Advocate Insurance Desk

Advocate Technologies

Welcome to the Advocate Insurance Desk Podcast 🎙️ We break down insurance compliance, risk, and pricing across commercial real estate using real data from Advocate's Market Terminal, not anecdotes. Hear conversations with industry leaders and practical insights on how technology is reshaping lenders, brokers, and carriers. If you work in CRE or insurance, this is for you. Subscribe for full episodes and clips. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AdvocateInsuranceDesk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advocate-technologies

  1. 15h ago

    What California's Last Resort Actually Costs: Multifamily Property

    California's insurer of last resort is the most expensive option on the board in multifamily property. The FAIR Plan sits at 62.8 cents rate on line over the trailing twelve months. Lloyd's, writing the same segment on the surplus lines side, sits at 20.8. The story in the trade press this month is that the standard admitted market is returning to California. The terminal data says the return has not happened yet, and that when it arrives it is priced above what is already available in the state today. Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt go carrier by carrier through California multifamily property: who is writing the volume, why the gap between the residual market and the surplus lines market is not a like-for-like comparison, what the 2024 to 2026 trend actually shows, and why the Farmers filing reported by Insurance Journal on August 3rd looks more like a pilot than a re-entry. Then the question the data raises but does not answer. If private capital never left California, what is actually scarce? Every carrier level figure in this episode comes from the Advocate Market Terminal: average rate on line by carrier, California multifamily property, trailing twelve months. Four carriers sampled, not the full market. Run the same analysis on your own book at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast. Chapters 00:00 The thesis: the return has not happened yet 00:41 Rate on line, explained 01:00 The national picture: property down, liability up 02:14 California multifamily, carrier by carrier 02:34 The FAIR Plan at 62.8 cents 03:27 Why this is not a like for like comparison 04:43 2024 to 2026: hardening, then a pullback 05:31 A ceiling is not the same thing as relief 06:17 Who is actually carrying the book 07:02 The admitted market is not in the room 07:51 The Farmers filing, and what it really is 09:22 Is the FAIR Plan working as designed? 11:20 What is scarce is not capital 12:47 Takeaways for California brokers

  2. Aug 12

    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=podcast Ryan Deeds is on LinkedIn and is happy to hear from people building in this space - > https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryancdeeds/. Chapters 0:00 The two extremes of every AI conversation in insurance 1:08 Ryan Deeds, 25 years and four different seats 3:42 Resistance to change is really a safety problem 5:30 An Excel macro on Tuesday, in production by Friday 9:49 Data is worthless if it does not drive the next step 10:36 Why he is tired of dashboards 11:44 The activity taxonomy that found the friction 14:04 Three sources to trust one number 17:11 The renewal checklist that took a day to build 18:39 Getting producers to adopt the tool 22:30 Where leadership has to carry it 24:10 40% adoption on a one year old product 25:15 Risk OS and the problem it is trying to solve 28:50 Human at the edge, not human in the loop 30:28 Moving small accounts to the hive 33:27 Cyber to issuance, workers comp to a person 36:12 Why the build versus buy calculus changed 37:54 Proprietary data as the five year moat 39:46 Give me the API, not your UI 44:05 Close

  3. Aug 5

    Building AI Software That You Can Actually Benchmark | David Haddad

    Every vendor in commercial insurance now says they use AI. Almost none of them will tell a buyer which part of an answer was calculated and which part was generated. David Haddad, head of product engineering at Advocate Technologies and the builder of the World Insurance Model covered in Episode 21, joins Katie Dowson to explain why that distinction is the whole thing, and why the model itself is the least interesting part of any AI product. His own job is the evidence. David went from writing code effectively all day to writing very little of it, and what replaced it is planning, specification, customer conversation, and testing. Unit tests used to tell you a thing worked or it did not. Probabilistic systems do not offer that, so the work moves into evals, harnesses, and pipelines that decide what a model is allowed to do and catch it when it is wrong. He also walks through the week a feature his team had spent real time building was made redundant overnight by a vendor release, and why the right response was to stop defending it. The episode covers the dependency almost nobody puts on a slide. A company building on frontier models sits on a chain of counterparties it does not control, the same shape as the managing general agent chain from the last episode. Prices move, versions change, providers go down, and the tone of a generated document can shift while the customer assumes nothing changed. The Advocate Market Terminal is built on carrier pricing, premium, and compliance data across commercial real estate lines, and the standard is the same in both directions. If a number is not testable, it does not ship. The takeaway is three questions to ask anyone demoing AI software. How do your own engineers use it, how do you benchmark the output and show the math behind it, and how much of this rests on a single model. Learn more about what we are building: https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast #AdvocateInsuranceDesk #AdvocateTechnologies 0:00 The model is not the product 1:22 How the engineering job changed 3:47 Why model selection is overrated 5:10 What code is no longer worth writing 8:44 Hiring for problems, not for code 10:20 When a model absorbs what you built 13:12 What stays in human hands, and who is liable 15:03 Model supply chain, borrowed from MGAs 19:38 Tone drift in the proposal generator 22:58 Accuracy versus precision, and the bullseye 25:38 How to pressure test an AI vendor 28:17 A year out: the gap widens

  4. Jul 29

    Inside an MGA Program: The Carrier Isn't Who You Think

    The name on your declarations page is probably not the company that priced your coverage, and it may not be the one holding your risk either. In a growing share of the commercial market, a managing general agent does the underwriting, a fronting carrier lends its license and its name to the paper, and reinsurers you will never be told about hold the actual dollars. You only ever meet your broker. Katie Dowson and Grace Schmidt walk through what that chain looks like from the buyer's seat, why it grew so quickly out of the hard market, and the two ways it can go wrong. One is a renewal that comes back drastically higher or does not come back at all, for reasons that have nothing to do with your building or your loss history. The other is what happens to a claim when the coverage chain is under stress, which the 2023 Vesttoo collapse demonstrated in public. This episode also covers the part most buyers miss. When coverage sits on a non-admitted excess and surplus lines policy, the state guarantee fund backstop generally does not apply, which means the counterparty behind your policy matters more at exactly the moment you can least afford a problem. The Advocate Market Terminal cannot look inside a program, but it can tell you whether the program is even the right place for your risk, and it surfaces AM Best financial strength ratings next to the carrier so you are not looking up an unfamiliar name yourself. The takeaway is three questions you can answer tonight from a document you already have. Name, rating, capacity. Learn more about what we are building: https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast #AdvocateInsuranceDesk #AdvocateTechnologies Chapters 00:00 Why this is an industry data episode 01:01 The renewal that looks completely normal 02:06 What an MGA actually is 03:37 Why the pen started getting handed out 04:39 MGAs are not the villain 06:10 What a fronting carrier is 06:54 Three counterparties, one declarations page 07:19 Walkthrough: a mid-sized apartment portfolio 09:15 Failure mode one: capacity disappears at renewal 10:04 Failure mode two: claims under chain stress 12:06 Surplus lines and the guarantee fund gap 12:43 What the Advocate Market Terminal shows here 14:07 AM Best ratings surfaced next to the carrier 14:42 The catch: the rating is the front, not the reinsurance 15:48 Three tells you are in a program 16:51 Three things to check on your declarations page 18:08 Name, rating, capacity

  5. Jul 22

    How the Small Shop Finally Sees the Whole Market

    The property market is softening for the first time in years, and for once the good news is landing on the independent agent's side of the table. But if capacity is opening up for everyone, how does a two-person shop actually win against a national brokerage? In this episode, Katie and Grace make the case that the gap was never really about size. It was about who could see the market. We walk through five concrete moves a small shop can run in a softening property market, and for each one we open the Advocate Market Terminal and show what it looks like in practice on real placed-policy data. The five moves: 1. Read each carrier's game plan from where they've actually landed on price, not from rumor. 2. Shop strategically. Present the incumbent renewal plus two well-chosen alternatives, not fifteen. 3. Negotiate beyond price with a defensible number and the full distribution behind you. 4. Protect your revenue and turn a softening market into a retention and trust move. 5. Use technology to spend less time on market research and more time in the conversations that matter. One honesty note we keep on the show: the softening we describe here is on the property side only. Liability is still hardening, so bring your clients the good news about the part of the book where it's actually true. And when we say the terminal shows you something, we mean real placed commercial policy data, kept separate from broader market context. Create a free account and pull your first comp group at https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast The Advocate Insurance Desk is a data-driven commercial insurance show built on the Advocate Market Terminal, our insurance intelligence platform. New episodes go inside a real market and show you actual carrier behavior, premiums, and pricing by segment. Subscribe for more, and find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Chapters 0:00 Welcome 0:27 Why this one is a playbook, not a market outlook 1:24 The real gap was never size, it was sight 2:19 Move 1: Read each carrier's game plan 4:13 Move 2: Shop strategically, not broadly 6:02 Move 3: Negotiate beyond price 7:39 Move 4: Protect your revenue 9:14 Move 5: Leverage technology to enhance your value 10:05 The takeaway 10:41 Where to watch and listen

  6. Jul 15

    The Hard Market Ended. Liability Never Got the Memo.

    What if the number everyone is quoting to say the hard market is over is quietly lying to almost the entire market?In this episode, co-host Grace Schmidt is back and Katie catches her up on three headlines that moved commercial insurance while she was gone. No long market outlooks, just the stories that actually changed what we are building at Advocate, one at a time.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 is a fast catch-up across three of them.The core idea: a single market-wide average is hiding a split. After 32 straight quarters of rate increases, the industry index posted its first broad decline since 2017, down about 1.2 percent, and everyone called the hard market over. But that average blends two things moving in opposite directions. Property is easing while liability never turned, and the flat headline number describes neither side accurately. The only question that matters for a specific policy is where it sits inside its own market, and you get that from carrier-level data, not an industry average.In this conversation we cover the property and liability split and the courtroom-driven social inflation behind it, with average commercial auto verdicts climbing from roughly 3.6 million dollars in 2010 to north of 30 million in recent years. We pull up two Advocate Market Terminal reads: the US National Liability Index on the trading tab, and California multifamily liability on the pricing comps page, where the same line of coverage runs close to eight times more expensive from the cheapest quartile to the top. That is Joe Zuk's K-shaped market, organized around risk quality cohorts, playing out in real time. We then get into the data center buildout piling up more value than carriers can comfortably insure, echoing Rachel Nixon's point that capacity, not demand, is the real constraint. And we close on an industry that spent the year buying AI before realizing the hard part was always the data underneath it, which is exactly why Advocate built the World Insurance Model as a deterministic engine instead of pointing a big model at the problem.The takeaway: averages describe nobody. Property softening and liability firming are two different markets wearing one number, and the only way to price a real account is carrier-level data, structured and connected, not one more dashboard.Industry data referenced from the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, broker projections, and third-party estimates on data center exposure is outside the terminal. The carrier-level reads are the terminal's own.Sign up for the Advocate Market Terminal: https://advocate.app/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=podcastChapters0:00 Grace is back, and here is what you missed0:49 The setup: three headlines, one at a time1:14 Headline one: the 32-quarter streak just broke2:22 The terminal: US National Liability Index2:53 Why liability is firming: social inflation3:55 Pricing comps and the eight-times spread4:54 Headline two: data centers break the math6:25 Rachel Nixon and the capacity constraint7:43 Headline three: everyone bought AI8:21 The data problem sitting underneath it9:42 Why Advocate built WIM instead10:38 Recap and what to watch next#AdvocateInsuranceDesk #AdvocateTechnologies

  7. Jul 8

    The Engine Behind the Platform: Inside the World Insurance Model

    What if the most accurate way to run an insurance compliance check is to stop the AI from thinking?In this episode, Katie sits down with David, head of product engineering at Advocate, who built the World Insurance Model (WIM) over roughly five years of R&D. WIM is the deterministic engine underneath the Advocate app, the thing that turns thousands of manual policy checks into consistent, testable results. 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 goes one layer deeper, into the engine that powers the platform itself. The core idea: frontier models on their own are not good enough for compliance work. They perform decently and then leave you to clean up the rest. Pair a model with WIM as a tool, and it offloads the reasoning to a deterministic engine that returns the same output for the same input every time. Accuracy roughly doubles while token cost stays flat, because the model stops guessing at requirements and starts asking WIM which fields actually matter.In this conversation we cover the scale of the problem (around 30 million commercial policies and 500 billion dollars in annual premium running through compliance every year), what deterministic actually means and why it matters when one missed check can cost millions, how documents flow through the platform from upload to compliance report, and the Advocate App Labs benchmarks: Sonnet moving from 26 percent of coverage gaps found on its own to 63 percent with WIM, the rule engine alone reaching about 74 percent, and a licensed human reviewer still leading at 96 percent. David also walks through the model harness that mixes engine and frontier models step by step, how hallucinations are handled with citations and a human in the loop, why review time compresses from about 90 minutes to a couple of minutes, and what WIM means for brokers looking to expand into new asset classes.The takeaway: the reading and data-pulling part of a review is already being automated. The judgment calls stay with the human, and the accuracy gap keeps closing.See WIM at work. Create a free account at ⁠https://advocate.app/?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast⁠The full benchmark study is on Advocate App Labs.Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-haddad/Chapters0:00 Why this episode goes one layer deeper1:16 Meet David, who built WIM2:24 The scale of the problem: 30 million policies3:30 What the World Insurance Model actually is4:52 Deterministic vs probabilistic, explained6:05 Dropping documents into the platform7:56 Benchmarking WIM against the frontier models9:12 How a model uses WIM as a tool12:18 The numbers: accuracy gains and cost15:05 The harness and mixing models16:20 Hallucinations and the human in the loop18:18 Will AI take the reviewer's job?19:19 Trying WIM yourself20:11 What WIM means for brokers22:16 What to watch for next #AdvocateInsuranceDesk #AdvocateTechnologies

  8. Jun 24

    New York Wants Florida's Results. Can Prior Approval Deliver Them?

    Florida just mailed $1 billion back to 830,000 policyholders. New York thinks it can force the same result by law. The data says the bill is aiming at the wrong line. In this episode, Katie and Grace put New York's new commercial insurance bill (A11298) up against the Florida tort reform playbook, then test the whole thing against live transaction data from the Advocate Market Terminal. Florida fixed its courts and the rate relief showed up on its own, all of it in personal lines. New York is betting that prior approval, forced rate disclosure, and a filing delay can do for commercial property and commercial liability what tort reform did for Florida homeowners. So we pulled a single New York multifamily archetype, pre-war construction, five stories, three miles off the coast, and looked at what is actually moving. What the data shows: Commercial property runs about a 2.9x spread across the middle of the market and is already correcting downward on its own Commercial liability runs a 6.9x spread, with the average rate sitting roughly 3.4x above the median On comparable risk, the factor analysis pulls property pricing down while pushing liability up, the same K-shaped split Joe walked through a few episodes back The biggest driver on liability is not catastrophe or distance to coast. It is location, density, and the local litigation environment The bill puts prior approval on the line that is already healing and adds lag to relief that is already on its way. It discloses the line that actually hurts, but disclosure and a 60-day delay cannot reach a courtroom. The lever that fits the problem, tort reform, is the one New York did not pull. And this is not law yet, it is one member's bill that most likely stalls as the session wraps. Sign up at advocate.app and run your own asset class and market: see which lines are moving, by how much, and what is actually driving your price before your next renewal. Subscribe for more on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Chapters: 0:00 The $1 billion Florida refund 1:03 Commercial's quiet crisis 1:48 New York's bet: Bill A11298 2:39 Two theories: tort reform vs regulation 4:47 Theory two: the regulatory fix 5:48 What the bill actually does 7:39 The asymmetry: only homeowners get a forced cut 8:47 Setting the control: a New York multifamily archetype 9:33 The spreads: property 2.9x vs liability 6.9x 12:41 Factor analysis: property down, liability up 14:19 Not catastrophe, location 15:18 Umbrella, excess, and Joe's K 17:04 Synthesis: regulating the line that is healing 19:33 Politics, and why the bill likely stalls 20:24 Where we land, and pulling your own market

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About

Welcome to the Advocate Insurance Desk Podcast 🎙️ We break down insurance compliance, risk, and pricing across commercial real estate using real data from Advocate's Market Terminal, not anecdotes. Hear conversations with industry leaders and practical insights on how technology is reshaping lenders, brokers, and carriers. If you work in CRE or insurance, this is for you. Subscribe for full episodes and clips. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AdvocateInsuranceDesk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/advocate-technologies

Information

  • Creator
    Advocate Technologies
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Advocate Technologies
  • Show Website
    Advocate Insurance Desk