As we discussed in our webinar in July, Artificial Intelligence, or “AI” is poised to revolutionize the employee benefits brokerage industry. In this blog series, we’ll drill down into some of the points discussed in that webinar and ponder the ways in which nearly every aspect of the benefits industry will experience AI-related efficiency gains
But first, let’s step back and ponder: why is there so much hype around AI?
During our lifetime, there've been a few major technology inflections:
The Personal Computer
In the early 1980s, there was the advent of the personal computer or PC. Before that inflection point, everything was done by hand. Accounting, for example, was done on ledgers and adding machines. The PC changed everything. Over time, price points became lower, and PCs became more accessible. Soon a PC was in everyone's hands.
The Internet
By the late 1990s, the next massive technology inflection came along: the internet. Before the internet, you had to look things up in books, which you had to order from libraries. Now all of a sudden, information was available pretty much on demand. Where before the benefits industry operated exclusively on paper, now it was online and that had a huge impact.
It's really been over 25 years since the internet came along and hit the mainstream. Since then, there have been other innovations like cloud computing and mobile computing that have extended it and maybe even improved it, but they haven't really been paradigm shifts in the same way that the PC and the internet were.
Artificial Intelligence
And that brings us to the next paradigm shift: artificial intelligence. The reason AI is such a shift is that on the one hand, it allows you to do an incredible and ever-growing range of activities and it makes it drastically easier for humans to do all of these activities. On the other hand, it is very rare for technology to come along and expand the capability curve so much without being harder to use. Artificial intelligence does that, and it does so in a way where it learns as it goes so that over time it becomes capable of more and more and more and more. Never in our lifetimes have we seen something that grows and advances in a self-sustaining way at the pace that AI does.
And that is really what all the hype is about. In a matter of months, AI has managed to achieve top-tier performance, competing with the best and brightest of humankind across almost every category. Chat GPT4 has scored between the 85th and 100th percentile on the LSATs, SATs and GREs. All of a sudden, AI is the smartest person in the room. It's almost like you have an Ivy League business school graduate or a lawyer as your assistant whenever you need them. This is huge progress even compared to six months ago.
The other shocking thing is that consumers are taking advantage of this at a rate that we have not seen before. In a matter of two months, ChatGPT reached 100 million global monthly active users. Even the most viral apps historically have taken months if not years to reach this level. This is faster than the iPhone, Instagram, or even TikTok. The rapid rate of adoption speaks to not just the utility of AI, its intelligence, and all of its different applications, but also how easy it is to use it. AI is different from other technology because it's conversational. You ask it a question and it responds to you very much like communication between two human beings.
So, the average user can find a lot of value in it because it provides access to an incredible amount of knowledge while being very easy to use and apply to their everyday lives. As an example, parents and teachers are alarmed that kids have figured out how to do their homework and write their papers using AI. Nobody has figured out how to stop that yet.
AI is learning faster than our ability to stop it, and humans are adapting very well and leveraging it very quickly. The overarching point is: AI is going to become a part of our everyday lives and it is happening at an unprecedented pace. The brokerage industry can either be afraid of it and get left behind, or embrace the utility of AI and put it to good use to make their lives and their clients’ lives easier.
In the next post, we’ll drill further into what AI actually is, and how it is poised to make an impact in many different industries.
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