Wholesale Talent in the Age of AI

Neil Kessler, CEO of Specialty at CRC, sees the AI wave in all aspects of the wholesale specialty business. “A lot has changed because of AI,” he said. “When we think about AI, we think about it helping in two ways. We’re trying to basically make the process faster and to make our people all smarter.”

Kessler said AI is helping with new business submission ingestion, automated account clearance, and now quote ingestion. “So, now you can start to think about, ‘How do we use this information to make our people smarter?'”

He sees a key difference from other technology revolutions in the past where changes were all about access and speed. “This AI-focused revolution is about those things, but it’s also about knowledge and intelligence. That’s the real difference.”

But he cautions that a blind reliance on AI is probably not the way to go. “I think you’re going to need to have a little bit of both.” AI and tech along with a human touch.

He understands the concerns around job roles as AI advances for both new and existing talent in the market. “There definitely will be changes to the work that people do. But I personally have a more optimistic view that we will find ways to continue to provide more value to our customers by getting those people plugged in, in different ways,” he said. “But I do think that if people are only able to do tasks that are able to be automated by AI, that’s going to be a problem for them.”

He advises current and new, incoming young talent in the wholesale industry to think about their future career progression in an age of AI innovation. “How do I learn more skills? How do I get better? How do I embrace the future?” he said.

“That’s what we’re trying to get people focused on. Our goal is to take people in those jobs that we’re trying to automate and move them up into successful and growing teams to do more that’ll hopefully lead to better client experiences and more opportunity for all.”