. Right now, we're at 37%. It's bad.
We're not there yet.
But we've dropped it every month for the last 12 months.
We've dropped that number.
And part of that is we're just young.
We don't have the revenue on the top side,
and we kind of over-indexed on people on the front end
because we're a startup.
So some of that is just where we are in the evolution of our business.
So you take all the costs.
Question was, how do you calculate it?
We take all the costs associated with service,
cutting out sales and cutting out operational costs, and we apply them to top line revenue, right?
So it's basically just a percentage.
You're going to see how much you spend on service
versus how much revenue you have.
And to be in the elite,
you're down in 5% to 7% range.
If you're under 10, you're kicking ass.
If you're under 20, you're doing good.
So under 20 is good.
10 is kicking ass.
5% to 7%, you're elite.
Very, very difficult to get down in that range.
But if you start looking at that
and you start thinking through this model,
you can make some major, major cuts in that number
by starting by implementing
a human optimized model that I just described here.
Does anyone have any questions about this, about what we've gone through so far, about
the human optimized model?
It makes complete sense.
You're 100% on board.
You're all implementing it tomorrow.
Beautiful.
I love that.
Told you this was going to be brilliant, Cass.
All right, what do we have next? So this stuff is not new. There's some companies up here. We all,
you know, probably hate Lemonade or made the mistake if you were dumb enough to invest in them.
But Lemonade was on to something. I hate the way they implemented it, and I think that their CEO is a dumpster fire
in terms of the way that he refers to us
and deserves everything that he gets.
But outside the fact that he got majorly paid
and then hosed up all his investors
by dropping after the IPO, right?
I mean, that was a classic kind of bait-and-switch play there.
Good for him.
But they were on to something.
What they were trying to do was implement a human
character to people and deliver processes that takes us weeks and seconds, right? We all laughed
when they paid a claim in three seconds for like an $800 umbrella or something. It was like a whole
story that came out. And we laughed at them. We said, oh, you can't play claims in three seconds. But what they were building and what they have now
is the ability to handle certain size claims
based on pictures using AI
in a way that does allow them to play claims
very, very quickly.
And to their customers,
that is a huge value add for them, right?
Now, we can not like some of the things they did
and some of the things they said,
but you can't knock the hustle when it comes to thinking about what is important to their customers
and implementing a process, in this case, building out a visual AI model.
I mean, obviously, I have no idea how that works,
but that you take a picture from like four sides of whatever happened,
and their AI can rip through and figure out, was it on purpose?
What's the value?
And actually put that money back into their account in seconds.
It's brilliant, right?
Now, we're not going to be able to do that necessarily in our agencies yet,
but we do have a partner, Snapsheet,
which actually works with a lot of the carriers that we do business with
that is implementing that stuff.
So Snapsheet's the second one on here.
So yes, there is a kind of D2C company that does it,
but Snapsheet is actually doing the exact same thing.
And they work with a lot of the carriers that we write.
And small claims are getting closed faster, right?
The claims process is not perfect.
We all know that.
It's a very difficult thing,
but it is starting to happen.
And these things have been going on for years.
Snapsheet has been doing this for almost a decade now.
So even though we weren't allowed to use the word AI because everyone thought it was crazy, today we can. And this stuff has been in
market for a while. So even though it might feel new in this moment, it isn't actually. And a lot
of people have been working on this stuff for a while. Another really interesting one, these guys
sold to Bold Penguin, Risk Genius. Chris Cheatham had a really interesting AI-driven tool
which would examine policy forms
and allow carriers to make policy decisions
or underwriting decisions faster
by digesting and reading the policy forms.
So even though a human may have a feel
for what policy forms are,
what this tool was doing was taking
and can real-time see changes in policy forms
and deliver those
that knowledge set to underwriters. And I was always trying to pitch him that this should be
a sales tool. There are sales tools that are coming out with this, but this was seven years
ago that he started building this. So this stuff has been in market for a while. What are we
actually using at Rogue Risk? So I want to talk about three types of artificial intelligence that
we're using at Rogue that I think are easily implementable for you guys.
And if you guys have any questions about these specifically, raise your hand, shout them out, or if you have other things that you want to ask about or other types of tools.
These aren't the only three, but just to be cognizant of time and to not overwhelm you, I wanted to give you three specific ways that we're currently using artificial intelligence in our agency in this moment. The first and the most exciting to me is a tool called, there's a bunch of these, so take this tool for what it is.
What we actually use is a tool called wonderchat.io.
It's a chatbot.
It uses ChatGPT4 technology.
That's OpenAI's tool, but it uses the more advanced version.
Although 3.5 turbo I guess
is supposed to be better I read the other day I haven't tested it we'll see um chat tpt4 technology
but it only indexes what you feed it so here's what we've done we've fed it every article on
our website and a bunch of pdfs that we've created for different niches. And it serves answers to people who come to our website,
but only our voice, only our information.
So as we feed the chatbot articles, PDFs, et cetera,
it's only indexing and feeding and responding
based on information that we give it.
So we can give it PDFs that the public never sees. We can give it, we can also feed it and have it index our website
and just feed articles on our website. We do, I obviously do a lot of content creation. So we have
like 500 plus articles, right? And then on the backend, you can actually script out its personality. So I named it Martha the Quantum Concierge,
just to be super douchey.
And Martha has a playful yet bold personality.
And if she doesn't know an answer,
she gives you a Marcus Aurelius quote,
which is also super douchey, but, you know, whatever.
That kind of fits my personality.
I have pants that don't go all the way down to my ankles.
And what's cool about Martha is I can in real time adjust the rules.
Like I told Martha, never guarantee coverage.
Never ever say something is absolutely covered or not covered.
Because one, we know we've all done insurance before.
We know that that's not the case.
Even if the policy says it's covered, sometimes they will try to not cover it.
And two, it's just not a best practice to ever in any marketing material ever guarantee that any is covered.
You're setting yourself up for an E&O.
So she does it.
Don't ever give exact pricing.
If an article gives ranges, give ranges.
Ranges are okay. It is okay to say, in general, similar bakeries in Indiana tend to be between $1,500 and $2,500 in general liability.
That is okay to say.
What you don't want to say is it's going to be $1,700.
That would be a mistake.
So we can actually give her rules, and then what I've programmed her to do and again, you're playing around
and we're going to get to my methodology
on how to figure this stuff out in a second
but what I've programmed her to do
is at times where it feels appropriate
tell her to just reach out to us or give a quote
and if it feels like the person is more geared
towards a phone number, show our phone number
if it feels like the person is more geared towards filling out number, show our phone number. If it feels like the person is more geared towards filling out a form, send them to our
quote.rogers.com page, which is our get started quote page.
And if you feel like it should be both, both, right?
I'm literally, this is what I'm telling her.
And that's what she does.
Now, it's not perfect.
I go in, I check the chat logs.
And if something is off, I'll change it.
But again, I'm not a coder, right?
So I'm not going to create a custom chatbot app.
And that is very possible.
And I'm sure for those of you who are highly technical,
that's absolutely something you can do.
But for those neophytes out there like me,
this is a really easy tool.
It's 99 bucks.
I think if you have like 100 articles
and if you have more, it's 250 bucks a month.
But here's the stats.
We've had it up for,
well, this would be the end of the third stats. We've had it up for, well, this would be the end
of the third week. We've had 268 chats started and 33 people have clicked over to get a quote
and 25 of those has actually filled out the form. Would you pay $250 for 25 form fills?
I would. That value proposition is worth it to fills. I would.
That value proposition is worth it to me.
I don't know yet, because I'm not tracking the phone number,
how many people have called.
So we could have gotten phone calls too,
because we get inbound phone calls as well.
Again, not everything I'm talking about here
is fully implemented in Rogue.
It's aspirational.
So we're going to get to the point
where we have trackable phone number in there as well.
So I can literally see exact right now I have it set up so I can track how many people click
through to the form and then how many fill out the form.
So I can see that funnel.
I don't yet have the phone number, the trackable phone number yet.
We're going to get there.
So that is really interesting.
Here's the super interesting part about it.
You can create as many chatbots as you want.
So what we now have is an internal chatbot. Here's the super interesting part about it. You can create as many chatbots as you want.
So what we now have is an internal chatbot.
We're building our second internal chatbot.
And this is where this shit gets sexy.
Because how many of you sitting out there are the leader of the agency or the principal or whatever you call yourself, right?
When you want them to do something, the people that work for you, You got to like go, hey, do this thing,
right? And most of the time they don't listen to you. You're like, what the, does he or she know?
I do it my way. I know Eric doesn't know what he's doing. He never sold a homeowner's policy in five years. He has no idea. I'm not going to listen to him, right? I know this workaround and
I know that's what they do because humans are crazy just like us so
what we've done in an effort to better distill our processes are are the way we want our business
done is we've created an internal chatbot that actually is our our sops it's actually our
how to how to do rogue how to how to do your position at rogue how we want it done what
carriers to go to you know all this kind of stuff so so what we have now is a chatbot they can go
to and if it's like how does how does this tool work or where am i supposed to go for this
information and it's all it just comes up in the chatbot she's now acting as an internal
um we call her regina i don't know why one of my employees named her.
We haven't given her a cool name like quantum concierge yet though, but Regina. And Regina
is now serving our people with our SOPs and answering their questions about our business
that they forget. It also really helps our new employees because now not only are they getting
our training process, but they also have this chatbot over here
that if they forget something
or they need to go back to something,
they don't need to have papers on their desk,
they don't need to have Google Docs tags
or SharePoint up or whatever.
They just go to Regina and go,
how do we do this?
Or why do we use this?
And it pops right up.
That is an incredibly useful tool to us
and a huge part of human optimization.
And the last thing we're actually doing, the last one is going to be an appetite engine. So when a new quote comes in,
our producers just type in bakery, Indiana, and they know where we want that business to go.
So I'll say like, go to Hartford first, go to Traveler second, go to Chubb third. And, you know,
and it'll, they'll just do that. That one we're still working on.
That one's a work in progress.
We're testing it.
Yes, ma'am.
Yes, everything is out of wonderchat.io.
Yes.
Yep.
You're putting that information in manually.
Right now.
Then having to go in and update that as the carrier's appetite's changed.
Right now.
It does have an API connection that we just haven't gotten there yet.
So step one is I wanted to see would they use it
and would it be valuable to them before I made the investment
to try to make that information more real-time.
But I'd say, you know, for the most part, you know,
so being that we work in the lower
48 States, it is impossible. The carriers don't even know what their appetite is on a day-to-day
basis. Right. And again, that that's not a knock on them. They're huge organizations and stuff
changes and, you know, Southern Indiana has one appetite in the middle of the country,
middle estate has another, and how would you know? Right? So all I want is for it to be close.
If it's close, that's good.
That's going to take a significant amount of time and thought out of their process.
So I don't necessarily today need it to be 100% accurate.
I just need to be close.
Because what we're doing now is trying to guess up here because, you know, and I don't
want to kind of bury the lead here, though.
I really struggle with raters, commercial raters. I have not found them to be a value add yet.
Now, I haven't actually worked with Gaia. That's a brand new thing for me. I've seen the name,
but I just haven't talked to them. I just met Carl last night with Biggie. And so I'm going to do
some research on them. But the standard raters that are in the market right now, I have found to not necessarily improve the process.
It's way more efficient to just know the carrier.
And we only present one quote.
We don't do a good, best, whatever, because we're licensed experts.
And when you present three options, you're essentially saying, I don't know what I'm doing.
So, yeah.
Hey.
That's a good question. So we use, we use Tarmaca 15% of the time. So that is the one that we use. We use them 15% of the time. And what we do is we actually send,
again, and I'm not playing favorites to carriers. This is what we do. We actually send them the
Hartford's business school, a commercial insurance business school as part of our onboarding process. So they do about a month with us and then they go
do Hartford and then they come back because if I could place every piece of business that I had
with the Hartford, I would. Yeah. Challenge that because the problem is, is the appetite. Sometimes
you don't know. And, and you may not know generally across your age, if you get some crazy risk,
you know, so we don't So we could debate this all day.
No, no.
Look, I want to believe in them.
What I have found, and I don't think it's the tech's fault,
the problem is when you do the bridge, all the carriers are different.
I mean, this is what you know, right?
Like, for a while, Liberty was applying a discount,
and then we had our, you know, that was showing,
and we were going to Liberty, and then we'd get in and they'd go,
well, we just standardized that discount.
That risk doesn't actually get the discount.
I'm like, well, then I'm clicking through to you because you're telling Tarmaca that
they needed to have an embedded discount.
But then when I click over, that discount action actually applied because when the moon
is in the sign of the Aquarius, you don't allow that discount for bakeries in Indiana.
Fair enough.
So are you saying then that you'll see real value? And this,
we're talking about simple risks. Yeah. Small commercial. Yeah. Simple, small commercial stuff.
But you see the real value then when you can bind in the platform. Yes. So that's when you see the
in-platform binding. I'm going small to be clear. Yes. Mid and all that, because mid is going
towards that too. Yes. In-platform binding is when that value proposition will change for me,
because to me, they're baiting switching offs,
and it's not, again, it's not the Raiders' fault.
It's, you know, I spent a lot of time with Tarmac.
Rag's a good friend of mine.
And, you know, I was there.
I was like their fifth customer.
So, like, I saw how this goes, and he'd be like,
travelers will randomly apply a discount on some things
and then not apply on others, And it's all on their side.
And we don't even know.
We're finding out from you guys.
So long story short, being in 50 states with 12 producers,
I tell them, if you know the market,
go right to the market, get it, return it.
Because price doesn't matter.
And we all know that.
So like, if Hartford's $150 more,
but you know they'll give you a quote and a proposal back,
propose it. If you like working with travelers, go to travelers, get a quote. Who cares if it's $75 more, but you know, they'll give you a quote and a proposal back. Propose it. If you like
working with travelers, go to travelers, get a quote, who cares if it's $75 more. They, the person
wants to know that you know what you're doing, the covers are getting as good and that they can
trust you. If those three things happen, they don't care who the carrier is, what the price is
for the most part, right? They may tell you that they do, but then you just have to be a salesperson
and get past that because you know, that's the the job. So to just give all of your carriers at-bats here and there?
Because you get pressure from the carriers, the market reps coming around.
I have a love-hate relationship with carriers because they lie and so do I. So they tell me
that they'll write things and I tell them that I'll write things with them, and so we both lie.
That's kind of how that works.
It's like a bad marriage.
So, yeah, so, okay, so chatbots.
We're good on chatbots again.
I don't want to oversell wonderchat.io.
That's just the tool we're using.
There are tons of them out there,
but that's just the one that we're using.
More I wanted to show you the functionality.
Okay, RPAs, I want to get to, and we got a hard stop at 945. I hate to look at my watch,
but I want to make sure I'm on time for cast. So, oh, this number actually looks right. I have a
clock on the floor. It is right. Okay. I'll stop doing that. RPAs. RPAs, think of them as bots.
This is actually something that we are in the process of building right now,
so we have not launched them.
But Fusco uses them, Paradiso uses them, Jeff Roy uses them.
Some of you in this room probably use these guys.
This to me is, I don't know that these things will be the future forever in our industry.
To me, they kind of seem like a placeholder until a lot of the agency management systems catch up.
This feels like something the agency management systems
could catch up on and pass.
You know, did they get out?
This technology could be just built
inside an agency management system.
But like an example, the first two that we're building,
we use Better Agency for our CRM
and we are currently
moving from Nexture to Applied Epic for our agency management system. Some of that is because
we're owned by SIA, and for accounting and information distribution purposes,
it works better for them. But I really like the CRM functionality of Better Agency, and we've
been on it for a while, and it works for us. But those two systems don't talk to each other. So what the RPA is going to do is at midnight
every night, it's going to take everything that happened in Better Agency, update and change
things in Applied Epic. And then whatever changes in Applied Epic, say a renewal or a claim or
whatever, it's going to take and update that information in Better Agency. And instead of
having VAs passing that information back and forth or having to build an API,
which as are expensive and they break, right?
The bots are just going to do it all, you know, every night at the end of the night.
That's one.
That's fairly simple.
There's a bunch of things that they can do.
I would reach out to some of these companies, talk to all of them.
Don't just talk to them when I'm talking to.
I chose this one because they have an expertise in epic and that's and we're moving to that platform but work you
know talk to all of them here's the really sexy bot that we're creating so we do a lot of outbound
calling and what this bot is going to do is actually go out to various information repositories, build lead lists.
I hope I'm going to use this word right. Concatenate. Is that when you put things
together or when you separate them? Sleep. Concatenate, right? Concatenate. That's an
Excel word, I think, right? Excel. Yeah, there we go go the information to the very system so say i get
90 of what i need from one one database it'll then go look in another database and pull the
rest of the information or if it's still incomplete it'll go to a third database
and pull put that together into a new lead drop it into our better agency start firing off
to we do like two emails to like warm up the lead.
And we kind of do like an assumed call.
So like the second email will be like, hey, I'm really looking forward to our call tomorrow.
Because then people assume that they just didn't put it on their calendar and you have a call.
That's kind of sneaky. Jenkins, I can see you doing that shit.
So those two emails go off.
And then the third day day our producer gets a notification
you have a new lead waiting to be outbound called and then it's right in our system
with the x date with that you know this is experience rated workers comp stuff this is
you know crothers mccon all those guys uh they're x mod and any other pertinent information and now they're calling out the bot did all of that up to the phone call and now that thing is just looking 120 days out
and i'm giving you my shit here you understand this this is this is the good stuff this is the
really good stuff this is how you make power money right you're just you know hire freaking
nick to teach you how to sell and then put this bot in place.
And now you're just making paper.
This is how we do it, right?
You're not spending time going out and futzing around in my edge or insurancexstates.com
trying to, you know, pull a list together.
You've given it the parameters, manufacturers in these seven states with this much revenue,
these many employees and these industries.
And when one of their X dates comes up 120 days out, run it through this process, gather all the information,
pop it into your system and have your people start calling.
That's probably worth the price of coming to this conference.
Do that shit.
All right, cool.
So last one is content creation.
This is like a no brainer for AI.
There are a million of these tools.
I'm happy to walk you through the tools that I use.
If you're looking to dominate a LinkedIn,
there's a cool called Tabit. Frank, actually, Cass, just remind me after and I'll
email everybody the tools that I use for content creation because I want to get to this last bit
here. But there's a ton of these. And if you are creating content today without using some form of
AI, you're just wasting time. And that doesn't mean having the AI created for you. It could mean
like distribute. So what I do is I'll create a video and then I'll run it through this tool called Descript which
then allows me to pull off all these clips and add transcribes and now one say seven minute video
describing a process can become eight you know one big video and eight smaller videos and then I can
rip it all you know then you can run it through another tool. Again, I'll send you the list of tools and I'll send you
the process that I use, but, but then it can become a Twitter feed or a LinkedIn post. And,
and then you can schedule it all out. And this stuff is happening. You can do this on Sunday
night when you're having your like weekend cocktail, like you're just sitting there,
whatever. And, and now you have 10, 15, 20 pieces of content on one, one seven minute record, you know,
spend a little time on a script, one seven minute record.
And now you have all this content that you can schedule out and it looks different.
It feels different.
And it's coming at people at different platforms.
You spend, you know, besides the seven minutes to record it, you might spend another 20 minutes
to do all that.
And you can do it with multiple videos at one time.
So like the content creation stuff and really i think there's going to be a saturation point i
don't know when that's going to be it's not now so do this now now is when you start to extend
right this is that time period before google or the social media platforms or just human behavior
starts to to not want so much content that day will most likely come at some point.
That day is not today.
If you do this now, this is where you start to separate it.
Getting back to that original slide
on where you see the human optimized agency is up here
and there's a spread between the two.
This is the time that you do that.
This is when you start to pull away
because when everything starts to level out,
that's not when you go,
oh, you know, I should have done that, right? Here is where you start to separate yourself
if you engage in these things now. And it's going to take time. I've been working on these
things for nine months, you know, in addition to everything else that I do at the agency.
So these things are going to take time to implement. You want to think through them.
But here's the key. This is the key to figuring all this out, right?
If you don't fuck around, you're not going to find out what works, guys.
You have to do the work.
You got to get out there and figure it out.
You want to know how AI works?
Use AI tools.
You want to know what an RPA can do for your agency?
Use RPAs.
You want to know what the content creation...
Do you know how many freaking ai content creation tools i have
signed up for my email is everywhere it's like a thousand of these tools because i just sign up for
them i use them like this one sucks this is too complicated this one's too expensive i'll never
use this but it's cool oh this one's really interesting i'm gonna set this one aside i
might use this one again right that's the only reason i know. And then there's a couple of newsletters
you can subscribe to that are really cool.
And again, I can send you all this stuff
that I subscribe to where I find some of these
and I'm constantly mining.
But my friends, I think you wouldn't be here
if you didn't believe in this to some extent,
but we have to get out there and try this stuff.
There is no best practice for AI implementation into your agency yet.
There will be someday.
Steve will probably figure it out.
But there isn't today.
And it's going to be specific to your agency.
So you've got to get out there and start messing around with this stuff
and think about it and try it and test it.
And some of it isn't going to work.
You may spend $100 on a tool and and three days later realize it's garbage,
it doesn't work for you.
So what?
Build it into your budget.
Build a fuck around, $1,000 fuck around,
AI fuck around budget into your monthly expense,
and just understand, you're just gonna have to eat that cost
because that's how you figure out what works
and what doesn't work.
And if you haven't actually watched the real version of this video you should it's hilarious
but uh i i draw on an end on kind of a funny note but but i'm being very serious guys
this is a time when we can separate ourselves from our competition that is absolutely real
we are in a window of opportunity in which if we test some things, if we try some things, if we extend ourselves just a little bit, right? Instead of watching shitty TV at the end of the night, take that last hour and mess around with AI a little bit. That's what I do. You probably know I'm a maniac, right? Someone referred to me as a mad scientist the other day, which I don't necessarily like
because science isn't real, right?
We all learned that in 2019, but in 2020,
but it, you know, my point is like,
this is what I do at night.
I'm, my kids are bombing around doing what they're doing
and I'm testing wonderchat.io
and I'm like, ah, this looks really cool.
I implemented this drunk on a Sunday night because I was alone.
I'm, you know, probably since last time I've been up here,
I've gotten divorced, so I'm alone a lot.
And I'm alone on a Sunday, drinking bourbon, putting Wonderchat in.
The next day, we had 17 people use it and got three quote requests.
Now, I wouldn't recommend being home alone drinking bourbon by yourself because
wacky shit happens when you do that but but what I do recommend is that you guys you engage in this
I absolutely and firmly believe we are in a window of opportunity in which if we start to play around
find the things that work for us we can extend our lead against the people who would come and take our lunch.
It is absolutely the moment.
That window will close, right?
CJ will probably close it because he figures all this stuff out, rocking and rolling.
But that window is wide open for us, and I hope that you're engaged.
If you enjoy this, you can check out my agency, rogrist.com.
That's where you'll see all this stuff that I put into practice.
I also have a podcast, The Ryan Hanley Show.
You can go to ryanhanley.com and check that out.
And I pretty much only actually communicate as a human on Instagram.
All my other social platforms mostly are just distributed content.
So if you want to connect with me there, I would love that.
Otherwise, guys, you can always reach out to me, ryan at roguerist.com.
If you have questions, I'm always around.
I'm always happy to help.
And it has been my great pleasure.
Thanks. Thank you. so
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