RHS 063 - Ron Glozman on a Practical Use for AI in Insurance

Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Before we get to today's guest, I want to do something different. I want to support a good friend and a good cause, and that is Chris Paradiso and his *Last Agent Standing* magazine that he creates.

Ryan Hanley: This is the fifth edition of the magazine. All the proceeds go to charity. If you know Chris, you know he's someone who supports our industry as much or more than anyone else. He stands among the giants of the individuals who support our space. He's doing incredible things. He gets people together. He gets conversations happening. I've known Chris for almost a decade now, and I just consider it an honor to be kind of in the conversations that he's brought me into. I want to do my part to support both the individuals who contributed their expertise to this magazine and, here is the kicker, all the individuals who have ever contributed to any of the magazines.

Ryan Hanley: So here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to ParadisoPresents.com. ParadisoPresents.com. And Chris doesn't know that I'm doing this. He has no idea. Go to ParadisoPresents.com and share that link. Share it on social media. Share it on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn with the hashtag #LastAgentStanding. Hashtag #LastAgentStanding.

Ryan Hanley: Okay, so this has nothing to do with the podcast. This is everything about this magazine, the people who contributed, and just getting the word out. Share that link and just put it in there. Purchase a copy. I did. Put some peer pressure, put some social pressure on your peers to go buy a copy. I bought six copies of the latest episode, which I did contribute to, but that's not why I bought them. I bought six copies and I have copies of every... so basically I have six copies of each of the five editions.

Ryan Hanley: What I'm going to do is for everyone who goes out and shares the link to ParadisoPresents.com where you can purchase your copy of the magazine and hashtags it #LastAgentStanding, I'm going to start randomly picking people and sending them, mailing them, all five copies of the magazine. So share the link, put some pressure on people, hashtag #LastAgentStanding. You can tag Chris, you can tag Paradiso Presents, you can tag me, tag anyone who contributed. Bob McCool, Daniel Sung, Bob Klinger, Joe Hollier, Jeff and Una, Roy, Frank Settner, Ron Gloseman, who's our interviewee today.

Ryan Hanley: Do this, share it, get the message out. Bradley Flowers contributed, Susan Shaw contributed, there's amazing contributors. Kerry Wallace contributed. There's amazing contributors just in this latest episode. I'm going to send you all five episodes randomly, six people, if you do this. It's about getting people to purchase more copies because then more money goes to charity. More people see these stories that everyone is sharing, thoughts they're sharing. It's about spreading ideas throughout the community. I just hope you'll do this. I don't do a lot of this kind of stuff on the show, but I want to be supportive of Chris. Like I said, he has no idea that I'm doing this.

Ryan Hanley: So that's a long intro to get to Ron Gloseman. Ron is a technologist and he's a thoughtful guy. I love the way he's coming at the industry. He is the founder and CEO of Chisel AI. Chisel is a provider of AI-powered solutions for commercial insurance brokers. Basically, guys, he's come up with some machine learning and natural language processing software which allows you to track differences between maybe how a policy was bound and how it was issued, how renewals are issued versus what was quoted. He's basically created a software that helps drastically reduce the chance of errors and omissions claims because of differences in bound, quoted, signed policy docs, and what's actually issued by a company. Also helps with endorsements, helps with all that kind of stuff. It's really interesting.

Ryan Hanley: He talks a lot about what AI is and how it can be used in a fundamental way in our industry, in a very practical way in our industry, and I think you're going to love this episode. So share Paradiso Presents, listen to this episode, hashtag #LastAgentStanding, and I'm going to pick six of you over the next couple weeks randomly to send all five editions of the magazine. All right, let's get to Ron.

Ryan Hanley: Hey, Ron. What's going on, man?

Ron Glozman: Good. How are you doing?

Ryan Hanley: I'm good. I appreciate you letting me push 15 minutes.

Ron Glozman: Yeah, no worries. Today has been a day. There's no doubt.

Ryan Hanley: A good or a bad day?

Ron Glozman: Good, good. I would say good and bad. The full spectrum of day. I've had both. I've written business today, which always makes a day a good day, and I've had some conversations I wish that I hadn't had today. So the full spectrum, which brings us to you and our conversation, which I am excited about.

Ryan Hanley: I like to get right into it with these. I'm just interested, man. I'm interested in what you guys are doing. I've looked at the website. I know a little bit. Tracy emailed me. We talked a little bit. Maybe just start to break it down for me. One thing I will say, and this is one of the things I love about the insurance industry, is anytime you throw anything that asks like... the URL is chisel.ai. As much as I would love to believe that I am this forward-thinking tech guy, as soon as I see the letters AI next to each other, I immediately have two thoughts. I'm like, "Wow, I bet this is super cool," or "It's complete bullshit." So which one is it?

Ron Glozman: No, for sure. I think it's important to define what artificial intelligence maybe is because it's really been around for a long time. A lot of people have misconceptions and there are many types of AI. Maybe I'll start there. There's machine learning, which is probably the most academic aspect. There's a lot of really good research there. A lot of people study machine learning or study a branch of machine learning as an area of expertise. Then there are things like text to speech and speech to text, which is like Siri. I think everybody's used to Siri and "Hey, Alexa" and "Hey, Google." Nobody finds it scary, I don't think. But it's all artificial intelligence because it can understand you, it can translate it into text effectively. You can then take that text, do a question-answer search, generate an answer, and then take that answer from text and generate speech to read it back to you. That's like four types of machine learning right there just to accomplish what might seem like a really simple task.

Ron Glozman: When we talk about what we do, which is policy checking and the intake of submissions for the insurance industry, that's again maybe people think it's scarier, it's complex. But when you break it down, it's a lot of small problems that together add up into maybe a complex.

Ryan Hanley: It's funny when you're breaking that down. When you really think about it, when you stop and you really think about how much technology goes into, "Hey Siri, where's the closest pizza joint?" And Siri's ready to rock. You say that, and then literally you get an answer back: "Down the road on the left is the best, 400 five-star reviews, Johnny's Pizza." The amount of technology that goes into that. To us, it's like, "Oh Siri," we don't even think twice about it. It's crazy that then we think about mapping this to the insurance industry.

Ryan Hanley: So this Siri... [gestures with hands] I'm pointing at this, even though we don't do video, everyone knows I do things with my hands and then they can't actually see me. We have this incredibly powerful built-out technology delivering real-time responses in what would have to be considered a fairly accurate manner. Then we contrast that against the things that we deal with today in the insurance industry. I had a 45-minute bitch session with a buddy of mine about agency technology today. It's insane. It feels almost like we should just go out with an actual club and actually club the client and then actually drag them back to the office. Physically do that. That might be more efficient than how we operate.

Ron Glozman: For sure. I think there's a lot of opportunity for efficiency. I hope it doesn't have to come to clubbing them over the head. I would hope we can have other solutions. I think it starts with being able to intake digital documents. One of the great things that I personally like is PDFs, especially because everybody's working from home and DocuSign seems to be getting more accepted and all of these e-signature solutions. I think it's really a great step forward. Looking at that, I'm hopeful that that is a catalyst of the beginning of a transition into a more digital way to deliver insurance and to buy insurance.

Ryan Hanley: To your point, if we have to club them over the head and drag them to our office, it doesn't scale and it's not a pleasant experience. Not for them, not for us.

Ron Glozman: It would be pretty badass though if you did that. You literally just had someone by the collar and you dragged him to the door. And someone asks, "Who's that?" And you're like, "That's our new client. He's got a fleet of vehicles and a nice plumbing business."

Ryan Hanley: Okay, getting back to reality here. You talked a lot about PDFs. It feels like to me that this COVID world is not going away. I think that idea has probably been beat up quite a bit. The pendulum will swing back. I can't wait until I can actually meet at least some people in person. But I have a lot of... My agency has existed since March 9th. I'm not going to say that I've sold like a thousand clients, but I've only had two of them. One asked for an in-person meeting and we just didn't do it. The other was an in-person meeting that I sold. Every other client I have has happened through the phone, text message, email, and e-sign. I haven't even sold anybody through Zoom. I haven't even needed to. Phone, email, text. What comes next? I'm going to send you an e-sign document. You sign it, you send it back. Done.

Ryan Hanley: That part... I think we'll have more human experiences to build trust into our process because that's always going to be important. But the delivery, the exchange of information, the capture of information... that part being 99% digital doesn't feel like that's going away. It doesn't feel like we're going back to handwriting on the cord forms and stuff. I'm personally excited for that. I think that allows us to then do a lot of cool things.

Ron Glozman: One interesting statistic is that 50% of people in the United States specifically are underinsured, at least when it comes to the commercial space. My favorite is a farmer who bought a property, let's say in California. He bought a farm with a plot of land, half a million dollars. Due to appreciation in California, that land is now worth a lot more. Because he's just getting his policy renewed year over year, it's been at the same limit and nobody ever catches that they should increase it. That's 50% of people in the United States actually. When the information comes in digitally and we can start looking at things like, "What is the property value in that zip code or postal code?" or "Is it in a flood zone or hurricane zone?" There's lots of cool information that we can then do, but it all has to start with getting that information into some type of digital format. Then cool things can happen.

Ryan Hanley: Then you can pull in... I don't want to say... maybe some of the stuff I say is silly and kind of the more technical vernacular, but there's so many lakes or whatever of data stored in different places that you can suck in and ping against what you actually have. I was talking to a carrier one time and they asked me, "If you could have one thing, anything, what would it be?" I said, "When I have an account, I would like to be able to push a button and have all the nonsensical information that I have to ask them about sucked in so I don't have to ask them about that." Like, "When was the last time that your roof was done?" "2015." That's what I put. 2015. It was done in 2015. Unless I know it's super old, 2015. Or if I did 2015 for the electrical, then I put 2017 for the roof. That's every... because what are you going to do? You're going to waste all your time, the valuable time that you get of your client's attention, on "When was the electrical last done?" Now, I get it. You need to know if there's circuit breakers or fuses or whatever. That kind of does make a difference. But some of this... we're talking about building code information and ISO information and how far is it from a fire hydrant. I'm not saying that stuff isn't important, but it is certainly not important to talk to your client about. That is not information that we should be wasting our client's time on. This feels like one of the magic pills to moving forward.

Ron Glozman: A hundred percent. One of my favorite statistics... I talk to a lot of carriers. On average, the average questionnaire can have like a hundred plus questions. They're typically only using 15 to 50 of those. A lot of those are just throwaway. To your point, you're probably beating your client over the head saying, "When was the electrical last done?" Unfortunately, they actually don't even capture that information because we're back to point A. That information today needs to be manually typed into some type of database on their end.

[Connection cuts out briefly]

Ron Glozman: Sorry about that. That's the lovely powers of work from home internet.

Ryan Hanley: All good. How many times have you tried to sell and the internet died?

Ron Glozman: Thankfully, my internet has not been a problem here. I have had my AC unit at the house go during the middle of summer. I've worked out of the house and it was about 100 degrees in here. I have had to deal with that, but thankfully the internet has not been an issue.

Ryan Hanley: Great to hear. So you were saying that companies have apps that have 100 plus fields, but they're only taking in 15 to 50 of them. And even some of those they're not using because in the end, all that information has to be plugged in manually into the system. And that's where we lost you.

Ron Glozman: Yeah, a hundred percent. I was going even further to say, as you're probably familiar with, many carriers have their own portals or their own forms that they ask you to fill in when you're sending in submissions or applications. It can be very time consuming. On the flip side, they receive a variety of formats because they work with so many agencies and brokerages. Again, artificial intelligence, specifically natural language processing, which is the ability for a computer to read and understand text just like a human, is the application or the artificial intelligence that can really help there. I've personally seen a lot of success in that area.

Ryan Hanley: Before we go too much further, I'd like to discuss natural language processing. When people think about anything that has to do with artificial intelligence, I think machine learning is what they're really thinking about. I think about a computer taking a certain number of iterations in, and each one of those iterations teaches them something. Over time, they develop an optimization to that process in a very broad strokes way of defining it. But this idea of processing language, turning it into data, or being able to take data and turning it into language... Just talk to me a little bit about that process. I know it's one of the faster growing areas where artificial intelligence is being used. At the same time, I don't know that I know that much about it, or probably anyone who's listening knows a tremendous amount about it or its power when actually used.

Ron Glozman: Sure. Natural language processing, as mentioned, is really just a way to say teaching computers how to read. There are more branches of natural language processing. For example, we talked a little bit earlier about question answer systems. That's an example. Another example is translation. Back in the day, the way translations like Google Translate used to work was it was really like a dictionary. It went English to French, English to Spanish, English to Chinese. It ended up being a huge, like 100-plus gigabyte... hopefully I'm not losing you... that was very, very large because it was just a mapping of each language. Nowadays, Google, for example, uses what's called an autoencoder. It takes English, translates it into a bunch of numbers, and then those numbers can be translated into any other language.

Ryan Hanley: It's like having a cipher, kind of.

Ron Glozman: That's exactly it. That's a great word. It's a cipher. That's a great word. That's another example, machine translation. We're all used to going to Google Translate when you're lost or traveling around the world. You take a picture of a menu and boom, escargot means snail in French, for example. That's another cool one.

Ron Glozman: Other examples specifically of natural language processing that can apply to insurance include entity extraction and classification. That's the ability, for example, to extract names, dates, financial information, and then classify them. It's good to know that this is a number, like 1,000, 10,000, 1 million are in here. But it's also important to know, is it a limit? Is it a deductible? Is it a premium? And if so, what is it related to? Is this a limit for the property? Is this a limit for the shrubbery, for the flood? Is it a sublimit? So on and so forth. That's where machine learning can come in. The ability to take this context... basically you give it a body of text. In this case, imagine a PDF, an email, and an application form. It hears all the names here, all the dates, here are all the numbers, here are all the relationships between them. Here's what type of date it is. It's an expiry date, an effective date, a retroactivity date, et cetera. It really comes down to math and statistics. Just like you can teach English to anybody effectively, you can teach a machine English.

Ryan Hanley: So how does this relate to... you use the idea of getting... talk to me about Chisel. Talk to me a little bit about what Chisel does. What is this tool? I've read through most of the site. I've heard your guys' name tossed around a little bit. But if I'm being completely honest, I don't have a real firm grasp on exactly what problems you're solving and how you're solving them. But it sounds sexy as hell.

Ron Glozman: Thank you. We are at the core a natural language processing company. That's our specialty. We have two solutions today that we're focused on helping the industry solve. One is focused around the problem of errors and omissions. We specifically call it Policy Check. It allows you to take a policy and compare it against some type of source of truth document. For example, it can be an expiring policy if this is an existing client, or it can be a binder or a quote depending on what you have. The goal there being, as you know, errors and omissions is costly and an unfortunate reality of the industry. We can help not only reduce the time it takes to do policy check to catch E&O, but also help you catch more E&O mistakes.

Ron Glozman: The other one on the flip side is focused on helping carriers be more efficient on responding to submissions. As we talked about, they can receive a thousand plus submissions a day from a variety of agents and brokers, all coming in in different formats. They're manually typing that information into their clearance and registration system, into their rating engine, and into their whatever systems they might have. We allow them to intake this email, all of the attachments, for example a statement of values, a schedule of vehicles, a list of properties, a jewelry list, the contractor's equipment list, whatever it might be, extract all of the information. How old is it? Who's the manufacturer of the tractor? When was the last service? All of those fun questions we were just talking about. If it's present, put it into the rating engine to help them basically kickstart the process, saving them typically two weeks of time. Not two weeks of effort obviously, but two weeks of elapsed time. As you've probably experienced, it takes time for an agent to respond or an underwriter to respond to you. We want to help them be faster about it.

Ryan Hanley: What are you seeing from an adoption standpoint? When agents hear this pitch, who's using it? Is it bigger brokers today? Is it networks of agents? From an agent perspective, what is the persona? What's the breakdown of someone who digs into this tool and starts to put it to practice?

Ron Glozman: I don't think size is necessarily the right way to look at it. The people that are using this... it depends. Typically, some companies don't actually do policy check, which is an unfortunate reality and not something I love to see. Some companies, for example, have a decentralized system. That means they have seven offices with a hundred agents spread out across those offices, and each agent has access to the app and they're checking one, two, three, four, five whatever policies a day. On the flip side, you can also have a centralized system. In that case, they have somebody whose full-time job is to check policies. Somebody will go in and they'll check typically 10, 20 policies a day rather than two, three, four policies. As far as size, typically we do see the big brokers are the ones who are purchasing the technology. But I think it just comes down to budget. Not because it's cost prohibitive, but simply because they have a procurement process that is a little bit more formal and more standardized. Sometimes when we go to a smaller agency, it's somebody who does everything and they might not have the time to see the value in this. All that to say, anybody who wants to reduce their errors and omissions is the right size. The person who ends up using it is the broker themselves or a dedicated full policy checker within the brokerage if you have such a person.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I know a lot of agencies do it. A lot of agencies do it on the back end too. They wait till the policy is actually issued and comes in, and they check what's downloaded versus what was actually initially bound. That part of the process could be automated with a tool like this very... I want to say easily... but it definitely creates the opportunity versus having a human being eyeballing downloads versus bound policy.

Ron Glozman: You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly it. On the flip side, typically when we do a lot of work with our carrier partners, the person who's using it there is actually the underwriter. They're receiving the email, for example, from an agent and they're forwarding that email to some type of centralized inbox, or it could be an API, just depends how the carrier has it set up. Then 5, 10, 20 minutes later, all of that information gets pre-populated automatically into all of the applicable systems. They can just pick it up from there, saving them typically two to four hours. That's with the underwriter friends using it on the flip side.

Ryan Hanley: It is one of the things that slows down the process immensely. This idea that every carrier has their own intake form, right?

Ryan Hanley: Like, you know, and every carrier's intake form is highly optimized for their agents. And they get to update it every six months and do a big release of the new updated agent portal. And everyone is exactly the same. It's a bunch of boxes that you plug information into. There are some tools like Tarmica, which I'm not sure if you've heard of them, that I'm a big fan of because it starts to reduce that.

I think any tool that would allow me to suck in all the information I needed from people emailing me their policies or just emailing me answers to questions I had, and then I would go to a carrier's backend and just hit a button and it would push all that information in. Then I could log into the next portal and push all that information in because this multiple entry destroys your profitability and your time.

I've said for a while now that I think Tarmica as a tool is one of the tools that is going to make small commercial profitable. It's a single point entry to multiple quotes. I have a commercial auto account that just came in. Their general liability is pretty small but their commercial auto risk is a little bigger, so I have three carriers that I'm going to go to. I have to hand type in all the information for a four-vehicle fleet for three carriers. That's two hours worth of work at a minimum. That's not to mention if any of them are competitive, if I still have to sell it. Hopefully I don't get 45 minutes into one of the systems and then they just kick me out because I've triggered some declination thing I didn't realize was coming.

You think about that process. What ends up happening is you just go to the one or two carriers that you know how to use fast, whether they're the best or not becomes less important. It's how fast can I get the information in and get a quote back. That's not in the best interest of the client. It's not in the best interest of your agency. And it's certainly not in the best interest of the carriers when that's what ends up happening.

Ron Glozman: Exactly.

Ryan Hanley: So now imagine a world where instead of having a portal, you can just email submissions at carrier.com and 20 minutes later, you get a quote back.

Ron Glozman: Yeah.

Ryan Hanley: The thing I like about what you're talking about, and the reason that I've talked to some people who are skeptical, they trust a human eyeballing something more than they trust technology. There's part of me that understands where that's coming from. I don't know that I necessarily agree with it, but I understand the philosophy. Some of the pushback you get is that people are worried that tools like what you're describing, like Chisel, are a replacement for humans.

What I see is Johnny or Sally or Tammy or whoever, whose job it is to eyeball these two things all day. Instead of them spending their time on that job, you don't have to get rid of them. Put them into a job where they actually are helping people. Have them be a second set of hands answering phone calls, or packaging up, or make them into the person who sends your onboarding welcome package, or any number of things that you never get to because you don't have time.

I feel like this new age of technology, now that we're past the disruption phase, we've gotten into a phase where tools are starting to emerge that allow us to optimize the humans, not replace the humans. That to me seems like what the ultimate goal should be.

Ron Glozman: That's exactly it. I think another interesting piece is, looking at you, you're a quite young man, and I'm also a rather young man. The statistics, though, say that we are a statistical anomaly. Statistics show that in the next 10 to 15 years, something like 50-something percent of the people in the industry are going to retire because they're above the age of 50. The amount of college grads entering the industry is only 4% of the graduating class. Long story short, if you work out all the math, there will actually be a crunch.

Unless we find ways to be more efficient, everybody's book of business is going to shrink. To your point, I don't believe at all it's about taking people's jobs away. Those people are retiring. People coming into the industry aren't interested in just doing data entry. They're trained actuaries or licensed brokers or agents. They want to be doing the actual value add, the coverage suggestion, all of those things that they come to you looking for advice on. I 100% agree. I don't think AI or any type of technology is an enemy. If anything, it's a benefit to the business. It's the only way forward.

As you look at the industry, you just mentioned one of the things that I think creates incredible opportunity. You view everything as a salesman or a marketing person. Everything comes to that context. I have other friends who think of everything like an accountant would think of it. As a technologist looking at our industry, you're saying there is going to be a major generational transition in terms of leadership as the baby boomers roll off. We have an incredibly small number of Gen Xers and a larger number of millennials rolling into these leadership positions. They're going to be the ones driving the ship and making decisions. Where are you seeing opportunity? Where are the places where you're like, "This trigger and this trigger fall into place and we can go 100 miles an hour to the promised land"? What gets you excited?

Ryan Hanley: There's so many thoughts. One of the ones that comes to mind foremost is a couple more studies that speak to some of what you shared. One study KPMG did in October of last year said that 97% of insurance company CEOs know that artificial intelligence is going to change their business. And 87% are willing to take change today. They're basically not waiting for the next person. That to me is really inspiring because it means that change is going to happen today. It's not the next necessary generation. It is going to happen today. That shows that people are open to change because change can only happen from within. I think it's a testament that the companies are willing to, and the time is right.

Ron Glozman: Yeah, go ahead.

Ryan Hanley: So a lot of the listeners to the show are agency, middle market to single location, single person shops like me, startup agencies. You have a wide spectrum. Someone's listening and they're saying to themselves, "I really see this. Maybe today my agency is not set up properly, but moving into the future, I see that there are a lot of processes that need to be automated so that my people can be better." Let's say they're having that thought. How do they start to prepare their business? What are some of the first steps they can take, things they should read, resources they should engage with? From your perspective, how do they start down this path to setting their business up for the future?

Ron Glozman: Great question. I'll start by saying it's easier than you think. It should not be anything that you don't necessarily already have today. Obviously there are varying levels of complexity, so I'll start with what I would call the MVP, or the minimal viable product. With that mindset, all you need is your documents in some type of digital format. You talked about a lake earlier, that's perfect. It could be a Dropbox, it could be a Google Drive, it could literally be a USB stick. As long as it lives on a computer, it's digital. Have a repository of them.

One step further, and I think most people have this, is a breakdown of their policies in force, ideally by line of business and carrier. For example, I write 1,000 small commercial fleet a year. Let's say 200 with Chubb, 200 with AIG, 200 with Traveler, 100 with Liberty, so on and so forth. That's really all you need. As soon as you have that, you can identify the biggest ones, the most important ones for your business. Most of the time we find that it follows an 80-20 rule. 20% of those lines of business and carrier intersections, what we call coverage, will be 80% of the volume on average for any brokerage, whether it's one location or multi-location. Once you've identified the 20% that are the highest volume, you start with automating those. If you get those out of the way, that's the most bang for your buck. It's the best proof point. Then you can decide how far you want to turn the lever. Does that make sense?

Ryan Hanley: Yes. I was talking to a good friend of mine who's building his own technology product. We talk every couple weeks about the business. I was bitching at him about being busy all the time and how I hate being busy. When I'm busy, I'm not doing the things that grow my agency. I'm doing things that don't grow my agency. When I'm doing things that grow my agency, I don't feel busy. Does that make sense? There's shit where you just feel like you're doing it and you get to the end of the day and you're like, "What did I even do today?" Then there's days where I'm leaning into sales and marketing and selling, and I get at the end of the day and my wife's like, "What's wrong with you?" I'm still full of energy.

I think one of the traps that is very easy to fall into, specifically for agency owners in the spectrum that I described, is it's very easy to find yourself busy all the time. When you're busy all the time, you don't have time to consider what I would consider smart decisions. Smart decisions would be things like I had a guest on here, his name is John Mason, he runs a wholesaler. He said some of the smarter agency owners will put some of their commercial auto through his wholesale shop, even if they have an available market, to help reduce the potential for major losses and ultimately boost their loss ratio so that they can maximize their contingencies with a particular carrier. That to me is a very smart decision, but it takes time. You actually have to be willing to think a little deeper about your business.

A lot of what you are describing here feels like it would be very difficult for someone to listen to this episode, come to your website, read the article you wrote in Chris Paradiso's *Be the Last Agent Standing* magazine, and not go, "This feels like a positive move for my agency." I think the issue that people are going to have, and this isn't your issue, I'm speaking to the audience at this point. The things we have to determine as agency owners is, are we willing to take a step back to think through the positive impact that AI, be it a tool like Chisel or some other tool, can have? Can we give ourselves the time away from busy work to make these decisions? I feel like the agency owners that do are going to be the winners 10 years from now. I'm super appreciative that you took this time with us, man.

Ron Glozman: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I was smiling as you were saying those things. I'm with you. I think small steps. In 10 years, it's not necessarily like flipping on a light switch. It's like learning to crawl, then walk, then run. You can't start running in 10 years and suddenly say, "I see what that guy over there is doing and I want to do it too." The problem is he's invested years into building foundations, into having the data in a digital format so that he can do predictive analytics and say, "These are the right customers for me." Then boom, his business is growing 200% year over year. You're like, "I want that too. How can I buy it?" No money in the world is going to get you that because it comes down to time. The person who made the investment first.

I don't mean to cut you off, I apologize, but I wanted to jump on that point.

Ryan Hanley: I will tell you, a lot of my business plan for this agency was built on the belief that because I knew the tools we were supposed to use and I had some of the background and I knew the right people that could help me learn the tools, I was going to be able to jump the line. If there's anything I've learned over my first seven months as an agency owner, that is impossible. You have to take the lumps. You have to spend the time. You have to learn the processes. You have to go through that thing, even if you know exactly what to do. Those who can wait and see in a prudent way, but at some point you have to make the move. There is no "If I put this system in place, everything changes." That is absolutely not what happens.

Ron Glozman: Exactly.

Ryan Hanley: Ron, I want to be appreciative of your time. I appreciate you coming on here and talking to us about this. I love that you support agents. I love that you were in *Be the Last Agent Standing*. I want to be respectful of all our female and non-binary listeners of the show. I think it's incredibly important for agents who do not have a technical background to mix with individuals like yourself who are pushing into the space with a technical background. For everyone to be exposed, for you to learn more about what it means to be a grinding old school agency, and for them to learn what it means to be digital and fast and connected and using the intelligence and abilities of different computer systems to drive them forward. That mixing is incredibly positive. Where can people learn more about Chisel? Where can they learn more about you?

Ron Glozman: Thank you for having me. If people want to learn more, they can check out our website at www.chisel.ai. There's a bunch of thought leadership there. We publish weekly blogs talking about how you can improve your agency, how you can be forward thinking. That's a great place to start. We're available on LinkedIn. If you want to find me, you can find me as Ron Glozman on LinkedIn.

Ryan Hanley: I appreciate it, man. Have a tremendous day. Best of luck on Chisel. I'm looking forward to the next time we can connect. Thanks for everyone for coming.

Ron Glozman: Thank you for having me.

[End of interview. The following appears to be an unrelated advertisement or outro.]

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