Insurance Thought Leadership
How is artificial intelligence changing the current business landscape?
Ron Rock
The opportunities for using AI and data analytics in financial services are huge. It really comes down to how we can get all the innovation instituted into insurance companies and banks in a highly regulated environment.
Pete Blackshaw
The good news for fintech entrepreneurs is you can do a lot with less. You still have to have a really good idea. It has to be an idea that can scale. But you don't have these massive barriers that you had maybe a few years ago.
When I did my first startup, I raised $31 million, and that was probably on the low side for dot-coms. This time, I only raised $1.2 million, and I still have a decent amount in the bank.
We're using AI for everything. I think 80% of our coding is AI. The economics of launching a business have really changed.
Insurance Thought Leadership
Most of the early focus on AI has concerned how it can improve productivity, but you’re taking a different approach with BrandRank.AI. You’re trying to deliver a service that simply wasn’t possible before AI.
Pete Blackshaw
About 95% of the attention is on AI as the efficiency steroid. I'm going down the path of AI as the mirror.
The reason is that AI is becoming the new purchase funnel, which is a story that not enough people are talking about.
We've been doing exhaustive research, looking at behavior patterns. Everyone is going to AI for everything now - what product to buy, how to use products. This has massive implications for businesses.
Search 1.0 is a $250 billion industry, and Gartner predicts that by the end of 2028, half of it will shift into what I call the answer economy, based on AI-based search. Even if only 10% shifts, that's a massive change.
For brands, it's critical to understand what shows up when you type in your name and why. Who's getting exposure? What are the consequences?
It's very tricky, because companies spent 25 years trying to figure out how to become one of 10 blue links in Google searches. If you didn't like the results, you could buy an advertisement.
Now search provides one blended response - I call it a prompted moment of truth. Either you're in the response the AI prepared or you're not, and most of the time, you're not.
While everyone should play the efficiency card - you almost can't avoid it just to be accountable to shareholders - I'm not sure that's the big idea. I think the more disruptive idea is that these AI bots are becoming the new window into brand identity and reputation.
They're wickedly smart and the world's greatest BS detector. If you're exaggerating your claims, greenwashing, or overstating product performance, they'll call you out in two seconds. At BrandRank.AI, we’re tracking and measuring what the bots are saying about you.
We’re offering a sort of insurance - you can't afford not to know what the bots are saying, because a financial analyst will use them to dig up dirt on you before talking to the CEO on a quarterly earnings call. That's today's reality.
And the speed of change is incredible. I'm paranoid all the time. Every five minutes, there's another big AI announcement.
The good news is that every time there's a wave, there's probably an opportunity for an entrepreneur to seize the moment before anyone else does. But my partner and I joke that we're only 15 minutes ahead.
Insurance Thought Leadership
We’ve published some about the death of the marketing funnel, which I think is a profound change. Tell us a bit more about what you see changing.
Pete Blackshaw
I presented to all the top executives at one of the world’s largest media players, and these are really tricky issues. A good AI search response has a sliver of something the Wall Street Journal said, it's got a piece of Bloomberg, it's got some other thing. A few of the AI search sites are getting into attribution, but I wouldn't say it's perfect attribution. So clicks and traffic drop for news sources in an already challenged industry. And the consumers really like what’s happening.
Small businesses depend on referral traffic from search, and it's just hard to get now. Or to get it, it's a very long-term process. You can't just buy advertising.
Insurance Thought Leadership
Once you’ve spotted a problem, how do you help companies improve their brand reputation and visibility?
Pete Blackshaw
We believe in a formula that Brand = RV-squared. There are three critical metrics we focus on.
First is visibility - do you show up when someone's asking for advice? For example, when someone asks, "What's the best insurance company?" who appears in the results?
Second is vulnerability, which is where BS detection comes in. We create a digital footprint of what the brand is promising, then use AI to find any gaps. Different AI engines have different standards. Anthropic is very strict about green claims and will quickly identify greenwashing. Other engines might be more lenient. While it's not as dramatic as CNN versus Fox News, these algorithms think differently, so monitoring all engines is essential.
The third metric, where you have a real chance to change outcomes, is content readiness. Through thousands of audits, we've learned that the number one algorithmic anchor feeding AI results is the publisher site or brand site. Oddly, big brands - the ones spending $6 million on Super Bowl ads - are often answer-illiterate. When you visit their websites, they struggle to answer basic questions. If someone asks about a sick child using their product, they'll likely show an e-commerce ad instead of providing an answer.
Younger challenger brands are outperforming larger brands because they intuitively answer every consumer question. AI engines constantly scan brand websites for new data, maybe a thousand times weekly. Whether you're a publisher or big brand, you need to market to algorithms and make your content readable - what we call content liquidity.
This means doing boring but essential work like FAQs. Nobody gets awards or bonuses for this, but nothing pays bigger dividends in AI than these fundamentals. Simple site search is crucial, too.
Everyone gets excited about AI's sex and sizzle, but I say forget it. Go back to basics, back to boring fundamentals. If you want to win at AI and improve your reflection, just answer the questions. It's amazing how ill-equipped brands are to do this - but that's good for us because it's our business model.
Insurance Thought Leadership
What does your service look like to a customer?
Pete Blackshaw
We provide a dashboard that allows clients to monitor various metrics. For visibility alone, we conduct 200 queries daily for a single brand across multiple scenarios. For example, we'll search "what's the best diaper?" or "what diaper do doctors recommend?" or "what brand is least likely to give me baby rash?" - essentially covering all the typical Google searches. We then track whether your brand appears, assign a score, and monitor changes over time. This real-time tracking enables optimization and team motivation.
Insurance Thought Leadership
What would an example or two of how companies use your service?
Pete Blackshaw
When launching a product, what search engines or AI answer engines say becomes disproportionately important. Think about all the influencers who hear about a new product and go to Google, and now they're going to AI answer engines. Your presence in answers at the early stage of the launch is critical. We've done projects, including one for a company that Ron's affiliated with that does many sponsorships, to determine if they're paying off. If you're investing heavily in offline sponsorship, you want to see if it changes what AI engines say about that particular topic.
We're seeing many behavioral shifts. People are moving from cookbooks to having recipes dictated to them in multiple languages, which has huge implications for food trials. We're analyzing that. I'm working with a Fortune 50 company where we're monitoring their CEO. CEOs are brands, and they can have a big impact on outcomes. They, too, need to be interrogated: Is the brand believable?
I wouldn't be surprised if some of what I'm describing becomes very central to the insurance and risk business because we're essentially letting companies de-risk. They can learn, What are the counter-signals? Brands want to remove exposure, and some brands are so big that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. AI serves as that third party that says, "I know what's going on."
Insurance Thought Leadership
Ron, you follow innovation super closely, given the companies you’ve attracted to Ohio and are trying to attract. What are you seeing?
Ron Rock
Beyond what Pete discussed, the biggest trend I'm seeing is the growth of embedded technology, particularly in how it's being integrated into customer flows across different verticals.
AI in insurance is a particularly interesting area. While it has the potential to streamline underwriting and make it more personalized, there's concern about potential bias. We want to remove biases and achieve hyper-personalization in insurance, but there's a legitimate worry that AI models could eventually replicate the same biases present in previous models. It's both a challenge and a huge opportunity.
Insurance rates have skyrocketed in the last couple of years - it's insane how much we're paying for coverage. Being able to bring those costs down would be amazing.
Insurance Thought Leadership
Given what you’re doing for Ohio, Ron, and what you, Pete, previously did to attract jobs to Cincinnati, how do you think AI will affect talent recruitment and job locations in the coming years?
Pete Blackshaw
There was this incredible movement of people looking toward the center of the country post-COVID. Everything got disrupted, new e-commerce models emerged, and San Francisco was like a deer in the headlights. That wave has ebbed some because there's such furious innovation in the AI area.
That said, I'm a big believer in creating new hubs, and the developments in Ohio are really encouraging. The fact that we've got to triple or quadruple the number of computer engineers just to feed Intel creates a good foundation because they could become tomorrow's startup entrepreneurs.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would quadruple what Ron's been doing for many years. The only way you're going to get net incremental jobs is if you have a lot more entrepreneurs. The big institutions won’t admit it, but AI is inevitably going to lead to efficiencies. You're not going to see net incremental growth from the big enterprises. Most folks will tell you in private that they could run a factory on five people with AI.
We need to be careful not to assume entrepreneurs have to take the traditional university journey. The world is learning fast on Khan Academy, TikTok, on-demand videos. The way the younger generation is teaching AI is mind-boggling. ChatGPT is like Socrates in your pocket. The traditional degree models might not be as relevant unless you're a computer engineer.
I think we can get a lot more entrepreneurs in the pipeline because things they thought were absolutely critical, like finding the world's greatest engineer, to take their app idea to the next level probably won't be necessary. They'll just need to know how to prompt really well and have some expertise that takes the coding the last mile.
Ron Rock
The workforce within organizations is going to be changing. The more transactional or manual process-driven work will kind of go away, but then you're going to have all these new jobs related to data analytics, AI, etc. So there is an opportunity for us to upskill. We want to make sure that the people already employed in financial services are moving with the times.
Insurance Thought Leadership
How could Ohio's universities serve as hubs for AI innovation, particularly given institutions like Ohio State and the University of Cincinnati medical school?
Pete Blackshaw
JobsOhio has invested significantly in the University of Cincinnati with that vision in mind, and I think AI could be that catalyst. I'm very tight with the Boston community around MIT and Harvard, and they're almost open-sourcing their university for anybody doing relevant work. That's what we've got to figure out here.
Insurance Thought Leadership
Ron, I think I just heard a huge endorsement for JobsOhio. Any final thoughts?
Ron Rock
As all industries start to evolve with AI, we also have to evolve. We need to examine how we programmatically change what we offer companies that are pursuing innovation.
We have companies that are building within, and we have companies that are partnering. Being able to change with those times is important as an economic development organization, as well.
Insurance Thought Leadership
Thanks, Ron and Pete. This has been great.
About Pete Blackshaw
 | Pete Blackshaw is the founder and CEO of BrandRank.AI, a Cincinnati-based startup and SaaS platform and service that helps brands measure, protect, and grow trust through the power of AI-driven search and discovery. Pete recently served as CEO of Cintrifuse, a startup catalyst, incubator, and venture fund backed by corporations such as P&G and Kroger, and considered a national role model. At Cintrifuse, Pete and his team supported hundreds of startups. Pete is the author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000 (Doubleday). He holds an MBA from Harvard and a bachelor’s from UC Santa Cruz. |
About Ron Rock
 | Ron Rock leads the financial services sector at JobsOhio. His role is to create and oversee the strategy for growing existing Ohio businesses and attracting new businesses to the state. With over 25 years of financial services experience, Ron brings a deep knowledge of the industry and is constantly exploring new opportunities to strengthen the ecosystem. JobsOhio is Ohio’s private economic development corporation and works outside – but alongside – state government, principally making loans and grants to support business attraction, expansion, and retention efforts within the state. |
