Reimagining actuarial science with AI

In this episode, Chris sits down with Igor Nikitin, CEO and co-founder of Nice Technologies, to explore how AI and modern engineering practices are transforming the actuarial field and setting the stage for the future of actuarial modeling. We discuss the introduction of programming into insurance pricing workflows, and how their Python-based calc engine, AI copilots, and DevOps-inspired workflows are enabling actuaries to collaborate more effectively across teams while accelerating innovation. Featuring: Igor Nikitin – LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/igor-nikitin-asa/Chris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com/, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/chrisbenson.bsky.social, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonLinks: Nice Technologies https://www.nicetechnologies.com/Sponsors: Shopify http://shopify.com/practicalai – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U. S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at shopify.com/practicalai http://shopify.com/practicalaiRegister for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real-world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind-the-scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, onto the show.

• 0:48Chris Benson?

  Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. My name is Chris Benson, your co-host. And with me today, we have Igor Nikitin, who is the CEO and co-founder of Nice Technologies. Welcome to the show, Igor.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Thank you, Chris.

• 1:04Chris Benson?

  So, one of the things that we love doing on the show is to get into different industries and explore how different industries are implementing and using AI in different ways. And you are an actuary, or at least the CEO of an actuarial modeling company. And that, we may have certain folks in the audience who are not intimately familiar with your industry. And I was wondering if we could start with, kind of tell us a little bit about what your industry is, as well as kind of how you got into it, and then kind of into why the technology around it specifically.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Sure. So, actuary, not to be confused with actor, is a risk management professional. We work at insurance companies, and we are the people who figure out how much insurance costs, what are the terms of insurance, and various aspects of managing insurance companies. So if you go to any insurance company, people there would tell you that it is really ran by actuaries in that company.

• 2:06Chris Benson?

  You're the folks with the power in it there. You're the ones that are actually making the wheels turn.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Well, us and sales. Because somehow, people don't wake up in the morning thinking, oh, you know what? Today, I'm gonna buy myself some life insurance.

• 2:21Chris Benson?

  That's good. So, so like, given the fact that it's risk management of this, could you talk a little bit about like, what's, what is involved? Like, if you, if your job is to, is to wake up, you're an actuary, and you're going to work at an insurance company, what does that look like? What is it that you're doing for the insurance company to do? You know, like, how do you implement risk management? What are the traditional tools, you know, aside from some of the technologies that you, that we're about to get into with you? What does that world look like?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  It usually looks like a lot of Excel spreadsheets. And for various items, there are more sophisticated models. So you may see proprietary software being used for certain things, like projecting benefits. You may see some software specialized on the projecting of your investments and on your portfolio. And in general, your day looks like doing a lot of financial modeling to answer questions, or to satisfy various regulations, or to develop new products. But in the end of the day, most of what actuaries do are some form of modeling

• 3:33Speaker 02

  or regulation, research, or compliance.

• 3:36Chris Benson?

  Gotcha. So that is the wheels behind the scene in that industry that makes it turn. So I guess that, when, when an insurance company, for instance, is going to price its products, you know, the, the insurance that a consumer might buy, I assume that all the aspects that go into that are, are part of what the actuary figures out. In terms of like, they can't price it without knowing all the different types of risks and, and how those play into the model. And so I, I'm curious, how did you find yourself? Did you start yourself as an actuary? And then, and then go into technology? Or did you come from the other side as a technologist into the space? How did you find yourself in this field?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  It was actually quite an interesting story. So I was programming since I was the age of 13, because I told my parents that I must have computer to learn programming. That was a ruse. I just wanted to play video games like all the other cool kids. But I think they get the last laugh because here I am a software engineer. So it was a hobby of mine. Then I moved to US and I kind of lost my circle of friends who were into programming. And so thinking what I want to do, my parents were telling me, well, you know, maybe you should be a lawyer. So I looked up, okay, to be a lawyer, what major do I need?

• 5:00Speaker 02

  And it was English. I did one semester of English. I hated it with lots of passion because somehow there is no wrong answer, but all of my answers were somehow wrong. And so I did a bit more soul searching and I decided that I want to become a high school teacher for mathematics. At the end of my college, I taught for one semester in American high school and I decided that I need to switch a profession. So next thing I know, I'm sitting in a coffee shop, Googling what to do with a mathematics degree. And that's when I discovered actuaries. And I said, okay, interesting. So there are some exams to take. I took my first exam. It was probability.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  And I was like, oh, probability. I'm great at probability. So I went in. I got two out of 10 on that exam.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  That is not a good grade. And I was like, oh, you know, that is actually challenging enough of a profession for me. I like it. So how do people pass this thing? It is absolutely brutal. Turns out you get a manual that is about 1000 pages thick with about 2000 practice problems. You solve all of that and then you show up to exam and it's easy at that point. So I did that. So I applied to a bunch of entry level actuarial jobs. But that was in January of 2009 and some of you may remember that there was a financial crisis right at about that time. Oh, boy, was there. What laid off. Yes. So I discovered that getting a job as an actuary was very, very difficult as an entry level actuary.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  And then I said, okay, what else do I know how to do programming? So I applied to a bunch of insurance companies with my resume for both actuary and programming jobs. And I got invited by Prudential Financial, actually, for an interview for a programming position. On my resume, it said I have introduction to C++ as the only programming course. And then I also brought a portfolio of things I've done and they said, okay, you have done a whole lot of stuff. And so they hired me as a programmer. Pretty quickly, I realized that as an actuary focusing on modeling, I can continue to do programming, but get paid twice as much. And so I joined their actual leadership development program

• 7:22Speaker 02

  and rotated through a bunch of different departments, learning how insurance works. Won an innovation competition along the way there with the idea of kind of future of modeling, what does it look like and what should a firm do to prepare for that? So that's how I ended up being an actuary.

• 7:42Chris Benson?

  Gotcha. So, so I'm curious, while the current, you know, age of AI had kicked off again by that time, it was really before anybody was doing it. So I'm kind of curious, as you were looking at models of the day that you're actually working with in real life at the job, just to draw a distinction, you know, as we, as we talk about, you know, the, the evolution of modeling over this past decade plus, what were, what were you typically working with? What kinds of models? What, what were the algorithmic things that you cared about in your day job? When you were doing that as you moved into software development, but within that actuarial modeling context?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  So coming from a software background, I was actually very surprised by a lot of things that I've seen. Because quite often, models, instead of being this kind of software that is very rigorously tested and optimized, you discover that there is a lot of quality controls that was, that is commonplace in a software industry that just doesn't exist. Part of it is because how do you version control an Excel workbook? And tha- tha- that is very challenging, but coming from background of using Git and DevOps, you're like, well, there is a way, we just need to get out, get away from Excel somehow.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Uh, but that runs into a different problem of there was no programming training for actuaries. Uh, there was, there was no required programming training for actuaries prior to two thousand eighteen. In two thousand eighteen, there was actually programming added to the actuarial exams. And since then, the profession became overall much more knowledgeable on programming and programming tools in general. Uh, because the situation was kind of interesting that we all do modeling, but none of us do, none of us had some sort of like very hands-on modeling course that is very kind of

• 9:39Speaker 02

  operations-based as opposed to understanding the theory behind insurance and all of the probability calculations and things.

• 9:48Chris Benson?

  I'm curious, the, is the field in two thousand eighteen updated itself, as you said, and kind of you started seeing programming as a requirement. How did that lead into, you know, now that it's kind of recognized as part of the field? And, and over the years since two thousand eighteen, uh, not, you know, not too long here, seven years. How has that affected the field itself in terms of getting up to the kinds of things that you're doing? Uh, you know, at this point where, where you're having AI capabilities and kind of modern algorithms directly implemented for actuarial fields. How, what did that look like, that evolution?

• 10:29Chris Benson?

  Cause that's not a lot of time between, you know, two thousand eighteen and twenty twenty-five as we record this.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  It is actually very different. Uh, and it was actually driven not so much by technology, but by regulation. Uh, regulations became much more sophisticated and that kind of forced everybody to use better technology. Uh, because if you need to run stochastic runs with thousands of scenarios, you cannot possibly do that in Excel, it's gonna run for weeks. Uh, and so that forced, uh, the industry to upgrade their systems and to adopt, uh, quite a few of the practices that are much more typical in software development.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  So seeing things like DevOps and unit tests, it became much more common nowadays. It's still not on every insurance company and it really depends kind of what insurance company, how insurance company operates, right? Because some of them, they focus just on sales and they kind of outsource all of the product development to other companies and the other, others are much more focused on kind of the mechanics of producing the insurance and then letting other companies care about sales. As far as AI, there is still very little adoption of it. Chief problem is the fact that AI is not reliable in a sense that it doesn't necessarily give you the truth.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And, and when, when you're complying with regulations, you do have to have the truth. So there is quite a lot of experiments of what is it useful for? In summarizing the data, there is some experiments in model development assistance. And yeah, I would say, and in providing a second opinion to the data analysis that is being done. So I would say those are the three areas where we see AI actually having some, some real world value that, that we observe.

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• 14:12Speaker 03

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• 14:21Chris Benson?

  So as you got to this point in your career where technology is changing, you know, and it's evolving, how did you get from that point into where you're at now with nice technologies and the capabilities that you provide? What was the remaining part of the journey into as you were kind of getting closer to the modern point?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I truly was born out of necessity. So our platform is kind of two pieces. There's calculation engine and data, and those are kind of two major parts, right? The data management part was really born at 2:00 AM as I was working on pricing reinsurance deals. And in that job, you deal with a lot of reruns and with a lot of tool chains that are rather manual. So new piece of information comes in for a meeting that you have tomorrow at 9:00 AM. This piece of information comes in at 5:00 PM the day before. And then the

• 15:26Speaker 02

  tool chain to incorporate this piece of information into the final quote can take four or five hours of different combinations of Excel models, Python models, different proprietary models. One reason for that is that reinsurance pricing is very bespoke. And so it's difficult to automate a process that is bespoke. And because of that, you end up actually sitting in the office until you're done incorporating this and checking this, and then you send your boss a message at like 2 AM saying, hey, it's done, can you review it by 9 AM? And they would actually be there knowing that they do need to review it because there's

• 16:09Speaker 02

  a lot of, a lot of money, a lot of eyes on the, on the quote and a lot of responsibility. So that's when I came up with the idea of like, all right, how, there must be some sort of engineering solution to this. And the solution is really what if you make your tool chain remember the steps you took in your original pricing, right? Because if you have that and it can recreate those steps without making mistakes that humans tend to make when they're work at 2 AM for the fifth night in a row, that's where kind of that idea was born.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  The other part of it was I've done modeling in several different systems and I realized that for certain products, some systems are far easier and quicker and cheaper to use than others. The challenge there is what if the cheapest system and the best system to use for a given product is an in-house system? And that's where I took, where I realized that we can take a page from the video game development industry. So in video game development industry in the 90s, they had the same problems. They had a bunch of proprietary software and as the complexity of games took off with compute power, you said, oh, 3D graphics are great.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Your development costs also skyrocketed, but you can't sell, sell video games more expensively because your customer refuses to pay more than $50. So how do you solve it? Well, Unreal Engine and Unity, right? They basically provide a core functionality that everybody builds off of to build the actual video games. And that makes the process much cheaper and hence you can actually have games that cost $50 as opposed to $5,000. So we said, okay, can we take that similar concept and apply it to insurance? So we would need a software that provides access to the underlying code. But at the same time, we need to make sure that it is commercially viable and well supported and industrial grade.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  And that's how we came up with idea for our calc engine, which is source available business model. Meaning we provide source code to our clients, but not to general public.

• 18:25Chris Benson?

  Gotcha. So it's interesting that I love you're kind of, there's a little bit of a, kind of a classic entrepreneurial story there. And that you're A, kind of scratching your own itch, like you're recognizing my job would be easier. If I were to recreate what I was doing before and have that immediately available. And then that's interesting inspiration. I would not, I don't think I would have expected you to, to the analogy between the actuary and field and also gaming is pretty cool. So it sounds like you're building an app kind of in the same spirit as you mentioned Unreal Engine and Unity, which are the two biggies in that industry.

• 19:08Chris Benson?

  So in the end, could you talk a little bit about what your calc engine became? And how it was received in the industry and like what, you know, I know as a, as a sense, Daniel, who is my co-host, who is not able to make it here today, is also the CEO of a small company that's growing very fast. And I love hearing kind of how he's gotten through the steps of how his company has developed from kind of the challenges at the very beginning and he gets traction and stuff. Could you talk a little bit about what your, what your pathway has been like as you've been developing the calc engine and the other features at Nice Industries? What has that pathway looked like for you?

• 19:48Speaker 02

  So we always leaned on feedbacks. Even before we started a company, we did went to several executives in the industry and said, would this be interesting? You know, we went to heads of pricing, heads of modeling and said, you know, what if this thing existed? Would you care? And the answer was, we would love to see a demo. Pretty much every single person we spoke with said, we would love to see a demo. We said, okay, great, but to build a demo, we need like a year of work because this is pretty complicated thing to to to build if you want a demo that looks somewhat realistic.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  So with that knowledge, we said, okay, well, let's let's see if anybody else believes in this. We reached out to several people that we wanted to co-found a company with, and only two of them did not join. One of them did not join because she had a baby five days before we called her. So that was understandable.

• 20:48Chris Benson?

  That's a pretty good reason for anything, quite honestly, in the world.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  But the others joined, and that was a very defining moment of saying like, oh, okay, I'm not the only person who believes in this. And then we went to investors and we said, well, would you be willing to invest in this kind of venture? And we discovered that the answer was also yes. So we said, okay, well, apparently there's quite a few people who are interested. So then we developed a demo, we showed it to the original group of people that we were working with. They said, okay, great. When is it going to be commercially available? We said, well, probably for another year or so, because there's there's a lot of work to go

• 21:31Speaker 02

  from prototype to a production grade system. And then we launched publicly in this February with a production grade system. And right now we're in talks with a lot of different insurance companies on in in various stages of negotiations.

• 21:49Chris Benson?

  So it sounds like right now you're kind of the hot new thing in that field because you if you just came out a few months ago, you've got this great new thing that's going to, you know, revolutionize the industry with a capability it didn't have before. What are the I'm just curious, like, is an industry that hasn't had this kind of capability in the past, what's the reception like on that? Is it? I see in a lot of industries that we'll talk to people who, you know, there's a bit of a struggle to shift mindset into recognizing it. And then there are other industries where people are just waiting for the leap forward and stuff. Is it, you know, or some combination of the two? What is it like changing an industry, you know, in that way at such a fundamental level as you're trying to get traction on that and

• 22:34Chris Benson?

  bring and for you as a as a business owner, bringing new customers on board, but kind of giving them a new way of of doing that?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  It's a lot of explaining how we're different because on one hand, people quickly catch on that our business model is completely different from everybody else in the market. On the other hand, the most common question I get is, do I require to know Python to use your system? The answer is no, but that is like the number one question, the most common question that I get. And so it is a bit of a process, especially at big companies where there are many stakeholders, a lot of different vetting processes and a lot of coordinating between a lot of parties. So you need to have pricing on board and valuation on board and modeling on board and IT on board.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And it just takes a lot of time to coordinate everything between those. Just like life insurance policies, insurance companies usually don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, you know what, we're going to swap our modeling platform. That's a big undertaking, you know, and it's not taken lightly. And having been in those shoes, I realize that there's a lot of work and you would only do it for very, very compelling business reasons.

• 23:52Chris Benson?

  It sounds like, like when, if you look at, like, speaking about one of your customers, that they're really, it's really to get the benefits and to leap forward, they have their workflows, which is, and as you kind of pointed out, the different components of their business, the different departments, if you will, have to all kind of get on board. It reminds me a little bit, as you say that, and I don't know that this is a good analogy, so I'll throw it out, of kind of when you put in like, like an SAP implementation in a, in a company and it hits many different functions of it, it seems to have, where the workflows themselves at those, at the, at the customers will change.

• 24:33Chris Benson?

  It sounds like different software, but within your industry, like you're, there's a bunch of plugin points where people have to buy in and workflows change so that they can get the benefits of surging forward. Is that an accurate, is that an accurate way of representing that?

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it is somewhat similar. I would agree that it, it does change the way people work. For some people more than others. So if you look at it from a model developer perspective, you used to use proprietary software where you had a bunch of dropdowns where you could like edit some formulas. Fun fact, those formulas look suspiciously similar to code. And now you use something like Visual Studio, for example. Now, looking at it from perspective of an actuary, you would say, okay, that's a big difference. Now I have to understand Python. But looking at it from kind of an actuary who also has experience in programming,

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I see it as, oh, I finally have Git for version control. I finally have DevOps. I finally can automatically merge code from multiple developers. I finally have amazing tracing and tracing capabilities and breakpoints and a lot of these tools that I did not have before that allow me to understand things quicker. And in today's world, that also means that you can have an AI code assistant that can explain how things work, that can make variants of different calculations, that can create unit tests for you and do all of those things actually quite well.

• 26:14Chris Benson?

  So that is pretty fascinating to me in terms of the description. Like I, I, as you're talking about, you know, tools like Git and Visual Studio and stuff like that. And those are things that, that I obviously know coming at it as a, as a developer. Could you talk a little bit, but recognizing that not every actuary is, is a developer and everything, could you do a deep dive into kind of what your workflow looks like, like from the customer's perspective? What does that turn their reality into? And, and can you draw out some of those points about why this is better than it was before? By doing that, because we've talked a bit, a bit about the investment in learning new stuff, the investment in getting the different,

• 26:57Chris Benson?

  you know, departments of the insurance company working together. Take, take me through it. And if you could draw out some of the, the, the benefits of the technology and specifically the, the AI bits that you have into it, I'd love to understand what that looks like. What, you know, what does a modern actuarial workflow look like for a company that's now out on the, the leading edge of that?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Uh, sure. So a simple example would be, let's say you have an Excel uh model that does something, right? So imagine a dozen or so tabs full of Excel formulas. And that does some sort of calculation, right? Uh, so the number one question you would get is, well, how does it work? Uh, if I want to understand how this works, I would spend some time digging through all of these formulas and tracing and kind of understanding how they all connect. Now, in the, in our platform, right? You literally just ask uh the AI system, hey, can you explain this, how this calculation works? Can you point me to where in the code is it?

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And you get an exact location in the code um and the calculation, right? Then you say, okay, well, I need to modify this model to support a new product. Um, and there is maybe several pieces of that product that uh would need to be modified, right? In Excel, it's very difficult to merge models. So if you have three people working in parallel, it's very difficult to put all of their changes together and make sure that you didn't miss anything. Uh, versus if you work in Python, um, you have Git. You just say, hey, can you merge this? Uh, and if your platform is well organized, uh, meaning it's object oriented, um, you would have very little problems with that.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  And there's a good chance it'll just auto merge in seconds and say, okay, there is no conflicts. So it enables development of functionalities as a team, as opposed to being forced to be in a single developer because working in parallel is simply too complicated to merge. Uh, and then you say, okay, so now I have this functionality, it kind of sort of works. I want to make sure that it's production grade, so I need to test it. In Excel, you have a limited number of tests that you would hopefully come up with. I've seen like dozens usually being kind of a decent number. With the help of AI, you can you can create a lot more than that.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  And with unit test functionality in like Visual Studio or DevOps, right? You can have literally thousands or even millions of unit tests to make sure that your software does exactly what you want and can handle all of the edge cases correctly. And then the next step would be to say, okay, well, it works in Excel, but this is glacially slow. What can I do? And at that point, you're you're quite often just stuck because there is simply no way of getting it faster. Now, in our world, you can ask your AI assistant, hey, can you check my code for?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, you you have the performance benchmarks and those would get triggered if you've done something that like tripled the runtime all of a sudden. But second, you can ask AI assistant to say, hey, can you tell me which part of my code is slow? And can you give me some ideas of how to do it quicker? And quite often you will get, at the very least, it'll identify where you're doing same calculation over and over or doing other things that are suboptimal. Overall, it's just much nicer experience, which is which requires some knowledge of Python to be effective at it from modeling perspective.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  But at the same time, with AI assistants, that threshold of how much Python you need to know is much lower. As well as it is just so much faster to to ask AI assistant for like, hey, can you explain something? Or can you find something in the code base?

• 31:08Chris Benson?

  It sounds like, just as an analogy on another topic that we brought in, you know, a common buzz phrase these days is vibe programming, vibe development, you know, where you're working with a LLM on your code and that, and it sounds like there's sort of an analogy in that the actuary is going to know some Python to use the system, but the system helps with that. Is that, is that a fair assessment to where the system itself is kind of working in that vibe coding manner of saying, I can show you the challenge in the code that you need to address, or, and maybe I can help you fix it and things like that. What are, can you differentiate a little bit about which parts of the workflow,

• 31:51Chris Benson?

  the actuary is, is getting into the Python and what kinds of things, you know, are able to be done through a GUI or through an agentic approach? For instance, where you have, you know, an agent that may have taken on a task that was historically a very manual task or anything like that. Is there, do you have any, anything that you can share along those lines? Just in terms of how workflows evolved?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  All right, so I'm mostly talking from a modeler perspective, right?

• 32:17Chris Benson?

  Sure.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Now, if you're a user like pricing actuary or valuation actuary, right? So you use models, but you don't touch the function, like you don't alter their functionality. You're just putting inputs in and getting outputs out, right? For that, you actually don't need to know any Python at all, because all of that is done through a GUI. Now, a great thing about a source available approach is that you can bring your own GUI. And in fact, you can have multiple GUIs. So instead of a single desktop application that's used by pricers and modelers and tries to do well for both of them, we say, well, why not allow use of third-party tools?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  So a modeler can use Visual Studio or PyCharm or whichever IDE they prefer. Now, the pricer can use Excel or web interface or some other media that integrates well with their particular systems and workflows. And you can swap those out, or you can even build your own. So it helps a lot when your system is source available with the idea that

• 33:32Speaker 02

  You can build anything you want in it, and that could include your goies.

• 33:37Chris Benson?

  So it sounds like you're really focused on kind of maximizing the actuary's time and minimizing the amount of effort to get compared to what it was, you know, prior to them having this kind of capability available to them. How does that, like, if you're the actuary using it, like, what is the impression of how it changes jobs? I ask that in terms of the requirements of doing the job, because that's one of the first things that people are always asking is kind of how does the technology change what it means to be an actuary? Like, as a software developer myself that's in the AI space, people are always talking about what the quality of software development is with all these cool new tools we have.

• 34:21Chris Benson?

  And often, the results, there's been a lot of conversations about it, you know, depressing the software development need, but in actuality, I actually disagree. I find the tools to be very helpful, and I'm still very engaged in it. What is the actuary experiencing now, having ramped up on your process versus the process of doing it, you know, fairly manually with spreadsheets and everything before? What's the feedback you get on that in terms of what people are, you know, how do they perceive this new way of doing it now that they're kind of fully ramped in and up to speed?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  So from pricing perspective, I think this would be most vivid. So as a pricer, you basically take the request for proposal for a certain insurance contract. You figure out how to plug it into your models, and ultimately, you produce a quote that says, "Okay, we will do this reinsurance for this much money on these terms," right? If you ask a pricing actuary today, what are they doing during their day? They would say, "Oh, I'm pricing." Now, if you ask them, okay, so what exactly does that mean? Like mechanically, what are you doing? Uh, they would say, well, about fifty to seventy percent of my time,

• 35:40Speaker 02

  I'm literally moving numbers from one model into another model. Uh, so, and then run the next model and then take the outputs and plug them into the, the next model, right? The remaining time I'm spending, um, checking the results and making sure that they make sense and, uh, that, you know, everything looks good and there is no strange things happening as far as results that I expect versus what I actually got. And then, um, I'd say about ten to fifteen percent of time is also spent on hunting down answers to various ambiguities, um, that were presented in this contract. So you would reach out to the party requesting and saying,

• 36:22Speaker 02

  hey, you know, there is a bunch of people missing gender. Do you know what gender they are? Or their birthdays are in the future? Like, we're pretty sure that's wrong. So that's the world today, right? Um, once you implement a platform like ours, what happens is you set up your pricing process once. And then from there, at any point, if you get any data updates or changes or you wanna try something, you change your original inputs. You click a button and because the system remembers the steps you took, uh, it'll actually do the full repricing for you, um, in about ten, fifteen minutes. So it's a good amount of time to go get a coffee.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And, uh, that frees up your time, uh, to do more analytical things or to price more quotes. Uh, management loves the second one. But, uh, as, as a pricer myself, I like the third option. Uh, it gives you an option to go for, to go home at 5:00 PM as opposed to 2:00 AM.

• 37:28Chris Benson?

  That's a good answer, actually, a really good answer. So. You've taken it this far and you've really made an impact in terms of the capabilities you're offering to the companies in your industry as you're taking on new customers and stuff. As you're looking forward in time and over some period, not immediately, but over a year or two, maybe longer, depending on what your horizon is, how are you envisioning the industry changing? And do you have any ideas for the future that you would like to see either yourself implement or the industry at large change and develop into?

• 38:08Chris Benson?

  What kind of future, when you're kind of done for the day and you're having a glass of wine or just kind of chilling and your mind's wandering a little bit, what's the future that you're excited to see, that you're wanting to help build or be a part of?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yes, so I see the future, we want to change the way Actuaral Modelin is done. Instead of current proprietary softwares that are being used, we envision a future that is built on common technologies, so particularly Python and the tooling around that. And we think that that future will be much more efficient and it will make our profession even more valuable than it is today. Reason for that is if you learn a proprietary software today, you go to a different company or even a different department within the same company and they use different software. And then you have to relearn everything you learned because all the buttons are different,

• 39:07Speaker 02

  all the menus are different, the logic is different, and many things are different. If you build Modelin on a common technology like Python and Visual Studio and DevOps, you learn it once and those skills will be just as applicable to any other company where you go. In fact, they apply beyond just Modelin. You can do automation, you can do data science, and in fact, they apply even outside of Actuaral professions. They're just generally more and more valuable as our society becomes much more technologically advanced.

• 39:47Chris Benson?

  Fantastic. Well, Igor, thank you so much for coming on Practical AI today. I learned a lot and really appreciate you sharing, not only kind of teaching us a bit about the industry you're in, but telling us how nice technologies is starting to change the face of the industry in terms of how actuaries are able to kind of level up and go home at 5 o'clock instead of 2 a.m. Definitely a big bonus there. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  All right. That's our show for this week. If you haven't checked out our website, head to practicalai.fm and be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X, or Blue Sky. You'll see us posting insights related to the latest AI developments, and we would love for you to join the conversation. Thanks to our partner, Prediction Guard, for providing operational support for the show. Check them out at predictionguard.com. Also, thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder for the beats and to you for listening. That's all for now, but you'll hear from us again next week.