Applied Systems has acquired Planck. This transaction will bring together Applied Systems, the leading global provider of insurance software, with Planck, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company for the insurance industry. This acquisition significantly expands Applied’s AI capabilities to accelerate our vision for the next generation of the digital roundtrip of insurance, creating more value at each stage of the insurance lifecycle benefitting agencies, carriers and their clients. Read on for answers to common questions about this new development.
Q: Why did Applied acquire Planck now?
A: Over the past two decades, and especially since the COVID-19 experience exposed a lack of digital solutions, the insurance industry has been investing in technology at an increasing pace. The transformation from legacy technologies to modern, cloud-based solutions has benefitted the insurance ecosystem immensely, creating new value from traditional insurance business models while introducing brand new ones to our industry. Although we are in the early stages of the AI era in insurance, AI solutions have proven value across various other industries, and we believe it has the potential to empower our industry at an even more accelerated pace.
We believe the time is now to take bold steps to lead the insurance industry in discovering and implementing the benefits AI has to offer. By acquiring Planck, we welcome a world-class team of AI and data science experts and a top-notch AI technology platform to accelerate the application of leading AI capabilities. At Applied, our focus is to earn the title of indispensable growth partner by helping our clients win. With our unique set of insurance technology assets that span both the agency and carrier sides of the market, we believe we have a significant opportunity to create AI-driven value throughout the next generation of the digital roundtrip of insurance in ways that will help our clients know more, do more and win more.
Q: What is Planck?
A: Planck is an insurance-specific AI technology company that empowers commercial insurance underwriters and producers with superhuman research and insight generation capabilities to build a more complete picture of business risk in less time. Founded in 2016, Planck was created by leading AI experts and insurance gurus to solve commercial lines underwriting challenges and curate, match and analyze business risk details to support more informed prospect search and underwriting decisions. Planck’s trailblazing people and commitment to solving the industry’s most pressing challenges will complement and accelerate Applied’s culture of innovation.
Q: Why did Applied acquire Planck?
A: Applied believes that acquiring Planck will significantly accelerate our ability to deliver the power of AI-enabled solutions for our agency and carrier customers. There are three distinct points to the acquisition rationale:
- Differentiated technology capability: Planck will be able to enhance current functionality across our entire global product portfolio by enriching business data for a more comprehensive view of risks, embedding data insights and recommendations and automating policy workflows at an accelerated rate. Their proprietary technology and our unique data assets, coupled with our software products, will put us in a position to build the best AI capability in insurance. While it will take some time and focus to develop productized value from Planck’s AI capabilities, we are confident that their advanced technology, expertise and experience will accelerate our time to value for our customers.
- Proven talent and leadership: The Planck team are experts in data science and AI capabilities, with extensive experience deploying and building successful products that leverage these technologies. Before founding Planck, the founders built an AI platform for sales management that was acquired by Salesforce and became the foundational technology behind Salesforce’s Einstein product. Following their successful tenure at Salesforce, they started Planck in 2016 to apply their expertise specifically to solving hard problems for the insurance industry. Today their customers include the leading insurance carriers, and they have just begun to explore how to apply their expertise to the agency side of the market.
- Better together: With our unique set of insurance technology assets, our unparalleled expertise in insurance software and services, the close relationships we have with our customers and our financial resources, Applied will bring scale and access to the market that will amplify Planck’s unique and differentiated capabilities. The combined organization will be able to scale Planck’s capabilities more effectively across multiple segments while creating greater value for all stakeholders. Planck’s deep AI domain expertise will allow Applied to expertly guide our customers through this paradigm-changing technology shift and significantly expand our market opportunities in both the agency and carrier spaces.
Q: What is Applied’s vision with Planck?
A: Applied’s product vision is to deliver connected and intelligent workflows that accelerate the digital roundtrip of insurance and enable a connected experience across independent agencies, carriers and insureds. With Planck’s platform, we will lead our industry in discovering how AI can reduce the inefficiencies of redundant tasks and unlock the value of data to create a more accurate and holistic view of business to fuel growth. Together, we will lead the way in building solutions for our customers that improve the speed and quality of critical business. Applied is committed to making big moves in AI in safe and practical ways and will accelerate the development of new capabilities and products across the company’s portfolio through this acquisition.
Q: What will be the first ‘better together’ solution Applied is releasing leveraging Planck AI?
A: Commercial insurance producers and account teams struggle to identify high-potential prospects and opportunities for cross-sell and upsell within their book of business. Identifying the right lines to sell requires a detailed understanding of customer risks and exposures, costing time and money to cobble together research across third-party resources.
Applied Book Builder is a prospecting and renewals application that enables producers and account managers to target new business prospects and drive profitable premium growth within their current book. Leveraging the power of AI, Applied Book Builder enriches commercial risk profiles based on thousands of publicly available sources to round out risk profiles and identify coverage gaps within existing policies, creating cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Corresponding market placement insights help teams submit business to carriers likely to fit the customer needs. bookmarked databases, and supplemented through customer conversations.
Q: What is Applied’s position on responsible use of AI technologies?
A: At Applied, we hold ourselves accountable to building AI responsibly and being a trustworthy partner to our customers, focusing on the core principles of ethical, transparent and accountable (ETA). This means that AI systems should be designed and developed with ethical considerations in mind, be transparent in their decision-making processes and be accountable for their actions.
- Ethical: AI systems should be designed to be fair and non-discriminatory. This means that they should not be biased against certain groups of people, such as race, gender or religion. AI systems should protect the privacy and security of user data. This means that data should only be collected and used for legitimate purposes, and that it should be kept safe from unauthorized access.
- Transparent: AI systems should be transparent and explainable, so that users can understand how they work and why they make the decisions they do. This is important to ensure that AI systems are not biased or discriminatory and that users can trust them. Applied must be capable of understanding what data, weights and temperature were provided to the AI platform. In certain circumstances (e.g., neural networks), we must acknowledge the “black box” aspect of the models.
- Accountable: AI systems should be accountable for their actions. This means that there should be clear lines of responsibility for the development, use and deployment of AI systems.