My guest for Episode 101 is Marcela Granados Lavoie, FCAS, CSPA, Principal - Global Head of Insurance at Databricks.

The theme for the episode is 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲.

Marcela and I covered the following topics:⁣

✅ Marcela’s motivation for pivoting to tech/software
✅ Why a software company would need an actuary 
✅ The cloud and how it enables insurance modernization 
✅ How generative AI can help yield value for insurance companies 
✅ Using unstructured data for underwriting, claim, marketing, and distribution 
✅ Marcela’s experience learning R and Python 
✅ Programming and coding proficiency actuaries need today
✅ Tips for actuaries, data scientists, and data engineers to work collaboratively
✅ Origins and motivations for the Organization of Latino Actuaries

Time Markers

1:30: Transition from consulting to tech/software (impact of legacy systems on consumer sentiment, shifting policyholder expectations, and personalized experiences). 

5:21: Where actuaries add value in tech/software (strategic conversations, becoming trusted advisors, speaking language of insurance, and understanding customer pain points).

7:10: Connecting horizontal product features to vertical insurance functions, understanding and quantification of customer use cases.

12:10: Databricks as a data and AI platform for ingestion, transformation, curation, servicing, and consumption into downstream applications.

14:40: Databricks’ compute capabilities (moving beyond batch to streaming), separating compute from storage, and evolving from ETL to business outcomes.

16:11: Global Head of Insurance role (qualifying opportunities, briefing executives, influencing product direction, building solution accelerators, and demonstrating platform capabilities).

24:01: Databricks’ customer profile, the rise of semi-structured data, and integration with other technologies.

30:25: The cloud, the rise of big data (volume, variety, and velocity), modernization, and cloud migration trends.

37:18: Generative AI explanation and homeowner’s premium modeling illustration (GLMs vs. neural networks).

44:10: Generative AI use cases (accident descriptions, product recommendations, coverage verification, underwriting appetite, claim reporting, measuring intent, and customer triaging).

49:36: The importance of programming and coding, open-source (R and Python), and combining programming languages with generative AI (ex. CoPilot).

54:56: Collaborative illustration with actuaries (business hypothesis and analysis), data scientists (model fine tuning and algo testing), and data engineers (building data pipelines).

1:01:18: The Organization of Latino actuaries, origins, and motivations.

If you are an actuary seeking to work in technology/software, you want to listen to this.

My Website: maverickactuary.com