Plugging In to Supercharge Agency Performance with Colby Tunick from ReFocus AI

1

INTERVIEW

JBKnowledge podcast network.

On episode 41 of the InsurTech Geek podcast, talking about Plugging In, To Supercharge Agency Performance with Colby Tunick from ReFocus AI

Rob: Hey everyone. This is Rob Galbraith. I am flying solo this week of the InsurTech Geek podcast. Unfortunately, no James riding along. So, this is the time the copilot gets to take over and earn his wings a little bit. So I'm real excited to be with you guys this week, and glad to be joined by Colby Tunick of ReFocus AI. Colby, it's a pleasure having you on.

Colby: Thanks for having me on the call, Rob. Great to meet you and great to be here.

Rob: So we're real excited to get to meet Colby, learn a little bit about him and, learn about ReFocus AI and what they're focused on. And we're going to get a little geeky, talking about the difference between AI and machine learning and go a little techy and then a little salesy this week, so I'm really looking forward to it. Before we get started, with our conversation, don't forget that you can subscribe to the InsurTech Geek podcast by texting GeekOut to 66866 and make sure you never miss an episode. You'll get our newsletter and you'll be in the know to get this episode and all future episodes. So I encourage you guys to text GeekOut to 66866. Back with Colby. So Colby, we always like to start every podcast by getting to know a little bit about our guest and having them give a bit of a background, you'll be shocked to know that many of our guests did not originally start out to be in the insurance industry, and so it's always interesting to hear, the winding path that you took. I don't think you're any exception to that rule. So, just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Colby: Absolutely, Rob. I hear that a lot when I talk to people in the insurance industry, one of the questions I always enjoy asking is how did you get involved in insurance? And most of the time it was, well, it just happened. It was so unexpected. It was, a lateral move. It was an opportunity that a friend presented, something like that. But, something that I've enjoyed about insurance is that people are very value and mission-driven and insurance is really one of the ways that we can help people with more sustainable lives. My journey didn't start with insurance. When I graduated from college, my first job out of college was working as a defense consultant grant writer and international researcher, and I was running some of my own projects. One of them that I always like to mention as I was helping run a coffee farm in Hawaii, not at all related to the defense part of the job, but it was just a task that came up. We used to joke that friends don't let friends drink Starbucks. I encourage everybody who's listening to go find a local coffee roaster and give them your business. I did that job for a couple of years, it was a great learning experience about how international companies go about seeking support from governments, in particular, I was writing grants for both the U S department of defense and UK ministry of defense, in that role, and just learned a lot about how large companies operate, and that transitioned me into a role working at a space technology startup, which was extremely interesting. I got to put on my Elon Musk cap for a little bit, and learned a lot about what you could consider cutting edge technology in an industry that's actually very antiquated. When we think about space, we think about new frontier. It's exciting, everything's shiny, but most of the techniques and technologies they use are 50, 60, 70 years old. On average, to build a satellite, it takes five years. That's something a lot of people don't realize and interestingly, there's a lot of parallels between insurance and satellite design or space tech design because of the tool set and methodologies that are still in use there today. So after leaving that job, I took a position at the California earthquake authority, which is the second largest single line, natural catastrophe insurance company in the world. It's an insurance carrier specifically focusing on residential earthquake insurance in the state of California. It's comparable to the federally run insurance companies that book Japan and New Zealand have for earthquake insurance. And again, of course, those companies are on the Pacific rim and sustain regular earthquakes, just like we do in the western United States, and working there at that insurance carrier. I realized that there was an opportunity to use our data, to help drive not only our business, but our sales decisions. And it's interesting because insurance is one of the few industries that can claim that they have too much data. Most other industries suffer from what you would consider a data shortage, they're relatively new. There's not a depth of history there to pull from, but insurance produces so much data. In many cases, it can actually be crippling, so at that point I was actually working on a different technology for social media marketing and he wasn't my co-founder at the time, but my co-founder now our chief operations officer, Elisha Cheng, started talking to marketing people about my idea without telling me, and he went out on my behalf and did this research for me, which was very much appreciated when I found out he was doing it. But, early results from that were not promising. I was a little downtrodden. I had been spending a couple of months understanding this market and the industry, so I called an advisor and I said, Hey, I'm not seeing a lot of luck here. It looks like there's just not the need I thought. And he said, "you know, you work in insurance. I don't actually know anything about insurance, but is there an, is there an application of machine learning for insurance?" And that got me thinking again on the data question that we had internally been discussing and trying to resolve, and that's where we are today, a little after a year. It's been a long year and a quarter, because we started the company and then we have COVID-19, and that has been quite a journey, but here we are today and I couldn't be happier with the progress we've made.

2

Connect with Colby Tunick