Connecting data to the lives beyond the buildings

Transcript:

Garret Gray:

AI has been playing a role quietly behind the scenes for a very long time, especially with us at Cotality. A lot of our products have a, not necessarily were they LLMs, but they had earlier forms of ai, and we've been at this for a very long time.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Welcome to Beyond the Buildings by Cotality. I am your host, may Claire Bolton Smith, and I'm just as curious as you are about everything that happens in the property industry. On this podcast, we satisfy our collective curiosity, explore questions from every angle and look beyond the obvious. With every conversation, we illuminate what is possible. Insurance is personal. In property insurance, behind every data point, behind every piece of software, there's a human story waiting to be told. Sometimes it's a story of disaster. Sometimes it's a story of recovery. Every time it's a story that intertwines data and people, but that's why we do what we do here at Cotality, we look at properties from every angle because we know that better outcomes begin with better data. And in the insurance industry, we help people understand what's next so you have the most complete picture when answering the tough questions. Today we're joined by Garrett Gray Total's President of Insurance Solutions to talk about how we use AI to innovate with purpose so that everyone can imagine bigger. Garrett, welcome back to Beyond the Buildings.

Garret Gray:

Thanks for having me.

Allie Barefoot:

Before we get too far into this episode, here's a friendly reminder about how to see what's coming up next in the property market. To make it easy, we curate the latest insight and analysis for you online, find us using the handle at Cotality on all of our social media channels. But now let's get back to the show.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Today we're going to talk a little bit about our AI strategy, a little bit about your personal AI journey. I think everybody around here, we know we're surrounded by talk of ai, but when people think of insurance, they probably think of slow, cumbersome processes. And advanced technology probably isn't necessarily thought about synonymous with insurance. But can you maybe just start to set the stage is where is the insurance industry today? Where does it stand with technology?

Garret Gray:

So you just look at the landscape and because it's so complicated and because insurance carriers in general are very risk adverse and they're kind of a very old business style. Hundreds and hundreds of years, this sort of market has existed and they still do a lot of things the same way they started out doing it. And so for all of those reasons, the industry moves rather slowly. Now. When COVID happened, it threw this industry into this complete tailspin because adjusters could no longer come to people's homes. There was the whole way that this industry operated got completely turned upside down, just like a lot of other industries. And that was sort of like a jet feel towards streamlining and adopting technology. So it took what was sort of coming and accelerated it because it was sort of a mandatory thing for carriers to continue to operate. And because of that, we've seen kind of a surge in technology adoption, a little bit of reverting to the mean, where things are slowing down a little bit. But still, carriers move much faster today than they traditionally have moved. Starting from

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

They had to,

Garret Gray:

Yeah, because they had to.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Yeah. Now, what about AI specifically that's technology is advancing, and how is AI playing a role in all of that?

Allie Barefoot:

Another thing people are investing in is ai. AI is changing how property is priced, financed, and insured. It's recalibrating efficiency to expose new questions about fairness, transparency, and trust. At totality, we've been a part of this transformation from the ground up. We've also been tracking these changes to understand how to guide the industry towards a future where intelligence moves fast, but accountability is never far behind at every step. Our insights return to the same principle. Housing may be powered by data, but it's lived by people. Find out more at Cotality.com/insights.

Garret Gray:

Yeah, so what's funny is AI has been playing a role quietly in behind the scenes for a very long time, especially with us at Cotality. A lot of our products have either A, not necessarily were they LLMs, but they had earlier forms of ai. And we've been at this for a very long time. We didn't really talk about it a lot five years ago or so. But AI has really accelerated with things like chat, GPT and Claude coming more into the public consciousness. In fact, I've been talking about AI in our space for five years, and I used to ask when I was in front of a group of people who's playing with it themselves outside of work, outside of what maybe we're bringing, but who's playing with themselves, almost nobody would raise their hands, maybe 10% of the people in the room. That was lucky last year at Interconnect. I asked that same question. Almost everybody raised their hands. And some of the people that even I know in the industry that are not forward thinkers, they were using it for some pretty interesting use cases. So it's changed so fast, partly because it's, it's kind of bombarded our personal lives as well that it's starting to have a business impact as well,

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Right? I mean, it's everywhere. It's all around us. We don't have an option to not be influenced by AI at this moment. I do want to get into more of what we specifically are doing with ai, but let's talk a little bit more about us and our strategy and insurance and what we're doing. We are using AI in so many different ways. The way that we positioned this self this year, usually in your interconnect keynote, you're like, oh, here's our strategy for the future, and let me introduce a couple of products that we're working on that you can expect to see by this time next year. We took a different approach this year and we introduced our vision pillars, and we said that our strategy was anchored by these four vision pillars and the pillars that we use or that we're talking about, and they're going to be our pillars for the foreseeable future, are cognitive imagery, which is imagery enhanced by AI interoperability, which is all about integration, seamless workflows, making the user experience easier for our customers, and then the million dollar one agen ai, which is really going to automate the path forward.

So I think the statement that you used was cognitive imagery, enhances our data interoperability connects the tools, seamless workflow simplifies the experience, and agent AI automates the path forward. And really all of this is turning our data and workflows into intelligence. So let's talk a little bit about how we're bringing some of these things to life and why they're so important for our strategy for the future as we are trying to bring intelligence to the insurance industry.

Garret Gray:

So there's a couple things going on right now. I think one we have a long history of, and we'll have to do this even more now, bringing AI solutions to the market, whether people know their AI intelligence or not, there is some stealthiness to a lot of what we do, A lot of we have been doing is AI behind the scenes and just brings intelligence forward. There's going to be more, it's more obvious. We have Allie coming. We have different versions of interacting with your data that is AI led. That I think is a really important aspect of how we're serving our customers. There's things like I was talking about with image to scope, which is highly AI focused, where we're taking cognitive imagery, we're taking video and photos, and we're looking for damage and the quality of items, and we're pairing that with our pricing database to figure out what is the scope and the price to get somebody back to pre-loss condition.

And so there's a lot of AI just like in every bit of what we're doing. And so a big part of our strategy isn't just, yes, we need to get AI features built into all of our workflows and data solutions a hundred percent. We need to do that. Yes, we need to re-look at and reimagine how we're building software and do it through an AI lens, but we also have to reimagine how we're engaging with our customers and making them a part of that. And so we've got something that we're working on that we're calling Vibe with us, which is essentially giving them that sensation, giving our customers a sensation of coming into a room with us, vibe coding, a solution, a software, a feature, whatever it may be. And then we wrap all the things that Cotality brings, like scalability and security and governance and enterprise software. And then we're able to release that kind of work product not within months or a year, but within weeks or days after that vibe session. I think that sort of customer engagement is going to become the new normal, and I want to get ahead of that. And so a big part of our insurance strategy is bringing the customer closer to the development process and shortening the life cycle of what it takes to get product to market.

Allie Barefoot:

It's that time again, totality just dropped new numbers about what's happening in the housing market. Here's what you need to know. Summertime has taken on a new meaning. Heat waves, Cotality found that places better known for severe winter weather are also facing dangerous increases in heat. These projected increases threaten the health of millions of Americans and carry a growing financial cost in some areas. Cotality expects average annual losses from heatwaves to rise by as much as 700%. Nearly every American home will face more days of extreme heat by 2030, but the largest jumps in hot days are not where you'd expect states that are usually considered heat havens are heating up still Florida and Texas will remain at the center of heat risk going into 2050. See exactly which states are heating up and how fast at Cotality.com/insights. And that's a sip. See you next time.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Just a couple more questions. Garrett. Take out your crystal ball. If you could look into your crystal ball, what do you think the insurance industry will look like even just by 2030, which feels like it's far off, but we're only three and a half years away from there. What do you think the insurance industry will look like in three to five years?

Garret Gray:

Yeah, one of the things I think that you'll see a lot more of is you're going to see a lot more kind of solutions popping up that are going to maybe be working with one carrier at a time, more fragments,

Because the barrier to entry is lower. I think there's going to be more people tackling small pieces of the workflow. I think for us, what that means is a lot more integrations. We want to be the rails. We can't be everything. And so our integration posture is going to have to change here and be more aggressively open. And then I think you're going to see a lot more agent to agent sort of workflows where the insurance carrier's agent is interacting with one of our agents. They're working together to get to a faster settlement. I think you're going to see even people like ServPro and other bigger brands of contractors come up with agents that they want us to work with. I've already had a call with the CIO of one of those, and that's sort of their vision. So I think the way people are going to interact with the software and our data is going to change, and I think you're going to see a lot more agent to agent activity and a lot less of people manually doing work, which is, I guess sort of obvious. It's sort of what's happening everywhere. But I do think that carriers are heading down that path.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Yeah, the natural progression of where we are,

Garret Gray:

Whether they'll really get there in three years is the question. The hard part is

I think there's a lot of pressure at the C-suite of a lot of our clients in the carrier world to come up with AI talking points and things that they're doing that are AI first, and they're hoping that will help either their stock price or whatnot. That I do think there's a lot of consternation about how do you actually implement that once you unleash these things? Is it going to be without bias? Is it going to be fair? Is it going to wreak havoc because it just moves so fast? There's a bit of both things that are contending, and I think that's what puts us in a really good position to bring incremental solutions to the market. Something we've been talking about for a long time. So yeah, I don't know that it'll be dramatically different, but I do think that the landscape is changing fast, faster than it has in the past.

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

Okay. Well, it'll be really interesting to see how things play out, and I'm grateful that we're a part of it and we're helping drive the industry forward. All right, Garrett, thank you so much for joining me today on Beyond the Buildings by Totality.

Garret Gray:

Thanks for having me,

Maiclaire Bolton Smith:

And thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed our latest episode. Please remember to leave us a review and let us know your thoughts and subscribe wherever you get your podcast to be notified when new episodes are released. And thanks to the team for helping bring this podcast to life producer Jesse Devon's, editor and sound engineer, roia Roman are facts guru, Allie Barefoot and Social media duo, Sarah Buck and Makayla Brooks. Tune in next time for another conversation that illuminates the ideas that will define the future.

Allie Barefoot:

You're still there. Well, thanks for sticking around. Are you curious to know more about our guests today? Garrett Gray is the president of Totality Global Insurance Solutions, where he leads a division in supporting the full property insurance ecosystem. By unifying the organization's capabilities, Garrett has created a connected approach that spans the entire insurance lifecycle from underwriting through claims and restoration. He's focused on driving the insurance division forward with solutions that empower carriers and service providers with the insights needed to streamline workflows and enhance the policy holder experience. Previously, Garrett was the founder and CEO of NextGear Solutions, which was acquired by CoreLogic. Now, totality in 2021.

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