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6 Common Myths About AI, Insurance, and Compliance

I run into the same misconceptions about AI and insurance again and again. Let me try to put some of these common myths to bed once and for all.

6 Common Myths About AI, Insurance, and Compliance
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Stay informed, gain insights, and elevate your understanding of AI's role in the insurance industry with our comprehensive collection of articles, guides, and more.

With our latest product updates, we’ve extended our commercial underwriting product with a suite of AI-powered features to facilitate end-to-end underwriting across all lines of business, scaling from transactional underwriting to complex, three-dimensional risks.

Sixfold’s number one superpower is to easily–and quickly–ingest carriers’ unique underwriting guidelines and automatically surface the submissions that match the carrier’s unique risk appetite. The platform empowers carriers to streamline the underwriting process by:

🔘 Analyzing publicly available information and ingesting data from multiple disparate sources in an instant for a comprehensive risk assessment

🔘 Generating a comprehensive summarization of the business’s operations and providing NAICS/SIC classification

🔘 Surfacing positive and negative risk factors tuned to a carrier’s unique appetite

🔘 Answering complex questions across large sets of documents

🔘 Prioritizing risks with an underwriter-facing dashboard for improved resource allocation

Over the past half, we’ve significantly matured our P&C underwriting platform with deep investments across accuracy, traceability, performance, and extensibility. Some of the key highlights include:

✔️ Improved Accuracy with Advanced Document Extraction  

As underwriters ask complex questions across large sets of documents, we’ve invested in new models to improve extraction across the universe of insurance documents. With Sixfold’s latest models, we’ve seen a 40% boost in accuracy in extracting data from the most illegible documents.

With our ongoing investments in extraction models tailored to the documents underwriters see daily, Sixfold ensures precise and reliable insights from large, challenging document sets, transforming how underwriters interact with data.

Sixfold ensures precise and reliable insights from large, challenging document sets; transforming how underwriters interact with data.

✔️ Appetite Match Scoring with Weighted Risk Scoring

To replicate underwriters’ cognitive processes, Sixfold is introducing weighted risk signals to reflect the nuance across how underwriting factors impact where a risk sits within a carrier’s appetite. Now, carriers can assign varying importance to different factors to prioritize risks more accurately based on alignment with their risk appetite.

A carrier can assign varying importance to different factors to prioritize risks more accurately based on alignment with their risk appetite.

✔️ Enhanced Transparency with Inline Citations

Not only can Sixfold answer complex questionnaires across lines of business, but now all answers are grounded in the original source material with citations to the most relevant sections for confident decision-making.

All answers are grounded in the original source material with citations to the most relevant sections for confident decisioning.

✔️ Bringing Risk Classification and Summarization Down to Seconds

With our continued commitment to investing in the Sixfold pipeline architecture to improve performance, availability, and resilience, we’ve brought down the median case processing time from 80 seconds to 31 seconds. With these enhancements, in less than a minute, Sixfold can research publicly available information to learn everything we can about a business and analyze the aggregated data for business summarization and NAICS/SIC classification.

✔️ Embed Sixfold across Underwriters’ Existing Workflows with our API

With the Sixfold API, carriers can seamlessly integrate Sixfold into existing workflows for enhanced productivity and unified risk management. From automated data gathering and ingestion to custom-tailored underwriting recommendations that can be embedded across existing workflows and systems, Sixfold cuts out the manual work and document handling overhead for 10x faster risk review processes.

✔️ Mitigating drift and bias with our Responsible AI framework 

Designed to navigate the rapidly evolving AI landscape confidently, Sixfold’s Responsible AI framework ensures carriers are well-insulated from risk with its enhanced auditability, data provenance, and traceability. By actively collaborating with regulatory bodies and legal counsel, Sixfold remains at the forefront of responsible AI innovation, safeguarding carriers with unparalleled diligence.

👀 Coming Soon: Research Assistant

Stay tuned for future launch updates to hear about upcoming capabilities like Sixfold’s Research Assistant, designed to find answers to complex research questions, all of which are grounded in the original source material with citations.

Want to see our new capabilities in action?
Get in touch →

Today’s LLM-based AI solutions boast powerful capabilities that just three years ago were only found in science fiction. Modern AIs, driven by advances in machine learning & computational methods inspired by the human brain, continuously gain new capabilities from the data they encounter, enabling them with previously unattainable potential.

However, when it comes to operating within complex, highly regulated sectors like insurance, not any ol’ AI solution will do. In this post, I want to explore why carriers are turning to a new generation of vertical AIs purpose-built to address the industry’s unique needs and challenges.

Horizontal solutions only leverage the Internet’s surface

“Horizontal” LLM-based chatbots (e.g., Open AI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude) are competent at a wide range of tasks, but you’d never trust them to execute a consequential insurance underwriting workflow.

Well, I mean, you could. But your underwriters would still need to engage in dozens (or even hundreds) of rounds of prompts, follow-ups, and clarifications to surface the information they need—all of which would require close review & scrutinization for accuracy, compliance, and hallucinations. They'd need to invest time in sorting through pages of answers to find important facts, correlate & de-dupe information, build timelines, and draw relevant connections. After which, they'd have to relate all of these processed facts back to their risk appetite to evaluate the quality of the risk.

With a horizontal solution, you’ve generally been limited by what’s publicly available online. To echo a common observation: these models offer “the average of the internet.

Horizontal, multi-use AI solutions deliver little—if any—operational efficiencies for a complex enterprise use case like underwriting. The industry needs something more from its AI.

How vertical solutions overcome the data dilemma

One key area where general-purpose LLM chatbots and wrappers crucially fall short is lack of access to specialized data. A LLM’s “knowledge” can only run as deep as the data it’s been trained on. With a horizontal solution, you’ve generally been limited by what’s publicly available online. To echo a common observation: these models offer “the average of the internet.” They might be perfectly helpful in, say, planning out a keto-friendly dinner for two, but much less so when it comes to assessing risk signals on insurance applications.

To access invaluable cloistered data, an AI vendor must cultivate relationships with specialized data gatekeepers and arrive at a precise alignment on use and security.

In order to be useful in underwriting, a generative AI solution must have been — as table stakes —trained on informative but isolated datasets such as loss histories. Even anonymized versions of these datasets aren’t available for AI training purposes (they can’t even be purchased).

To access this invaluable cloistered data, an AI vendor must cultivate relationships with specialized data gatekeepers and arrive at a precise alignment on use and security. It’d be impractical for a horizontal AI provider to address every possible enterprise niche. To pry these data doors open, you need highly specialized vendors with a singular industry focus.

Vertical solutions: a partnership of insurance nerds and tech geeks

Beyond special data access, a vertical AI solution is designed to address the highly specific needs of its sector. The complexity and regulations inherent to insurance underwriting require a team that is as well-versed in emerging tech as they are in long standing carrier challenges. 

A vertical AI solution likely incorporates a medley of intelligent tools under a single platform umbrella. A foundational LLM, for example, may be tapped for specific functions (e.g., summarization), but higher-level capabilities can only be achieved when the LLM is partnered with purpose-built functionality dedicated to specific tasks (e.g., external data APIs, vector stores, etc.) The solution’s precise structure must be guided by experts with an intimate understanding of today’s industry challenges—and an eye on the ones soon to be in effect.

Keep your eye to the verizon

Horizontal AI solutions are amazing, but they fall short in core underwriting tasks due to their shallow expansiveness; lack of access to specialized data; and ultimately the fact that they’re just one building block that must be partnered with industry-specific capabilities to deliver value to carriers. 

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn

We had an opportunity to chat with Sixfold's Co-founder and COO Jane Tran about the company’s amazing first year and the vision for the years to come, as well as her career journey, giving back, and tips on running a fast-paced AI startup.

What was your first job and how did that influence your career?

My very first job ever was as a cashier at an Italian deli around the corner from my parents’ house.

I think everyone should do a service job because it emphasizes the importance of good customer service like how to treat people. I also learned how to be quick because it's New York. New Yorkers don’t like to wait for their Bacon, Egg, and Cheese.

Walk us through your career journey from the Italian deli to co-founder and COO at  Sixfold.

I’ve had a good mix of enterprise and startup experience. I started my career at JP Morgan as part of their rotational analyst program. One of my last rotations was with the Turnaround & Process Improvement team for the Chief Information Officer—that’s where I fell in love with tech. I worked on really cool projects like improving the eDiscovery process and improving data governance. I had a blast. 

After that, I spent several years at Marsh and MetLife working with the CIOs on different strategy and planning projects before I decided to give startups to go. I was on the founding team at Unqork where I was Head of Solutions before becoming COO.

When I decided to leave Unqork, I kept in contact with Alex [Schmelkin, founding team at Unqork, and co-founder of Sixfold]. When he came up with the idea for what would become Sixfold, he asked me to join him to get this idea off the ground.

What does the name Sixfold mean and who came up with it?

So, all kudos due to Alex’s daughter Nina Schmelkin for that! She was doing a project for school around patterns. A sixfold pattern is considered one of the most interesting, naturally occurring patterns—snowflakes are a sixfold pattern. And so, when it came to choosing a name for the company, we were thinking about AI and the role that patterns play, and “Sixfold” seemed like an ideal fit.

Sixfold just turned one year old. How would you describe year one?

A ton of fun! We’re building really tangible use cases using cutting-edge tech. This first year has reinforced the importance of anchoring your work in first principles. AI is obviously super hot and evolving at warp speed, but we can't ignore the things that support great software development and great user experiences. That meant getting that foundation and discipline in place while at the same time making room for extensive R&D and a ton of iterations. 

We learned a lot. We tweaked a bunch. And I think we found product market fit. Our early customers are already starting to see value, and I’m really excited to see where that grows this year.

Do you have any notable “wow” moments from the first year?

Yeah, when we delivered our first end-to-end underwriting pilots and heard the underwriters say “we were able to complete this task in a fifth of the time.” I particularly love hearing how much they trust the tool.

Hearing that first positive user feedback feels like a major achievement! And, obviously, the recent closing of our Series A funding round.

Who are your role models and how did they influence your career? 

My parents. My mom runs a small business in kitchen supplies with her siblings — it was one of those things where they just sort of fell into it. They knew they could offer a really good product and create a fit within the market. They understood what customers wanted and knew that they could manufacture it. So they just went for it. That takes a lot of bravery. On the flip side, my dad hung wallpaper for a living. He's retired now, but he had that hard work ethic and true care for his craft. He developed a reputation for excellence and really worked his way up.

I think the combination of entrepreneurship, work ethic, and quality very much influences who I am.

A common conversation for startups is balancing “the need for speed” with employee happiness. How do you build that balance into the company culture? 

Unfortunately, I don't have a magic formula. I would say that from the get-go, Sixfold’s three founders — Brian, Alex, and myself — anchored ourselves on our Mission and a handful of operating principles like putting the customer first and being direct while being kind. We try to surround ourselves with people who share those principles so that naturally becomes the culture of the company. 

Jane together with Alex Schmelkin (Co-founder & CEO) and Brian Moseley (Co-founder & CTO).

The three of us really care about who works for us and how we all work together. Sometimes we may not have the best balance, but we always strive to be better. As founders, we care a lot about our work, but we also care deeply about family, friends, and life outside work. We understand that people who work with us have the same need for a balanced life outside work.

Do you have any tips when it comes to hiring?

Instinct is a huge part of it. It’s also helpful to have a great HR team in place — kudos to Marie [Sixfold’s HR Business Partner] for doing a lot of the initial groundwork, so by the time a candidate gets to me, they fit a lot of our criteria for that role. From there, a lot of it just comes down to just instinct. Ask yourself if they'll fit within the culture of this company.

Tell us about your mentoring work for different startups and organizations.

I'm on the board of directors and co-chair for an organization called Womankind. It helps survivors of gender-based violence in New York, with a focus on the AAPI community. They've been around for more than 40 years. They started with a single hotline for the NYC area, but have expanded to serve thousands of women every year across the US as one of the few true end-to-end organizations. So families get to stay together. They get legal help. They get job placement. Their kids have a safe place to be while they're figuring out, you know, the next steps. I'm really proud to be part of that organization. 

I've also mentored and advised a few other early-stage startups that I think are doing something new and interesting. This also helps me to understand what else is out there in the ecosystem. I’ve mostly been focused on B2B enterprise throughout my career, so I like learning about retail or other sectors.

I love being around people who are building interesting things. It’s super fun and it can be super informational too.

What are your top work tools that you feel like you couldn’t do without?

I don't do a lot of the things that “productivity hackers” do. I would say Apple Notes and Google Tasks are central to my workday. I keep extensive notes on my meetings— so that’s a lot of Apple notes. And then, for the important things with a deadline, I'll set up a Google task or calendar reminder. And that's how I organize.

What are you excited about for Sixfold’s second year? 

This year will be about continuing to mature our product and getting a lot of new customer use cases live.

We're working with a lot of great people and a lot of great customers. I’m looking forward to showcasing what we can do within this market and at this fidelity — a year ago, I don't think anyone would have thought that we’d be able to do what we’re doing, so I can’t wait to see what the next year or two will bring!

Want to work with Jane and the rest of the Sixfold team? Check out our career page

Just 12 months ago, we introduced Sixfold and its vision to the world. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a $15 million Series A investment led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from Scale Venture Partners and our initial seed investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Crystal Venture Partners.

With these additional resources, Sixfold will expand our already exceptional team of engineers to further enhance our products and accelerate our R&D efforts. On the business & operations side, we will broaden our offerings and grow our footprint beyond North America to the United Kingdom and European Union. 

Most importantly, this new capital injection will advance our mission to overcome today’s most pressing underwriting challenges, not by iteration, but by building a new end-to-end risk analysis paradigm. That’s a big statement, I know. But we didn’t pick the name “Sixfold” out of modesty.

Year one of building insurance’s most consequential tech

In our inaugural blog post, I pledged that Sixfold would “focus on one of the most intractable challenges in insurance: the inefficiency of underwriting” and our team has backed up this promise with a year’s worth of accomplishments. 

We’ve developed a patent-pending AI that rapidly translates carriers’ unique underwriting guidelines into digital risk models, regardless of what form those guidelines take. This is Sixfold’s superpower, but far from our only bit of AI magic.

Leveraging 10 proprietary models, our platform surfaces appetite-aligned risk signals from disparate sources and independently “connects the dots” to generate natural language summarizations and recommendations. All our hard engineering work has resulted in unquestionable business value. In just one year, Sixfold has boosted underwriting capacity for our customers by a factor of 10, accelerated data collection by 2,000x, sliced submission-to-quote cycles from hours (sometimes weeks) to mere minutes, and pushed our platform accuracy to an industry-leading 94% so our customers can precisely assign NAICS/SIC codes at scale.


Sixfold is uniquely posed for continued growth with top-tier global partners in the year to come. We were named a winner of The 2024 Zurich Innovation Championship, the industry’s largest open innovation contest. As one of only 9 winners selected from more than 3,000 global applicants, our team will participate in the Championship’s elite accelerator program to develop a new commercial underwriting solution.

Our Innovation Championship win was a powerful validation of Sixfold’s approach from a storied industry leader, and it wasn’t even the only one in 2024—in March, Sixfold was selected for the exclusive Lloyd’s Lab accelerator program (out of their largest-ever pool of applicants). Our team is currently working with Lloyd’s to develop innovative solutions for the world’s leading insurance and reinsurance marketplace, which will be invaluable as Sixfold expands into the UK and beyond.

Writing the next chapter in underwriting

Over the past year, we’ve grown from a team of three to a staff of 18, with more additions to come. In the near term, we’re focused on bringing on seasoned tech leaders to guide our continued success, as exemplified by the recent addition of Ian P. Cook, PhD, Sixfold’s first full-time head of AI. By adding select talent to our elite team, there’s no underwriting challenge we won’t overcome. 

I’m ridiculously proud of what this team has accomplished and excited about everything we will accomplish utilizing this latest fund round as a jumping-off point. 

I want to thank Laura Rowson, Nowi Kallen, and the rest of the Salesforce Ventures team for seeing the unique potential of our vision, or as Laura generously put it in our press release, for seeing Sixfold “as a company capable of transforming the insurance industry.” We’re beyond excited to work with Salesforce Ventures to accelerate our growth and materialize those changes.

And, of course, a huge thank you to Alex Niehenke at Scale Venture Partners and for continued support from our initial backers Charles Birnbaum & Jeremy Levine at Bessemer Venture Partners and Jonathan Crystal & Stephen McGovern at Crystal Venture Partners

Brian, Jane, and me doing very serious underwriting AI work

If you haven’t yet had a chance to see what our platform can accomplish, there’s no better time to get started. Reach out for a personalized demo. We can’t wait to show you the future of underwriting.

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn

I’m thrilled to announce that Sixfold has been named a winner of this year’s Zurich Innovation Championship! Since 2018, Zurich Insurance Group has overseen an annual “collaboration program” with select startups from around the world to develop new offers and services for their customers. The yearly Championship has rapidly expanded to become the industry’s largest open innovation contest with thousands of applicants from over 30 countries resulting in more than 50 active initiatives implemented through Zurich Insurance’s global business. 

Celebrated for Pioneering Innovation

Sixfold was only one of nine teams selected out of a pool of more than 3,000 global applicants to take part in the accelerator portion of the Championship. Our team will take on the “Commercial Insurance” challenge to engineer technical solutions that “improve transparency and accountability, enhance risk management capabilities, and foster sustainability transition through a culture of trust and innovation.”

For the next four months, our team will collaborate with leaders from Zurich North America (ZNA) to build AI-powered risk analysis & summarization solutions to augment underwriter workflows through the automation of high-volume (but not necessarily high-value) tasks.

Improving Insurance Efficiencies

Unlike traditional accelerator programs, which focus on product development, the Innovation Championship aims to accelerate the adoption of a new solution within Zurich Insurance’s global business. We’re thankful to the leadership at Zurich Insurance for believing in Sixfold’s mission and our team, and we look forward to building an amazing solution that results in improved efficiencies that benefit Zurich’s customers, insurance brokers, and other stakeholders. 

This collaboration comes only two months after Sixfold’s selection to participate in the 12th cohort of Lloyd’s exclusive accelerator program, Lloyd’s Labs, which kicked off in April and we will be demoing in July. 

We’ve only just begun Sixfold’s second year — and it’s turning out to be a BIG one!

This article was originally posted on Linkedin

We talked with Sixfold’s latest hire, Head of AI/ML Ian P. Cook, PhD about his career journey, how emerging technology will overcome long-standing industry challenges, and his new role as Sixfold’s data science leader.

Welcome to the team, Ian! Walk us through your career journey up to this point.

I caught the bug for quantitative work when I was in grad school studying Public Policy at the University of Chicago. After graduation, I worked in various policy analysis roles, including at the RAND Corporation as well as doing work for all the major defense agencies and other federal orgs.

While doing policy work, I was simultaneously pursuing my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh for Political Science. My trusty “dad joke” is that I wasn’t smart enough to do grad school just once. As part of my research, I taught myself Python and found that my skills in econometrics translated well to the then-exploding field of data science. After I received my degree, I worked with startups and went from building tech products to building tech teams as Chief Data Scientist with a GovTech company and Chief Technical Officer for a business analytics SaaS.

Are there any tech projects you’re particularly proud of?  

One of my favorite projects was a matching & recommendation tool for patients. A significant predictor of poor health outcomes is missing doctor appointments, but as it turns out people don’t just “miss” them, they avoid them when they’re not happy with the style or approach of a doctor or practice. This was a problem that me and my team believed could be engineered around. 

I oversaw the team building the machine learning functionality for a web tool that assessed both patient preferences and the style of healthcare providers and then turned that into a kind of Match.com for healthcare. Not only was it fun to build, but I’m particularly proud to know that it helped keep people getting the care they need.

Why Sixfold?

Sixfold immediately piqued my interest. The company is attacking a clear and sizable pain point for a well-defined customer (anyone with startup experience will tell you that’s not always the case). Plus, they’re doing it with what I see as generation-defining tech—LLMs are amazing in their own right, and having the opportunity to put them to practical use is an exciting opportunity. After meeting with the team and the leadership, I knew that this was where I wanted the next step of my career to be. Excited to get to work with an amazing crew—tip of the hat to Stewart, Drew, and the whole engineering team!

Everyone’s talking about LLM-powered generative AI these days. From your perspective, what are the most intriguing possibilities and potential risks of this emerging generation of tech?

I sit somewhere in the middle between the extremes of the AI discourse: I don’t think AI will give rise to a post-human apocalypse, but I also don’t believe we can just sit back and toss every hard problem at an AI and implement whatever solution pops out. 

We’re going to see these tools accelerate transformation across every industry. In most cases, that will ultimately be a good thing. However, without clear intention behind how they’re applied and oversight into how they’re trained and deployed, there’s a real risk for these tools to cause harm—unintentional or otherwise. Part of the attraction to Sixfold was their emphasis on applying AI responsibly.

As someone with a strong data science background, what does it mean for data to be useful, not just accessible?

Access is an aspect of keeping data well-controlled—like security measures and access control for personally identifiable information, health records, financial information, and other sensitive material. 

For data to be useful, it has to address real problems and it has to have been corralled in a thoughtful, purposeful manner. Usefulness requires someone to understand the question the data is meant to help answer and to be aware of potential biases—both statistical and human-generated—which might limit the applicability of the data.

How do you see your role as the AI/ML leader at Sixfold?

I see my chief responsibility as empowering underwriters to do their best work ever by augmenting Sixfold’s product with AI-powered tools. Achieving that means supporting the people who are developing, testing, and deploying those tools. Some days that might mean coordinating priorities and ensuring everyone has the information and resources to deliver. Some days it might mean being chest-deep in the code myself. And some days, I’m sure it’ll be a little of both. 

What do you see as the challenges of implementing AI in insurance vs other industries?

I’ll admit to being relatively new to the insurance industry. That said, even a n00b like myself understands that it comes with unique challenges like complying with regulations across multiple levels of government; implementing stringent processes to handle and distribute the personal, closely-held data of both individuals and corporations; and making a convincing argument for change in a well-established industry where many are content using tools and methods that’ve been around for decades.

As a seasoned technologist, do you think there are types of tasks that will always be better suited for humans, rather than machines? 

AI is going to take on the tasks that slow us down. I like to think of it as a bionic-like tool that augments and improves human performance.

It’ll free us up to focus on the most important—and frankly most meaningful and rewarding—parts of our jobs.

I’ll also add this: the better the machines get, the more we’re going to lean on philosophy, the most thoroughly human of disciplines. Discussions about LLMs are loaded with terms like “reasoning,” “thought,” and “knowledge,” which philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries. I’m reminded of the discourse in my philosophy courses around intention and will, which are completely distinct from the mechanistic processes in deep learning architectures. Philosophy is often derided as a field with little practicality, but as a technologist, I see it becoming more practical by the day.

How do you keep up with the latest developments in your field?

A lot of reading! There are tons of great newsletters that cover the field. Ben’s Bites is fantastic, but there are tons of great ones across Medium, Substack, and Beehiiv. I’m also a fan of podcasts like AI Daily Brief, The Cognitive Revolution, and Talking Machines. I like listening to those while doing chores, walking my dog, driving, etc. 

Keeping up with the latest research is always a challenge—it was an issue even back in my PhD days because there were always new papers coming out. Part of me feels lucky to have gone through that back then because now AI is moving at warp speed and it’s even harder to keep up. But I’ve learned to master the art of “informed skimming,” which means quickly reviewing summaries, conclusions, and writeups to find key terms that will tell you if the paper is relevant to the problem area you’re taking on.

What tools do you rely on the most for your work?

I’m a devoted fan of Pycharm for coding. I’ve tried switching to VS Code and other flashy new IDEs when they come up, but I always go back to Pycharm. For note-taking, I stick to Apple Notes. There’s a whole world of “second brain”/knowledge management tools out there for taking notes, but I have to refrain from those (anyone familiar with the word “Zettelkasten” knows the depths of that particular rabbit hole).

I learned during grad school that the more extensible a tool is, the more time I waste fiddling with configurations. Tweaking color themes is not “optimizing my workflow,” no matter how many times I repeat it to myself.

What is the best thing a person can do who wants to pursue a career in AI/ML?

Some requirements are hard to skip over: a decent amount of math, and enough knowledge to turn that math into code.

But you don’t have to be a genius at either one. Learn some matrix math, and then play with those matrices and see how you can apply them in predictive software. Then learn a little more, and implement a little more. The key to mastering any skill set is repetition and perseverance. To parrot that old quote about how one becomes a writer: write.

More specifically, I think there are three things everyone who wants to work in this field needs to know: SQL, Git, and enough of one programming language to be productive. SQL is the language of data: getting it, moving it, storing it, everything—if you can’t get at the data, it’s going to be hard to trust that you can work with it. Git proves that you understand versioning, reproducibility, and collaboration. When it comes to becoming thoroughly fluent in at least one programming language, I’ll sidestep the religious wars about which language is best or most useful and just say that the important thing is becoming really productive in at least one language.

Any fun tech projects that you're working on at the moment (non-Sixfold-related)?

I’m a fly fisher in my spare time, and I use a fly fishing app called onWater Fish. I reached out to the app’s dev team and learned they needed some ML-like support. So I pitched in to try out some new ideas. We’ve been successful in implementing some cool in-app computer vision work that anglers can use to record their catches (and brag to friends) all with one picture. It’s been a great way to apply my skills to a personal passion of mine, which has been truly rewarding. 

How can people follow your work?

I’m on LinkedIn, and try to post regularly on the practical application of AI, the future of work, and whatever else where I might have a useful take. For other social media, I can usually be found by searching @ianpcook.

Want to join Ian and the rest of the Sixfold team on our mission to transform insurance underwriting with AI? Check out our career page

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