Bermuda has a lot to offer, but is not getting its story out to Silicon Valley, an insurance industry leader told the Bermuda Risk Summit 2023.

Scott Frederick, managing partner of Sands Capital Ventures, said: “Cities such as Dublin have marketed themselves very well, and Lisbon has made getting work visas very easy.

“Bermuda is doing that but should be more vocal about it. It has a great regulatory environment and a predictable legal system. There are a lot of great flights to the island. There is a one-to-one conversion of currencies. Little things like that matter because it makes it easier to do business.”

Mr Frederick spoke during the second day of the summit at the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club, in the Bermuda: The Investors Experience panel.

“I don’t see Bermuda involved enough in the conversation around tech-oriented things,” said Adrian Jones, managing director of HSCM Ventures. “That is challenging because it is a crowded conversation and it’s hard to get your voice out.”

During the panel, Armin Rothauser, senior partner at Castlelake Investments, touched on the fact that Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell had just announced that the central bank will keep raising interest rates to tame inflation, following the steepest hikes in almost four decades.

“The fundraising markets are extremely challenging right now,” Mr Rothauser said. “This will have significant implications for risk-taking, across all markets.”

But he said his company viewed that as an opportunity.

“Those who win in these markets will be the folks who are well capitalised,” he said. “The less well-capitalised, newer entrants, and those with poorer data absorption and understanding will close up shop.”

The discussion also explored the growing impact of artificial intelligence on the insurance industry.

Mr Frederick said emerging AI will have “staggering” implications for the insurance industry. He urged conference-goers to play around with free AI programmes such as ChatGPT and Dall-e to start to get an understanding of it.

“AI is growing enormously powerful,” he said. “You can type whatever you want into it and it will generate for you an image in whatever style you request.”

He said AI could result in negatives for the industry such as the production of incredibly realistic deep fakes. Positives would be the ability to feed an AI programme 20 years of claims management systems data and have the system identify fraud in a way that a human could not.

“AI will impact every company and every aspect of what they are doing,” Mr Jones said.

But he dismissed the idea that AI would eliminate many jobs.

“You might lose your job to someone who is better at leveraging AI than you,” he said.

He said when ChatGPT 4 is released later this year, it will be 100 times more powerful than the current version.

“The best estimates are that it has been trained on 17 trillion parameters,” he said. “And in ten years it will be millions of times more powerful. We are only in the early innings. The implications to the insurance industry are only just beginning to be felt.”

Mr Jones said the current hard market presents a good opportunity for people to come out and prove themselves.

“It is an exciting time,” he said. “The losers will be the start-ups who don’t necessarily understand that and the incumbents who have struggled in order to make their business work. They will continue to slowly shrink down.”

Touching on talent, Mr Rothauser said the talent market is still very strong, but companies needed to create a brand to attract the right talent.

“If you want to hire tech folks you need the right branding,” he said.