The Tech Exec

 We have an exec at work, we’ll call him A. A likes to push machine learning models for this mythical thing called autoclaim. Autoclaim is where we can ‘augment’ our insurance adjusters so auto insurance claims are automatically appraised, calculated, filed and paid. The reality is they’re trying to get rid of labor costs, by automating the claims process. As we always seem to be short of adjusters these days, the pressure to do this is increasing. We have a few problems:

1) Machine learning models require highly accurate historic and real time data to replicate complicated human tasks

2) Our historic data sucks, and our real time data is non-existent (there are significant delays in the ETL processing of our data)

3) Our data science assets needed to build these models are worse than our data.

So A has gotten some third-party models to do part of this at the adjuster level, because the third parties have really good salesmen to do what salesmen do, and sell us stuff. There’s another problem:

The third party stuff doesn’t work. And we’re paying millions of dollars for it.

I’m not sure any execs have passed this to A. I’m sure somebody must have mentioned it. A is selling these shitty models in meetings as a ‘hit’ by the way, which is a complete falsehood. Of course anybody saying anything different is not a ‘team player.’ So we have a problem, when we have executives like A lying to either themselves, other execs and employees, or both. What will happen is the company will go down the shitter unless A can walk this crap back or he gets fired. Of course, nobody in this company ever gets fired, they retire/depart to spend more time with their family with their golden parachute.

The CIO just went to spend more time with his family, as did the CEO a couple of years ago. Both of these guys suffered the A disease, but it didn’t do any good, the company is still hemorrhaging cash.

This is nothing new, I was just reading a book about Apple, where they came up with a device called a Newton in the late 80s that would be networked, pad-style computer that would be able to do a lot of cool things like note-taking, document writing, and so forth. The technology was clunky and the failure really hurt Apple. Eventually they came out with the iPad twenty years later, which was a smash-hit. But then, as now the technology doesn’t exist yet for these technological marvels that don’t exist yet but execs are enamored of. So this trend in executiveland is a cycle that we are doomed to relive until the fundamentals of corporate America are changed to give these guys a dose of reality somehow.