AI Adoption at a 1,500 Person Agency with Ryan Deeds

Every agency leader who has watched an AI rollout stall assumes they bought the wrong tool. Ryan Deeds thinks they had the wrong problem.In this episode, Katie and Grace sit down with Ryan Deeds, Head of AI at ALKEME Insurance. Ryan has spent 25 years inside agency data, through retail brokerages, a conglomerate of more than 100 US and European agencies, before taking on AI across a 1,500 person organization. His argument is that technology stopped being the constraint a while ago, and what replaced it is whether the person on the other end feels safe enough to change how they work.The Advocate Insurance Desk is a data-driven commercial insurance podcast. Most episodes we use the Advocate Market Terminal, our insurance intelligence platform, to show exactly what is happening inside specific markets: real carrier behavior, real premiums, real pricing by segment. This episode steps off the pricing side entirely and into the operating side, where the data gets clean enough to trust in the first place.The core idea: if your employees do not feel protected when they try something new, no tool survives contact with them. Ryan builds around that. Audits that open with what people got right. Dashboards that talk back so a producer can dispute a number and a human answers. A one year old product at 40% adoption, which he calls a win, because he is not fighting for the last quarter of the org. And a hard line on where automation stops, drawn not by capability but by whether the buyer understands what they are buying.We get into why he is tired of dashboards and wants prescriptive next steps instead, the activity taxonomy that showed him where the friction actually was, why he wants three sources before he trusts one number, what "human at the edge" means once agents do the assembling, and why he now judges vendors on whether they hand him an API or make him log into their interface.Anybody can build anything now. The interesting question is what people will actually use.Learn more about what we are building at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcastRyan Deeds is on LinkedIn and is happy to hear from people building in this space - > https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryancdeeds/.Chapters0:00 The two extremes of every AI conversation in insurance1:08 Ryan Deeds, 25 years and four different seats3:42 Resistance to change is really a safety problem5:30 An Excel macro on Tuesday, in production by Friday9:49 Data is worthless if it does not drive the next step10:36 Why he is tired of dashboards11:44 The activity taxonomy that found the friction14:04 Three sources to trust one number17:11 The renewal checklist that took a day to build18:39 Getting producers to adopt the tool22:30 Where leadership has to carry it24:10 40% adoption on a one year old product25:15 Risk OS and the problem it is trying to solve28:50 Human at the edge, not human in the loop30:28 Moving small accounts to the hive33:27 Cyber to issuance, workers comp to a person36:12 Why the build versus buy calculus changed37:54 Proprietary data as the five year moat39:46 Give me the API, not your UI44:05 Close