{"id":6356,"date":"2023-12-06T08:03:12","date_gmt":"2023-12-06T08:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"httpss:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/?p=6356"},"modified":"2025-02-25T15:31:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T15:31:47","slug":"role-of-a-future-cuo-in-leading-digital-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/role-of-a-future-cuo-in-leading-digital-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Leading transformation: a day in the life of a future CUO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

AdvantageGo recently hosted a live evening event to premiere a short film commissioned to imagine a day in the life of a future chief underwriting officer (CUO).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital transformation is in full swing in the London market, but still nobody quite knows what the working day of a chief underwriter, five, ten, or twenty years from now will look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unafraid of a challenge, and enthusiastic for some story-telling fun, AdvantageGo commissioned journalist Mark Geoghegan \u2013 of The Voice of Insurance podcast fame \u2013 to write a movie short to imagine exactly this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result is a fascinating glimpse into what digital transformation \u2013 and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular \u2013 can do for the CUOs of the future, some of whom will already be working in the market today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was one immediate surprise for the evening event\u2019s attendees, as it was revealed that Simon, the AI in the film, was actually played by real AI, rather than a human actor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the film screening, a panel discussion then posed some of the big questions and potential themes posed by the video \u2013 not least the velocity of underwriting afforded by a much higher degree of automation, and what that meant for the CUO\u2019s precious time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe CUO is at the front and centre of transformation, whether that\u2019s digital transformation or operational transformation,\u201d said James Slaughter, Apollo\u2019s group chief underwriting officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said he thought the video captured \u201ca sensible mid-term future\u201d, but emphasised that the route to this digital transformation<\/a> is less about the tools \u2013 even the AI \u2013 and more about the culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy interpretation is that the CUO is being freed up from some traditional tasks and focused on leadership, building a business, building a culture and enabling underwriters to get the best from themselves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly, this means a more important role for the CUO, he suggested, and secondly, it will empower underwriting teams to react more effectively to information and insights, to drive better decision-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat is the heart of where I think the technology will drive the industry forward, because the industry is going through change at the moment,\u201d Slaughter said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe as underwriters are freed up to solve problems, create products, and deliver great service to customers more directly. We have to create underwriting tools, underwriting structure, and underwriting culture that enables people at the frontline to do that. As a CUO, I need the technological capabilities to do that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadership, as a concept, is underplayed by the industry, Slaughter suggested. In the film<\/a>, the future CUO noted the challenge of getting stakeholders\u2019 \u2018buy in\u2019 for digital transformation, implying the centrality of the CUO in leading that process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a fundamental leadership skill,\u201d he said. \u201cDigital transformation is a prime example of underwriting coming to the fore. It used to be the CTO that drove transformation, but I don’t believe that’s the way to successful transformation in our industry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the practitioners are following rather than leading the change, the process is likely to be more tortuous and fraught with risks of failure, suggested Ian Summers, global business leader, AdvantageGo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMany of us have been engaged in changing this market, and to hear that the practitioner is the one making the change happen and driving that change is really important for the future,\u201d Summers said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI has become a buzzword, but many types of AI have been in use for years, fulfilling lower level tasks, suggested AdvantageGo\u2019s Inder Dev Singh, technical architect, AdvantageGo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat has changed recently, is the introduction of generative AI, which is not only focused on learning from the data and looking at patterns, but generating further questions and suggestions for decisions,\u201d Singh said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this means the future CUO will need to brush up on a different skillset than her forebears today, Slaughter admitted. The focus on leadership will include leading AI elements of the team, like Simon, as much as it will the human team members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis isn’t a skill that will come naturally to us in our industry, such as how you ask the right questions to this increasingly sentient technology,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m still not sure, yet, which questions I need to be asking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AdvantageGo recently hosted a live evening event to premiere a short film commissioned to imagine a day in the life of a future chief underwriting officer (CUO). Digital transformation is in full swing in the London market, but still nobody quite knows what the working day of a chief underwriter, five, ten, or twenty years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6357,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"line-of-business":[],"class_list":["post-6356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6356"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=6356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}