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How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

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Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#41

Post by kurthr »

throw10920 wrote: post #24
lostlogin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. And then I recall my last few interactions with insurance companies. Dealing with a machine is unlikely to be worse.

My last few interactions with an insurance company were moderately annoying but far from terrible - I would absolutely loathe having those replaced by a machine, given the terrible quality of every AI "assistant" I've ever used.

Similarly, I was just forced to talk to an insurance company and the only way I got any response was by talking to a human. The more robotic they are, instead of working around known issues, the more likely we are to get to a satisfactory solution (e.g. don't overcharge me and then do nothing about it).

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#42

Post by QuercusMax »

robertlagrant wrote: post #33
QuercusMax wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're incredibly naive if you think AI will be used to pay out claims more fairly instead of being used as a deny-bot.

You can use people to deny as well. Or non-AI automation; just some business rules in a normal system.

United Healthcare was in the news last year because they had an AI claims "approval" process with a 90% error rate, all in favor of the insurance company.

It's easy to describe a business process with written down rules, and those are easy to find in legal discovery. It's much easier to obfuscate with an AI model, because "nobody knows what it's actually doing - it's AI!".

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#44

Post by throw10920 »

alpha_squared wrote: post #36
guywithahat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as inherently a problem; AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims, and responds a lot sooner. That said I suspect the founder is seriously overestimating the number of highly intelligent, competent people he can hire, and underestimating how much bureaucratic nonsense comes with insurance, but that's a problem he'll run into later down the road. Sometimes you have to hire three…

> AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims Respectfully, no it can't. From a Western perspective, specifically American, and from an average middle-class person's perspective, specifically American, it only appears to be fair. However, LLMs are a codification of internet and written content, largely by English speakers for English speakers. There are <400m people in the US and ~8b in the world…

I don't even think most Americans (except those trying to do the automating) would consider it to be fair.

AI is bias automation, and reflects the data it's trained on. The vast majority of training data is biased, even against different slices of Americans. The resulting AI will be biased.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#45

Post by chollida1 »

comrade1234 wrote: post #8

My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards. The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife st…

> Weird thing, instead of firing him McKinsey kept him and stipulated that he can only be in meetings when the partner is present.

Why would they fire him after a singe incident?

Sounds like McKinsey is a more companionate organization than you, and that's saying something:)

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#46

Post by alabastervlog »

lostlogin wrote: post #18
throw10920 wrote: post #6

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…

I agree. And then I recall my last few interactions with insurance companies. Dealing with a machine is unlikely to be worse.

My knee-jerk reaction is to think that the prospect of an insurance company handing support over to machines is a terrible development.

But it was already the case that they just arbitrarily do WTF ever they want, that outside a small set of actions that "bots" can perhaps handle fine they aren't going to do anything for you, and that the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.

So... not really any different? You already basically have to threaten them (well, have someone scarier than you threaten them) to get any real support, this wouldn't be different.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#47

Post by alwa »

robertlagrant wrote: post #33
QuercusMax wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're incredibly naive if you think AI will be used to pay out claims more fairly instead of being used as a deny-bot.

You can use people to deny as well. Or non-AI automation; just some business rules in a normal system.

And whichever method you use, you’re still accountable to regulators, courts, the letter of your contract, and the consequences of your reputation in a competitive market.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#48

Post by crazygringo »

throw10920 wrote: post #6

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…

> that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human, and forcing all interaction with the company to go through AI. That, to me, is deeply disturbing, and very very difficult to justify.

I don't know. Given the human beings I've interacted with in customer support, and the number of times I've had to escalate because they were quite simply "intelligence-challenged" who couldn't even understand my issues, I'm not sure this is a bad thing.

In my limited experience with AI agents, they've been far more helpful and far faster, they actually seem to understand the issue immediately, and then either give me the solution (i.e. the obscure fact I needed in a support PDF that no regular rep would probably ever have known) or escalate me immediately to the actual right person who can help.

And regular humans will stonewall you anyway, if that's corporate policy. And then you go to the courts.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#49

Post by matwood »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #31
energy123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical issues of putting people out of a job? Please. This mindset has to be called out because it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy. Economic productivity putting people out of jobs is both good and necessary and it is unethical to work against it.

> it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy What part of that is suffering, if it enables 100k constituents to put food on the table?

The problem is that it's a misallocation of human capital which slows progress for all of society. We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#50

Post by throw10920 »

kurthr wrote: post #41
throw10920 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last few interactions with an insurance company were moderately annoying but far from terrible - I would absolutely loathe having those replaced by a machine, given the terrible quality of every AI "assistant" I've ever used.

Similarly, I was just forced to talk to an insurance company and the only way I got any response was by talking to a human. The more robotic they are, instead of working around known issues, the more likely we are to get to a satisfactory solution (e.g. don't overcharge me and then do nothing about it).

Right. I wouldn't say that my interactions with those people were great, but they weren't nearly as bad as any of the automated systems that I've used.

Also, I think you may have made a typo that negated the meaning of some of your comment (but I believe I can understand what you meant anyway).

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