Bill Gross recently announced a free database of AI-generated ideas for innovative companies, based on the 31 methodologies that he's developed over the past three decades and that have powered his Idealab incubator.
The list of ideas — currently totaling a whopping 1,208,580 — may or may not contain an idea that you'll be able to turn into big bucks, but I think that exploring the database and interacting with the ideas is worth a bit of your time.
Many of the notions I see for the insurance market are provocative. They can at least suggest where there are holes in insurance offerings today that you should work to fill, even if you don't launch the sort of standalone company that Gross would love to see join his pioneering incubator.
Let's have a look.
Here is a link to the database. And here is a link to a Fortune article that describes the effort in detail, including Gross's argument that innovations driven by AI will create far more jobs than it will eliminate. The article says Gross's prompts to the AI break down into three categories:
"Opportunities, which he says are things such as solving a business pain point, removing friction, removing waste, removing danger, and improving design, among others; enablers, such as new technologies, scientific advances, and new materials, processes, or changing cost curves that make solutions more feasible than before; and shifts, such as regulatory changes, as well as behavioral, economic, cultural, or geopolitical movements that make the timing for a particular business seem right. "
Gross also fed his AI "some 17 million source documents that included news stories, research reports, expired patents, public company filings, and threads from online community discussion boards" and came up with his 1.2 million ideas for new businesses.
But are the ideas any good?
I certainly found them thought-provoking.
For instance, I selected the "fintech/insurtech" option, specified that I didn't want to invest more than $250,000, wanted to get to market within a year and hoped to "make the insurance claims process smoother for customers." The top suggestion, which the AI suggested was a 57% fit for me, was for a "claims trust operating system that... gives policyholders visibility into the evidence shaping settlements and repairs."
I'm not sure that's a business. It would take an awful lot of work to assemble the huge amount of settlement and repair data that would be needed to be truly definitive, but the idea raises an intriguing notion: Somebody will surely try to use an AI to give policyholders a quick handle on what the insurer will likely offer after a car accident, water damage to a home, etc. If the insurance industry provides the initial take, it will be able to lower expectations and control payments. If plaintiff attorneys fill the need, they'll be able to raise expectations, influencing policyholders to be disappointed... and perhaps hire an attorney to contest the offer.
The competing interests would seem to create an opportunity for a trusted intermediary, but I, at least, have become skeptical about whether it could stay unbiased. I subscribe to the notion laid out by Cory Doctorow in a seminal blog post republished by Wired magazine in 2023 that describes the process of — excuse my French — enshittification.
As I wrote at the time, Amazon is a great example. It initially built a huge base of customers by doing everything possible to make life simple for them. Once it had the customer base, it courted businesses — and the customer experience started to get gunked up by ads, attempts to keep customers from easily finding the best deals, etc. Once Amazon had built a marketplace where companies had to have a presence, it started milking them as much as possible on behalf of investors — a fee here, a fee there, maybe Amazon would even use its insights into sales data to launch products or businesses that would undercut a company with a hit offering on Amazon's platform. (Amazon has consistently denied doing so but has faced many lawsuits alleging it does.) Just about everybody still uses Amazon, but the experience is very different than it was a decade ago.
Even if I'm right that there isn't a business in a "claims trust operating system," the Idealab database has still pointed to a sore spot that the insurance industry needs to address. Somebody is going to use AI to shape policyholders' thinking about what to expect as a settlement, by providing near-instant estimates. So insurers should at least be thinking about how they show their work, and quickly, to keep plaintiff attorneys from setting unrealistic expectations and accelerating the trend toward more and more litigation.
So I'd recommend that, whatever your role in the insurance ecosystem, you poke around in the database to see what friction points and opportunities it has surfaced that you might be able to address. There are more ideas than I can count about underwriting, pricing, services from agents and brokers, and on and on.
If you're like me, your eyes glaze over after half an hour or so of an exercise like this, so maybe make a visit to the database an occasional excursion over the next month, perhaps at the end of the day as you're winding down or before a weekly meeting with colleagues so you can stir up discussions. We all get locked into our mindsets and into our day-to-day routines, and Gross has provided a whole host of prompts that can challenge us to do ever more than we are now.
Cheers,
Paul