Leading Digital & AI Transformation in Global Insurance

James BenhamAnd we are back with another great episode of the InsurTech Geek podcast. If you can't tell if you're watching on video, I am live at InsurTech Insights in London. It is currently 03/18/2026, and we are having a great time here with me, and I promised him I would not say his official title after the intro. So it's Thomas Koot. Thomas, how are you doing? Very well. Great to be with you. I am so excited that we got to be here in this amazing studio. I wanna thank the production team here at the pod who is helping us record this and has a really brilliant place for us to record.

But what a great conference. Excellent.

Dr. Thomas KuhntYes. A lot of participants, stimulating discussions. I love to be here. Yeah. Is this how many years have you come to this? To this one, it's my first time. I went to Vegas. I've been to many conferences. First time in London. But you've been to ITC in Vegas? I've been been to ITC. Yes. How many times have you been to Vegas? Three times. Three times too many. Yes. Yes.

James BenhamVegas will wear you out. It's

Dr. Thomas Kuhntexhausting. It is. You see the same startups here. I mean, it's kind of interesting. Have some pattern recognition. Yeah. It is. It is it is a lot of the same, but

James Benhamthis is a really wonderful conference, especially, we got very lucky today. The weather's fabulous. It's it's early spring in in London. We're having a great time. We have, I think, 6,000 attendees here at this conference. But right now, it's just you and me in this beautiful podcast studio. So I wanna talk about you, and I wanna talk about your company, and then I wanna talk about Insurtech. Is that a good order for you? Sounds fantastic. So let's talk about you for a minute. Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Northern Germany, a small town close to Hanover.

Dr. Thomas KuhntI was raised there, then I went to university afterwards, I went to Bonn, because I loved mathematics. Because when I grew up, wanted to become a scientist. I loved playing around. I mean, drove my parents crazy. They set the house on fire, doing a lot of small experiments, playing around with liquids, putting all stuff together that you shouldn't put together, watching gas kind of develop and so on and so forth, so you can imagine. Couldn't decide between chemistry and real science, hard science, physics, and then I ended up doing mathematics.

James BenhamWell, math is the formula behind all of it, isn't it? That that's exactly right. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is the more because I'm fascinated by all fields of study. Mhmm. I think astronomy is fascinating, and I think that physics is fascinating. I probably enjoyed physics the most because it was mathematics applied to the universe. Right? And I I I enjoyed math, but it's exhausting. But I just what I did find is that there's a formula for everything. At the end of at the end of the day, everything comes back to math.

Everything. And then I I my mom and my dad are both pilots, and I became pilot. And flying is all math. I mean, and you have to be good at doing math in your head while you fly, if you're gonna be a great pilot. And so it was really interesting to see, then I got into software, and my best programmers were math majors. Mathematics is the the engine behind the universe. And, you know, it's almost like, it's almost like there's one formula that governs them all.

You know? So it's quite interesting. So then after after your undergrad, you actually went to a university that I know quite well. I've been on campus quite a few times. You went to University of Illinois in a city affectionately referred to as Champana, Champaign Urbana. So tell me about why you went to the middle of the cornfields in Central Illinois to to go and get your PhD in mathematics.

Dr. Thomas KuhntYeah. I have to admit it's not that glorious. I also did not know the university before. I got a Fulbright grant back then, and so that was a kind of they decided where you go. You basically told them what you want to do, and of course everyone wanted to be going to one of the big name universities in The US, and they sent me to Champaign Urbana. The moment I got the letter I went into Google and looked at hey, where exactly is Champaign But I have to say, it was one of the best decisions in my life.

After the grant expired after a year, I continued my PhD research over there. I loved the environment, I loved the people, also loved the academic environment because it's personal. You relate to your professors. There's not those gray eminences that you'd rather not talk to as it's in a lot of universities in Europe. So I had a fantastic time over there. Yeah. It it's it's wonder it's a wonderful town. I've spent a lot of time in Champagne.

James BenhamAnd, the restaurant seems great. The bar seems great. The it's a wonderful college town. I'm glad you got to experience my my country in in that way. That's that's great. Like, growing up, so it sounds like you were a tinkerer, and you just wanted to be in the field of sciences. You landed on mathematics.

Dr. Thomas KuhntWas your intention to go into academia and teach, or did you always intend to go into a professional field outside of teaching? No. I wanted not to well, I mean, I started academia because I wanted to become a researcher. I was really, really drawn towards research, and I also did my PhD in algebraic number theory, very, very abstract, so back then I was proud that you can't apply what I'm working on. But now, I mean, lot of the things that I worked on I applied in coding theory, cryptography, so it's all around the geometry of numbers.

So what's the logic behind the pattern behind numbers? And that really, really excited me. So I wanted to become a researcher, but as part of the graduate studies I started teaching, and then I started teaching what I loved, my passion topic, to people who weren't that interested in math and they realized maybe not for the rest of my life.

James BenhamMean finding the pattern behind everything is at the heart of what we do in insurance. I feel like as people who are intellectually curious,

Dr. Thomas Kuhntthe search for correlation and causality is behind everything, right? Yeah, exactly, and I think also today you learn system thinking. If you try to understand the geometry behind numbers, you don't you stop looking at the individual number. You looked at, hey. What's the logic behind it? What are the patterns? And I think there's a lot of that you can apply even to technology.

James BenhamOh, yeah. And in spades, especially with AI. We can talk more about that But

Dr. Thomas Kuhntalso in organizations, right? I mean, if I think about it, hey, it's organizations are very complex systems. You have processes, you have people, you have technology. How do you connect all the dots, especially if things are not working well? I think I always try to manage the system and move away from kind of firefighting on individual topics more towards the system level.

James BenhamSo you get out of college, you're a newly minted PhD mathematician. You've achieved a quite a quite difficult objective with as difficult as the dissertation and defense process is. And, you know, I know that at U of I, they were probably quite friendly to you in helping you achieve that goal, but it's still a multiyear objective. You get out. What was the what was the immediate objective? Get a job anywhere, or did you have something in mind? No. It was a little bit

Dr. Thomas Kuhnta period of, hey, what do I do now? Because the moment I decided, hey, maybe university career is not mine because there are very few pure research professorships, a lot of it is just teaching, I was kind of like, oh, what do I do now? I'm a theoretical mathematician, am I even employable? And that's kind of back then, where do you apply? Well, applied to some corporates, I said, I'm not sure what we should do with you, at least back then, might be different today. So I ended up in consulting.

That was more as a stepping stone, I thought, well, now let's prove that I know business, that I learned business, and I thought, hey. What what better place to go next to as a as a consultant company?

James BenhamYeah. That's because it allows you to this is the same thing I did. I actually did two internships in consulting with a large global consulting firm and then, you know, was found very quickly what I wanted to do. And I think that's what's nice about consulting is that you can work in a lot of different industries. Did you work in insurance immediately, or did you did you spread the the workaround?

Dr. Thomas KuhntI started initially in banking Yeah. But then I realized I mean, I was firstly driven by, hey, let's crack the hardest problems. But after one or two studies, I learned, hey, if you work day and night, that's not the problem that keeps you up or keeps you happy, but it's the people you work with. And then I had a mentor that then moved towards insurance, and I followed him, and ever since, I've done fifteen years of consultancy in insurance. Wow.

James BenhamWhat was your first gig? What was your first thing you ever did in insurance? Oh, that was

Dr. Thomas Kuhntoptimizing the tight agent channel, so how to boost sales and profitability in tight agent networks?

James BenhamWow, yeah, mine was automating and optimizing the order flow for underwriting inspections for property policies. Oh wow. It was really, really, really interesting. So when you write a property policy, have to get a property inspected and we had to rebuild. And I was 24 at the time and had to reengineer the process for processing orders and it was really fun. It exposed me a lot to the property industry. So that's that that's interesting. So today, you oversee technology operations and digital transformation at HDI Global. Right?

And you're the the c the chief information officer, the CIO, and the chief operations officer. So it's a unique a unique path for a CIO to also be the COO. So you you have your hands on ops and technology. So what does that role look like day to day since you have that dual role assignment? That's

Dr. Thomas Kuhntkind of funny how that came. I mean, because I started as a COO, and months later, I got the CIO role because we had a large scale IT project that failed and I will not forget the day when our Supervisory Board member said look I don't want IT and business blame each other why the project failed, I want one person that I can hold accountable. Nowadays you would call it agile but back then it was more kind of like hey I make that person accountable for both the ops and also transforming it with technology.

But we've moved quite far away since then, I mean my typical day, probably a third communication direction setting, just repeating the why and the what over and over again. We are a large organization. We've moved towards managing the companies with an objective key results logic on a quarterly basis. I do every quarter spend a lot of time with the organization setting the objectives for the next quarter. Secondly, think it's a lot execution of strategic initiatives. I am a problem solver by heart that's what I learned when I studied and I love problem solving so I like to be very close to our key strategic initiatives, very hands on.

I try to change the operating cadence of our company to really have weeklies, monthly, really stay close to what works just to learn and iterate fast. And lastly, it's more sensing and learning. That's also why I'm here today. I think things are moving so quickly that we all have to learn and understand and with I'm asked to make very large decisions. Do I now invest double digit triple digit million money into AI? So I also need to understand is it the right time? What's hype? What's real?

So there's a lot of learning that I'm interested There's a lot of hype. Yes.

James BenhamMore so than probably any time in my twenty five year career. A lot of promises of radical change, but when you actually get I mean, you go sit with underwriters and adjusters? Yes. I do too. When you actually sit with them, things aren't that different for them. You know? Yeah. They're they're still slogging it out on the phone with with claims, like an adjuster, the average adjuster's life. Now we've been able to automate a lot about what an adjuster has to do. We can automate medical record summaries, we can automate claim summaries, we can suggest proper communication, we can streamline things, but at the end of the day, it's still a grind, right?

And the same thing with underwriters. I mean, they they still have more submissions than they can work on. They still have to make executive decisions. Right? This is not simple. Tell me a little bit about your organization. Like, what lines of business? What geographies do you serve? How big of an organization is it in people and GWP, like tell me about it. So we are global and we do global corporate business and specialty lines. We're roughly €10,000,000,000.

Dr. Thomas KuhntWe are the leading one in Germany, we're pretty big in Europe, we're small in The US so far, but we write all lines of business, but only corporate and specialty business. 5,000 people roughly.

James BenhamWow.

Dr. Thomas KuhntAll in Germany? Oh, no, no, no, all across the globe. So Germany right now represents about a quarter of the business, 20 to 25% of the business is Germany. A lot of still, we are big in multinational programs, so that's our heritage, so we followed the German industry when they went abroad, we are over 100 years old, so we did all the multinational programs where we insure a large corporate across all the geographies they're active in. So like a large German manufacturer, they decide to expand to a new country and you expand with them.

Exactly. So they're going to write premium in that country, you're going to have an underwriter who understands that risk? No, they they still underwrite most centrally, so we would do the master policy in Germany, and then we would issue local policies consistent with the master policy. You'd go get licensed there. Yeah. Then you collect premium back in Germany, and you'd you'd issue it there, and then you obviously have to adjudicate the claim locally with license adjusters that are licensed in that country. But sometimes even more complex, have to collect the premiums locally as well, pay local premium tax, so it's quite complex to manage those multinational programs.

And then, you know, at the end of the day that company probably wants one renewal date and one master policy for everything. Right? Exactly. And then they want to make sure that local policies are, of course, legally compliant locally, but also consistent with the master policy. Sounds easier than it's done. It's not easy.

James BenhamIt's not easy. I've I've been dealing with master child policies for twenty five years, and it's not easy. It's not even remotely easy because you have different billing schedules too. Have different issuances. Your software, of course, has to support all of this. The people have to understand it and equally apply it. It's very challenging. So we we have some I have so much I could talk to you about. And especially with with as in as international as German industry with, this really drug you abroad, right?

Yep. So it was almost like the very nature of the clients you signed up in Germany resulted in you having such a broad footprint everywhere else. Yeah, it's even more foundational. They founded us. So we are at the Coursley Mutual. We were founded by the German industrial companies when they went abroad and didn't find an insurance company that could support their needs when they grew internationally.

Dr. Thomas KuhntThat's why in nineteen o three they founded us as a mutual insurer. Right now we are still, we do, we are publicly traded, the stocks are still owned by the mutual.

James BenhamYeah, so they, it's it's almost like a a group captive Yes. Except it's a public company. And and you'll write non member owned business. Right? So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So we once we have the local the the German sourced linked business in the international

Dr. Thomas Kuhntentities, we start expanding into writing local risks. Because you have the operations, you have the setup, yeah, you don't have the underwriting yet, but it's easy to then branch out into writing local business. You might as well just write the business. Yeah. Exactly. That's fascinating. What a great what a great background, I know, and and and understandable.

James BenhamSo let's go to the next topic. You know, you you're giving two talks here. Right? One, you're talking about agentic AI, and another, the COO compass for global ops, which are very

Dr. Thomas Kuhntdifferent but connected topics. So what are the core ideas you're hoping leaders in the room walk away with in these two talks? So for me, it's all around people process technology. So on the AI slot, I talk I talked about the AI piece of technology. My key message is don't wait. I mean, start to experiment, iterate, I mean, this is maturing so quickly, so I think this is not going to go away, we need to figure out how to work with it, capture the opportunity. And then of course, on the COO lens, it's now what does it mean for processes and people.

Especially in a global organization, how do you scale agentic or any type of AI solutions across one country? If you have heterogeneous processes, what do you do locally? Where can you have master platforms that you keep consistent across the globe? It's quite complex challenge to decide kind of how do we really push that out into a global organization.

James BenhamIt is a ridiculously exciting time to be in computer science. I will say that as a lifelong I started writing code when I was 11. Now I'm 46. I'm in my thirty fifth year of writing code. I'm in my twenty fifth year of being in business. And this is the first time in my whole career when I don't have to say no anymore. I used to have to tell clients, insurance companies, that there were certain things we couldn't do, and now I don't. It's it's really amazing.

And, like, a when we say AgenTik AI, for me, the way that expresses itself is either local or cloud based agents that can perform a series of cognitive and complex tasks autonomously, either through a trigger or on a schedule. Right?

Dr. Thomas KuhntThat's what it means to me. What what does it mean to you? No. I think that captures well as an individual agent. Yeah. I think where it gets even more interesting if you then combine multiple of those agents with specialized roles. I think we see more and more and that's making me so confident if you look at software development, which we are pretty close to. If I look at Claude code and some of the agentic things, yes, white coding, I would not apply to the enterprise environment yet, but if I look at what's possible today, how fast our people can code, I mean, it's like you look at that, it works for five hours independently, it tests itself, it optimizes, and you look at the output and you think, wow, that would have taken weeks before.

I mean, it's amazing how speed It's it's amazing. And and people said, well, does this spell the the end for software engineers? I said, no.

James BenhamNot at all. Because I've watched non engineers trying to operate Cursor and Claude Mhmm. And it goes awry pretty fast because they don't really know what to ask for. They don't know how to validate the results. And it's hard for them to think about how to architect the solution. I said, but what it does mean is the end of backlogs. Because for my entire professional career, twenty five years, we've had to deal with this reality of a backlog, a pretty substantial backlog, most of which we know we can never get to.

And now we actually have a chance. You know, there's that that that line in, Dumb and Dumber with where where he goes where he goes, so you're saying there's a chance? And I was saying, like, there's a chance we can actually burn through backlogs Yep. And and actually respond to the needs of the organization, all of them, which is wild to think about. The problem now is actually not are we gonna get through the backlog, it's should we do it? Should we actually expand in those areas?

Because you can actually grow yourself out of business as well. And I've seen the same thing. I mean, I I deploy a suite of cloud agents while I'm sleeping. I wake up and I review their work. I do a code review, and then I you know, it's okay. You got this right. You didn't get these things right. Let's rethink this architecture. So, I mean, my business partner does the same thing. We both are back into coding now that we can deploy indirect agents, and it's, it's pretty exciting.

I mean, as a COO, what's been your your first thing to deploy in ops that's really made a difference on some very tedious manual task?

Dr. Thomas KuhntI think it's probably the simplest use case. It's, again, input management, because our input channel mostly is Outlook. It's our industry, I mean, especially in the large corporate specialty world, we get an email by a broker, tons of attachments, excels, words, and to process that, I mean, yes there was already certain type of input management based on rules, but whenever something didn't fit, you had those exceptions. And we found that applying Agenetic AI, you can really improve the performance of input management significantly, and nobody likes to open those emails, read it, and then you can continue with triage, prioritize some of the submissions to really only show the underwriters a business that they should be really looking at, and that that's already working quite well today.

They're an actual absolute

James Benhamtotal pain. Yeah. You know, and that's also why a lot of underwriters have to make a decision to just not quote business, because they're too busy. Yep. So it's like, that's why I think it's the end of backlogs. Yeah, Agree. Like, it's it's the it's the end of the underwriting backlog. It's the end of the claims backlog. It doesn't mean it's the end of the underwriter. You know, there's there's all the the the doomsdayers are this by the way, they're the same doom doom they're the same doomsdayers who have been doomsdayers since the eighteen twenties, the Luddites in industrial revolution England.

This does to me, it's like this is the first technology, though, that that directly threatens clerical office jobs, though. Like, more so than much more so than blue collar jobs. I mean, you can you can talk all you want about autonomous robotics, but the reality is that we have a massive shortage of skilled workers, and they're getting paid very well now. But now but now you've got this threat to the office, and then I'm like, well, have you actually sat down and looked at this? Because at every one of my insurance clients, we have a shortage of skilled adjusters and skilled underwriters, and we have a surplus of clerks.

And so I'd love to turn the clerks into skilled underwriters and adjusters. What what I found interesting, I don't know if you found this, is that half of them that we speak to are not interested in being skilled underwriters and adjusters. They don't want to go through the schooling. Are you finding the same thing where you have people that are reticent to go through the training to really upskill?

Dr. Thomas KuhntYeah, and I think that will be a big challenge ahead of us. I mean, I completely share your perspective on underwriting claims right now and we have a pre aging population. Mean hardly anybody is now coming from university and saying oh I want to enter insurance, want to become an underwriter. Mean we really struggle with recruiting. So on the pure underwriting profession, I'm quite positive. I mean, we have a third of our population retiring in the next ten years. So we're very happy and we are still pretty small in a lot of markets we're in.

So we can, we do believe that we can grow quite significantly by just replacing, I mean, really focusing the underwriters on underwriting.

James BenhamYeah, and this is the message I think people need to remember, is that the reality is there's a shortage of skilled workers. And so even with all the AI, you know, we're not gonna be allowed to have AI licensed underwriter bots and AI licensed claims bots. I mean, we're gonna have to have people involved. By the way, wouldn't want AI to make final decisions. I'm I'm a massive believer in human in the loop. I think that these should be tools that that that, you know, elevate our game because when I sit at the average would would you would you agree that, like, the core workforce in an insurance company is underwriters and adjusters?

Yes. Like, that's That's our main IP. I mean And then and then, you know, potentially, let's add in loss prevention and control. Right? Like, the actual risk engineers that go out and try and prevent losses from ever happening. So let's say that is likely the three big legs of the stool. Because of that, like we've got to find ways, because so many of their tasks are manual BS tasks. I've sat at their desk, so have you, I'm sure. They they they Outlook, they shovel documents through email.

I mean, it's just insane. That's daily routine. I call I call Excel the cancer of business. Do do do you have a do you have any strong feelings about Microsoft Excel?

Dr. Thomas KuhntI love it, and I hate it. I mean, it's so versatile, it's very hard to replace Excel. I mean, it's about Yeah. On the other hand, it's also very hard to standardize or even automate Excel. Bingo. If you want to do even even with AI, even with agentic AI, harmonizing BaudRose you get, I mean, you can do so crazy things in Excel,

James BenhamEven an agent can't harmonize Excel sheets yet. Exactly. They can be like they it can be quite difficult if you take, go into Claude code, for example, and say, here, take my very complex pivot table in Excel spreadsheet and turn this into a web app. It'll actually struggle with that.

Dr. Thomas KuhntStill. Yeah. And the other opportunity I see, and that was one of our first most exciting use cases for the underwriters, is the whole external research piece. If you look at pharma liability underwriting or financial lines, they do have to do background checks on the companies we are about to insure. And automating that on by policy today, they should already search, I don't know, a few hours on the web really doing the due diligence on the companies, and Identical AI can do that with a deep research functionalities.

You can provide a lot of those insights to the underwriters, and I think they really, really value that, that that provides more insights when they are about to make the decision. I am fully with you on the human in the loop. I don't see a near term future where we would remove the humans from that picture. Yeah.

James BenhamYeah. I I don't I don't see it, and I don't actually you know, I've I've spent twenty five years trying to automate menial tasks. I've also spent twenty five years trying to kill Microsoft Excel. I've been successful at automating a lot of tasks. I've been unsuccessful at killing Excel. So look let's look ahead because we're in a period of rapid change, but the reality is at the desk level, a lot of things are the same. People are still plowing through work on on Outlook. They may be relieved of having to do summary work, but we're still doing a lot of the same things.

So how do you see AI automation and digital platforms really reshaping the industry? And at the end of the day, how's it gonna impact the desk level of the people that work for you?

Dr. Thomas KuhntI do think that the technology is progressing extremely fast and I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to support many more activities in the future than what we can support today. I mean if you look at the exponential growth of the capabilities of some of those models, I mean it's just amazing. Even the models we've seen this year compared to the quality at the beginning of last year, I mean technological progress is rather rapid. I think we are overestimating the impact in the short term, but as always, mean, underestimating it a little bit in the long term, so I do see a future where can really focus more of their time on taking decisions and doing real underwriting, and right now, I don't know, 80% of their work is just rekeying data, reading documents, it's not really underwriting.

Yeah, it's not. And it's the first technology that underwriters and claims adjusters are really excited about. I don't know how long you've done that, but I mean it's like, mostly when you come with new techs, they say, do I have to change? Why now? Why that system? Right? But this is a tech where they say, hey Thomas, can we be faster? Can I get more Yes? Of

James Benhamwhen I, my first big thing to roll out was med record summarization on the medical component of claims. It was the first time that I've had a software release and hundreds of users wrote in to say this changed my life. It was massive. Like, this is more accurate than what I could do. This is better. This is amazing. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Like, it was a big deal. And then the idea started flowing. And they're like, can you do this and this and this and this and this and this?

Because like if you actually look at the core work of adjudicating a claim and you look at the core work of underwriting a policy, that might be 20% of their job. Exactly. And then all the rest is BS. And BS meaning things that actually don't really add value but are necessary tasks to complete to achieve the final objective right either close the claim out, indemnify the claimant right whether it's property, auto, GL whatever or or underwriting. So I I think there's a I think it's exciting.

I think it's a brave new world. I think that we're at, like, the baby phase right now. I think we're in, like, the infancy. The fact that, like, I can finally in Claude spin up Cloud Agents now and not just local agents is a is a is a total game changer. What's okay. So what do you do you use yourself? What what do you what do you what do you like? What do you use from a tech perspective?

Dr. Thomas KuhntSo always a challenge with the enterprise versus a personal environment because, of course, enterprise grade IT is always more protected, so personally, I I do use Cloud Code. I'm not really a coder, but it's finally an environment in which even I can code, and I love to really learn and understand. I think nowadays, even as a leader, you have to get your hands dirty. Yes. To really understand what's happening Yep. You have to work with it. As painful as it sometimes is. In the work environment, we are a little bit lagging, mean, are using Copilot, but for me this is more for the general employee base as a diffusion tool, we need to expose them to the new tech, right?

Because if I start with the very fancy exigentic setup and that's the first time they interact with AI in the enterprise environment, I'm very scared. So they need to learn when to trust AI, when not to trust, and that's why we are embarking on a broader transformation journey, just equipping everybody with kind of low barrier entry tools that they can work in within the environment while we work on the more corporate grade AI solutions that are more embedded into the workflows.

James BenhamInteresting. Yeah. I think co I think Copilot's like exposure therapy. It gets them used to it. It shows them what's possible, and it gets it done inside of a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that's, excluded from training and abuse monitoring. Right? Exactly. Those are the two things you have to opt out of. Abuse It's safe. They can try it out. They interfere.

Dr. Thomas KuhntThey they get used to using Yep.

James BenhamBut you have to admit, it's a bit underpowered compared to the other tools. It is. On a personal level, I'll tell you, Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. Oh my gosh, Gemini. And its abilities through Nano Banana for image generation, video generation, Veo 3.1. I mean, I my mind is being blown right now by Gemini. It's deep research mode, writes some of the best research papers. And, I think that's great. And then so I spend my personal time, again, not not my corporate data, but my personal time in Gemini.

And I think, from a corporate basis, Claude is probably my favorite because I love the stand they take as a company, and I love what they're doing for us on development tools. And I I love that it was people who left ChatGPT over a matter of principle. Nice. So it's I I think it's a I I think it's I I think it's quite remarkable. Well, look. I I think what you're doing is great.

Dr. Thomas KuhntI I love that you get to have your hand on the on the steering wheel on ops and technology. That's gotta be really exciting for you. And I know that if you're doing both, that means you have wonderful lieutenants sitting right under you that are executing all of your orders, aren't they? Yeah. And they really need to work together. And that's why I like I mean, we've talked about business IT alignment for a long time, but I think with AI, I mean, becomes IT, and IT and technology is business.

So I think right now, we are also putting the leadership of most initiatives into the hands of the business leads, so our lead underwriters in the countries are leading the AI transformation. But I think we will figure out the tech, but process and people,

James BenhamI think, are much harder challenges. Yeah. Well, the process has to follow quickly. Ideally, you define process before you implement tech, because if you apply amazing technology to a bad process, you just suck faster. Right? And no one wants to do that. Right? We actually wanna be better. We wanna be more efficient and more effective. Don't want to make a bad process more efficient. So but sometimes we have to lead with the tech and then embed the process consulting engagement inside of it, right? That's that can be really challenging.

Often we do both at the same time. And we do the same. And then while you're doing it, whole time you're doing it, you're evaluating the people and determining are these people that need retraining or do we need new people, right? So it's a very,

Dr. Thomas Kuhntpeople process technology, they're not separate. It's almost like you need to always say it together. Right? Because they're evaluated together. And you you really need the business to lead that transformation because it's not a tech initiative. It changes so much. It was exactly say, I don't want them to take the SS processes and just do AI in three sub steps. They need to rethink the processes.

James BenhamYeah. Do the It's not a tech challenge. Yeah. The fir no. It's not. The first question should always be why are we doing this? And that's an ops question. Yep. Alright. I'm gonna finish with this. Personal, like something interesting, unique, different, or a personal hobby that you're really into?

Dr. Thomas KuhntWell, I'm a long distance runner. So my my big hobby is long distance running. Alright. So what's the farthest you've ever run at once. Marathons. I mean, I I actually when I lived in The US, I learned to to my or I found my love of running. I did a lot of those cross country races in the Midwest, always sponsored by a brewery. A lot of fun. Right? You race and you have some fun afterwards Yeah. Once you finish And true German style drinking beer after working out?

Of course, yeah. Yes. But hey, the Midwest, are doing it all over the place. Yes, they do. Yeah. And then I started doing marathons in Chicago. The first three marathons I ever did was a Chicago marathon three What was the most recent one you ran you've run? Oh, that's Berlin. That was, three years ago. Okay. Have you ever run anything longer than a marathon? No. Okay. Well, I've walked. I've walked for 50 kilometers. Wow. That's a long walk. Yep. Yeah. That took us seven hours, I think, to finish.

That was quite painful. That's like walking for a whole day. That's

James Benhamthat is actually painful. You need to soak in the tub after that. You know what the fun piece is? It feels good till you reach the finish line. The moment you sit down, half an hour later, your body shuts down. Yeah, it's like it's like I was fine while I was moving. We're done now. Yeah, that's amazing. I I I like to walk for an hour at a time. Think it's it's it makes me feel really good. I get I get to get that out, but that's that's remarkable.

Okay. The marathoner, Thomas Kuhnt. Thank you so much for joining us on the InsurTech Geek podcast. Appreciate it. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in today to geek out live in London, for our interview with Thomas Kuhnt from HGI Global SE.