A robot just gave your insurance agent a pink slip. Blame machine whisperer Snejina Zacharia.
Zacharia took aim at the $220 billion-a-year US auto insurance industry on Thursday when she launched Insurify. Technically, her Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup isn't an insurance company. Rather it helps you sort through the maze of competing companies, their premiums and those dizzying coverage plans. Think of it as Travelocity for auto insurance.
To do it, 39-year-old Zacharia uses a robot -- not the humanoid kind from sci-fi movies, but smart software instead. Still, watch out, Jake at State Farm and Flo at Progressive. Your replacement's name is Evia, short for "expert virtual insurance agent."
Snap a photo of your license plate, text it to Evia, which will ask you a few questions via text and then scour 82 insurance carriers' plans to find you the best one for the money.
"No one in the industry is doing that," says Insurify's Bulgaria-born founder and CEO, noting that the process happens in an "instant."
In other words, Evia is just like your old insurance agent, except she's faster, smarter and cheaper.
Silicon Valley has a few technological obsessions these days. Virtual reality is one. Big data is another. But none threatens to replace people's jobs like smart machines, or computer programs that can understand human language, sort through vast stores of data, make sense of patterns and even teach themselves.
To be sure, fears of machines taking our jobs are older than the cotton gin. Nearly every major technological development in the 222 years since its debut has come with predictions of mass unemployment. They were wrong (mostly). After all, the last two centuries of technological revolutions haven't been ones of c
via www.cnet.com