{"id":9989,"date":"2025-05-01T07:14:30","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:14:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/?p=9989"},"modified":"2025-05-01T07:14:33","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:14:33","slug":"voi-podcast-with-adrian-cox-ceo-of-beazley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/content\/voi-podcast-with-adrian-cox-ceo-of-beazley\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We are running about 10 pilots at the moment\u2019 \u2013 Beazley CEO Adrian Cox on the AI revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><iframe title=\"Ep250: Adrian Cox Beazley: Managing the grey areas consistently well\" allowtransparency=\"true\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px);height:150px;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?from=embed&amp;i=hc62y-18883d9-pb&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;fonts=Tahoma&amp;skin=3267a3&amp;font-color=&amp;rtl=0&amp;logo_link=&amp;btn-skin=1b1b1b&amp;size=150\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beazley CEO Adrian Cox has his eyes on the food industry. That might sound odd coming from the head of one of Lloyd\u2019s largest insurers, who has just led the company to record profits, but he has good reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox was impressed by how a food firm deployed a powerful artificial intelligence tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The food conglomerate used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse all the bills paid for the materials received over the last 18 months and compared them to what they&#8217;d received from their warehouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The result? The food firm clawed back $1bn in overpayments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox remarks: \u201cNow, obviously it&#8217;s quite a big food company, but that is a remarkable use case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAnd so the ability to be able to do that kind of granularity of assurance around what you&#8217;re doing is quite exciting. So, I do think the use of AI is going to increase rapidly, but perhaps not in the ways that we&#8217;d first thought good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beazley is using AI in a wide range of areas. Its greatest strengths are evident on the operational rather than underwriting side of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speaking on the Voice of Insurance podcast, Cox explains: \u201cWe&#8217;re running about 10 pilots at the moment, ranging from triaging risks to speeding up some of the processes in terms of digesting documents, helping some of the claims processes, and so on and so forth, and we are gradually figuring out how to scale those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00a0\u201cI don&#8217;t think the development in using AI in terms of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/products\/underwriting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tackling underwriting decisions<\/a> has progressed as far as it has on the more operational side.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox has two additional insights regarding AI. The law of diminishing returns applies \u2013 the more questions asked, answers deteriorate. Also, be nice to get better responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cPlus, if it does come a time when the machines take over, you want them to remember that you were nice,\u201d he quips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Record breaker<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>AI is just one component used successfully by Beazley to achieve record profits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last year, Beazley reported a record profit before tax of $1.423 billion for 2024, a 13% increase compared to the previous year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Additionally, there was a real sweetener for shareholders &#8211; the company returned $700 million to shareholders through dividends and a share buyback programme.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox says prices are \u2018quite good\u2019 in the speciality market. Demand is rising as well. It is a competitive market, but full of opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Geoghegan also highlights Beazley\u2019s culture of \u2018rigour and discipline\u2019 and \u2018willingness to allow controlled experimentation\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox adds: \u201cIf you look at the sort of three platforms that we have, we&#8217;re still seeing business flow into the NS (non-standard) market, onshore in the US. That&#8217;s nice and healthy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI think the rate of demand flow into London has slowed a bit, but there&#8217;s still plenty of demand growth in Europe. So that optionality is also quite useful to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAnd one of the big macro themes, I think, of the last seven years has been that the amount of risk in the world is going up, and that drives the need for insurance. And that&#8217;s good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Smart follow-on<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the most impressive features of Beazley\u2019s performance has been its successful adoption of smart follow-on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox says: \u201cThe results of our smart tracker in terms of return on capacity since it started in 2018 have been better than 623 (syndicates), except for last year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The success of smart follow-on has triggered a market wide debate: if insurers can become more efficient with the technology, who should gain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox opines: \u201cIt should benefit the client. It should benefit us, and it should benefit the broker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cSo, we should get more efficient, and the client should benefit from that increase in efficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cBecause the conversation that we were having a few years ago was, why are there 35 points of frictional cost in the administration of insurance? And part of the battle is to get that down. And I think the savings should be shared.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A decarbonised future<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking to the future, Cox believes decarbonisation will be a huge pull for insurers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe do see the flow of investment money into decarbonisation increasing rapidly, irrespective of politics around the world,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAnd a lot of that will need insurance, and a lot of that insurance is yet to be written, and that&#8217;s super interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cox\u2019s team are currently working on how to insure a couple of nuclear plants, which is \u2018fabulous\u2019 and \u2018really interesting\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Questioned by Geoghegan on how you would even start on such a project, Cox gave a fascinating insight: \u201cYou start by looking at how comparable things have been issued in the past. And so how did governments think about liabilities when they first drilled in the sea, for oil, for example, or first in satellites into space, and you apply some of those learnings with this.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beazley CEO Adrian Cox has his eyes on the food industry. That might sound odd coming from the head of one of Lloyd\u2019s largest insurers, who has just led the company to record profits, but he has good reason. Cox was impressed by how a food firm deployed a powerful artificial intelligence tool. The food [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":6594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[14],"line-of-business":[24,20],"class_list":["post-9989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts","category-latest-insights","tag-underwriting-workbench","line-of-business-cyber","line-of-business-property"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9989","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\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9989"},{"taxonomy":"line-of-business","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.advantagego.com\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/line-of-business?post=9989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}