Hosta Featured in the Insurance Journal: Covid Ups the Ante for Artificial Intelligence

Meet Henriette Fleischmann, a rising insurtech star. She’s COO of Hosta Labs, which uses artificial intelligence to automate the detection of conditions, risks, materials and replacement values to make residential property underwriting faster, safer and more reliable. AI works best, she says, with repetitive tasks following a pattern. Insurance professionals still will cover more sophisticated property assessments – the “outliers.” Listen as Henriette outlines a start-up navigating growth in a pandemic. “I have a heavily loaded scheduled with Zoom Mania, as I call it. It’s back-to-back meetings for everyone.” On the one side she can attend more virtual events without travel time; the downside is the lack of human connection and one-and-one relationships. On balance, Covid has helped the AI market “quite a bit,” Henriette observes. “Carriers are literally forced into touchless and digitized solutions. You can’t just sit it out. It’s not clear when it’s going to end.”