There are people in this industry who will tell you AI is going to change everything. There are others who will tell you it already has. Doug Alexander (pictured) - speaker, cyber veteran, and the kind of executive who prefers plain talk over polished decks - has a different message: slow down and do the math.
“I have seen novelty technologies start from a concept while AI is present,” he said. “While AI has become part of our everyday fabric, you still need to determine the problem right. There are no extra points for doing something in AI if the math does not work. Start in the operational space, something small that you can measure. What is the pain point that you have not been able to get at? Start small. Quantify it. Make people accountable for it.”
That last part - make people accountable for it - is vintage Alexander. He has spent years in both retail and wholesale insurance, and more recently as CEO US of Emergence Insurance, watching organizations deploy technology enthusiastically and measure it loosely. His session at InsuranceFest is a corrective to that pattern.
The Santa Monica Pier setting suits him. It’s outdoors, it’s human-scale, and it invites the kind of direct conversation that gets lost in a ballroom. Alexander isn’t interested in the theoretical version of AI transformation. He wants to talk about the version that either works or doesn’t - and how you tell the difference before you’ve already spent two years finding out the hard way.
If your organization is somewhere in the middle of figuring out where AI actually fits, Alexander’s session is worth blocking out. He’s been in the rooms where these decisions get made, and he knows exactly how they go wrong.
Hear Doug Alexander apply the math in person - register at InsuranceFest.com.
