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Business Journals
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Journals
AI revolution: Navigating the promises and perils of a new era
At electronic health records innovator ModMed, its proprietary artificial intelligence application, ModMed Scribe, has been trained on millions of patient encounters. It is improving how doctors interact with, diagnose, and care for patients to improve office workflow. JM Family Enterprises use AI-powered tools to help create and test new applications. This is improving the quality of software development and reducing the time required to produce requirements and test cases by approximately 30%. A contact center platform with AI capabilities at BankUnited is exploring how sentiment analysis can help bankers and customers find the solutions that best fit a given situation. Miami Dade College, in collaboration with Microsoft, is applying the technology company's 365 Copilot AI-powered productivity tool atop its suite of applications to drive staff and faculty efficiency. Since implementation, nearly one year ago, adoption is over 90%, which is impressive, understanding that it's a brand-new tool, according to Antonio Delgado, the school's VP of Innovation and Technology Partnerships. This is simply some novel large language (LLM) model application; it's facilitating efficiencies across the school's technology suite. 'The results that we see even before getting to a full year of implementation is an enormous number of hours saved by leveraging the tool,' Delgado said. 'We see greater satisfaction. We see the productivity. And at the end, the outcomes with our students are better communication and better sense of belonging.' AI's promises and potential perils were explored during the recent AI Revolution Roundtable. Held at the Miami offices of the South Florida Business Journal and moderated by Andrew Duffell, president of the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University, leaders from some of the region's leading private and public sector employers discussed the challenges they're facing with artificial intelligence. Deploying AI in the workplace From the debut less than two years ago of generative AI applications like ChatGPT, companies today are turning to agentic AI. These systems can autonomously make decisions and act to achieve goals, often with minimal human intervention. Already, AI in all its forms is delivering a 'noticeable shift from prioritizing large, transformative use cases to simply understanding how to best integrate AI into routine tasks,' said John Damalas, group VP and CTO with JM Family Enterprises, the Deerfield Beach-based automotive distributor and services company. AI is creating an evolving narrative that positions it as a support tool for human-led activities, rather than a total replacement for cognitive work. JM Family's AI Center of Excellence has developed governance frameworks via its AI Council, a cross-functional team that promotes AI initiatives and ensures strategic alignment. It prioritizes responsible AI use with a 'formal process to review use cases for transparency and compliance with regulations, including monitoring proposed regulations in relevant jurisdictions,' Damalas said. Julio Jogaib, CIO with BankUnited, shared that employees must be trained on AI's best uses to advance their organization. This includes creating governance protocols to create standards and guardrails for proper AI usage by the workforce and organization. BankUnited's vendors are using AI in the applications they provide. Jogaib works to ensure the bank and its vendors 'have governance in place surrounding usage, data privacy, and other areas,' he said. It's especially important when client data is being used by vendors to train their systems. 'There is a lot of legal apparatus that needs to be in place and monitoring on what's being done by these platforms,' Jogaib said. 'They may say that they are not using our data. But you have to verify that.' As a health care technology company, ModMed works to ensure the company and its partners have the rights to use data or documents in the development of its platform, from widgets, chatbots, agents or generative AI. Daniel Cane, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, represented ModMed on the roundtable. 'They might have an asterisk by it now and say, 'if you use this new AI agent, we're collecting information to understand how our agent works and better train it in the future,'' Cane said. 'Be careful when you're using third party tools to understand how they're going to use your data.' Jogaib put it more fundamentally: 'You need to have people inside the company capable of thinking.' Training next-gen users Two cohorts of 'students' are emerging in the AI realm. One will be those traditional students in classrooms who are learning coursework to prepare them for future careers. Second are employees who are learning skills - including the use of AI - to serve their companies or future career opportunities. Technology has changed education delivery. Think back to the pandemic, when classrooms from grade school to higher education embraced portable devices and remote learning. AI is continuing that evolution. It's 'personalizing the education journey,' Delgado said. It can identify in-demand jobs, and the skills, degrees, or certificates needed to pursue them. The emergence of LLM applications, like ChatGPT, has students asking a question of the application, then copy/pasting the answer into their schoolwork. How do educators, or even employers, ensure students or workers actually learn and know the material? 'That's a big challenge that I see… the student is not doing the thinking anymore,' Delgado said. 'It's having the skills to embed AI in what you do and still add value, to defend the answer, to think about the abstract. We need to work on changing the way that academia is not only teaching but also assessing learning. Because if not, there is no learning happening.' JM Family invests in workforce development and views AI as an enhancement, not a replacement, for human capability. A critical part of its AI Center of Excellence is giving associates the tools and training needed to learn about AI and understand how to leverage it within their work. The roundtable's moderator, Andrew Duffell of Research Park at FAU, wondered how ModMed is encouraging employees to integrate their own knowledge with AI. Cane explained that the expectation is that employees are problem solvers and eager learners, and they arrive with a fundamental understanding of AI and its potential uses in the organization. Employees' natural curiosity must have them exploring how AI can be a tool to improve effectiveness, he emphasized. 'We are an employer that's using AI throughout our company, whether it's finance, accounting, marketing, software development,' Cane said. 'But we're also creating our AI to solve problems out in the wild.' AI's misperceptions, challenges and threats 'The belief that AI will automatically enhance processes and products can be inaccurate,' Damalas said. 'Similar to the digitization trend of the late 1990s and early 2000s, integrating AI into a business process with considerable inefficiencies may only heighten those inefficiencies, unless the process or product is carefully assessed concerning the specific outcomes or goals that AI is supposed to achieve within its context.' AI can create workplace challenges. According to Damalas, one involves managing change and promoting psychological safety for users as they adopt these technologies. He believes it is essential to address concerns that AI and other emerging technologies may replace jobs and instead encourage users to perceive them as enhancements to their skills and capabilities. Another will be how industries, such as health care, banking and financial services or education, for example, work with policy makers to enhance future regulations around AI. ModMed works with industry governing bodies to advocate for responsible AI applications and implementation. Internally, the company ensures its use of data complies with patient privacy laws, as well as emerging AI responsible-use and transparency guidelines. A company like ModMed's unique place as a developer and user of AI also gives it a role to play as advisor to governing bodies. 'Now is the time to be working with policy makers,' Cane said. 'It's essential that we bring policymakers and governing bodies up to speed on how this content and how this technology can be used in a way that can help people, and try to prevent people from getting hurt by it.' Where some may see regulators or governing bodies as 'the enemy,' Jogaib said the pace of industry innovation places developers and users in an important role as advisor. 'We call regulators our partners,' Jogaib said. 'We show them what they are doing, how we are doing it. We allow them to ask questions and through those questions they not only understand better how we are doing things, but they also take feedback. There must be this interaction, this exchange of experience.' As with any technology, strong internal policies can help thwart misuse and external threats. Companies must bolster and update their cybersecurity apparatus, Jogaib affirmed. Besides, as regulated industries, health care and banking, even education, face the prospect of government involvement - even suspension or revocation of licensure - should they not protect data or otherwise not meet regulations. Dispelling misperceptions Even as AI goes from headlines to frontline use in the workplace, developers and employers are still working to dispel fears and misperceptions that AI will replace workers. In physician practices, Cane said that AI won't replace doctors. Rather, its ModMed Scribe platform is helping doctors focus on practicing medicine, as opposed to rote tasks and administration 'and all of the back office overhead on billing and collecting and working on payers and all the things that happen in the middle where a doctor wants more than anything just to focus on the human being in front of them, the patient,' Cane said. 'It's not uncommon for doctors to spend two or three hours after work in what we call, 'pajama time,' catching up on their notes,' he said. His AI platform takes notes during the visit, writes prescriptions, orders and reviews labs, and handles other documentation - even following up with the patient to ensure compliance. From a more fundamental approach, Delgado noted that organizations need to educate their users - employees, customers, even students, in the case of educators - to ensure they're learning and using best practices. 'We need to really educate our constituents from that perspective about how to leverage it in a positive way, while still making sure they are open to including it as part of the journey,' he said. To Delgado, as business and society embrace agentic AI, or any AI applications for that matter, it still requires human intervention to supervise and hold AI accountable for its outcomes. 'Hallucinations' or incorrect responses remain a serious concern whose prevention requires human oversight. While future autonomous AI presents some dangers, the evolution brings tremendous promise. The embrace of AI 'is not an isolated event. It's a team sport,' Delgado said. 'Everybody, every function, no matter what type of company it is, has a place in the AI game, even if they don't know that yet.'
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
'Grotesque': Husband-wife insurance execs earn more than $50 million in 2 years
A Florida insurance company's husband-and-wife team of top executives earned pay in 2023 and 2024 that totaled more than $50 million, according to federal filings. Tampa-based Slide Insurance Company, the state's sixth largest insurance company, which started operations in 2022, paid its CEO Bruce Lucas $21 million last year, more than all other Florida insurance companies except for one. And Slide's COO Shannon Lucas made $16.5 million that same year, according to a May 23 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, first reported in the Insurance Journal. Meanwhile, national insurers' CEOs such as top executives at Liberty Mutual and Progressive, are making less than Shannon Lucas in total compensation, the article notes. The pair earned $12.6 million in 2023. The public filing has sparked condemnation and calls for more reform from a few quarters. The Insurance Journal highlighted how Slide founder and CEO Bruce Lucas, who left Heritage Insurance Company in 2021, is making nearly five times his successor at that Deerfield Beach-based insurer he helped co-found in 2012. Current Heritage CEO Ernie Garateix made $4.3 million in 2024, the Insurance Journal reported. Douglas Heller, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, called the compensation package, 'grotesque,' especially considering Florida's insurance woes due to its vulnerability to catastrophic hurricanes. Also problematic for Heller: how much of the start-up's business came from policyholders essentially forced to take Slide Insurance because Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, wanted to pare its rolls. Citizens' policyholders can be forced to take a policy from a commercial insurer should the policy cost within 20% of what the estimated Citizens' policy would have renewed at. Slide, from 2023, when it started taking Citizens' policyholders, to the end of May 2025 has assumed a total of 232,901 policies that were under Citizens, according to information on the state-backed insurer's website. Slide currently has 343,000 policies in force, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. The Washington-based consumer education and research organization that's more than 50 years old has found that residents in most Florida zip codes are paying the highest premiums in the country, Heller said The compensation for Slide's executives, Heller said, is 'just shocking and should offend the sensibilities not just of every policyholder who pays premiums to Slide, but every politician who created the conditions for Slide to move in, take all these policies and vacuum up this for their personal windfall.' More: Hope for legislative property insurance fix dimming as Legislature enters second half Slide Insurance officials did not return an email seeking comment, but industry officials have long pointed out that Florida's insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the state. Insurance companies that want to increase their premium rates by 15% more than the previous year company must undergo a public hearing before a panel from the state's Office of Insurance Regulation, justify the increases with historical claims and future risk assessments and then hope for the regulatory body's stamp of approval. Still, Republican Rep. Hillary Cassel, who works as a plaintiff's insurance attorney and introduced legislation this year that would have changed the landscape in which Slide has taken root, said the situation points out exactly why the current set of rules should be modified. Her legislation sought — and ultimately failed — to roll back a 2022 change that made it so that attorney fees, in most cases, would not be added into litigated settlements for policyholders against their insurers. The 2022 tort changes have caused the number of suits against insurers to plummet, and, some say, stem a tide of legal fraud, add up to a healthier insurance market with more consumer choices and slow the premium growth from the crisis of a few years ago when some premiums were tripling. Cassel, however, has said the changes have left Florida homeowners still paying more and with few avenues to hold their insurer accountable. And the Lucases are paying themselves on the backs of Florida policyholders, she said. 'This is exactly the type of egregious behavior that, as the vice chair of the House Insurance & Banking Subcommittee, I am committed to ensuring oversight and transparency into any and all payments … so runaway insurance costs are reined in, claims are paid and Floridian may continue to secure coverage for their property,' Cassel said. More: Report: As insurance market wobbled, some companies paid billions to affiliated firms Cassel's subcommittee was holding an investigation during the last legislative session into insurance company payments, but it did not come to any conclusions about why parent companies of Florida insurers distributed $680 million to shareholders and distributed billions more to company affiliates. The report filed with federal authorities shows that Slide is heavily reliant on reinsurance to pay claims, Heller noted. Reinsurance is what insurers must buy on the global financial markets to fortify their reserves to prepare for when or if a catastrophic level of claims hit. The reinsurance market has improved since the Florida market started wobbling beginning in 2019, but Florida's insurance crisis peaked as the reinsurance market became particularly tight. Reinsurance costs typically account for the largest, single chunk in an insurance premium — about 30% to 50%. 'To be highly reliant on reinsurance that's a real concern, especially in Florida, where the reinsurance market has been extremely volatile, and there's only so much they (Slide) can take out of the Florida reinsurance fund,' Heller said. 'And if you're highly reliant on reinsurance … you could imagine things going south for Slide customers really quickly.' Slide did enter the market at a moment of high risk for Florida insurers: 10 Florida-based insurance companies became insolvent between 1999 and 2023, and some national carriers decreased Florida business. The risk appears to be paying off for Slide: What was left for stockholders after expenses, taxes and costs (commonly known as the profit) grew from $87 million in 2023, its first full year in business, to $201 million in 2024. That's about a 130% growth in net income attributable to common stockholders, according to the federal filing. Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky could not be reached to comment on the filing, and Slide officials did not comment due to the 'quiet period,' according to reporting from the Insurance Journal. This period falls between when the initial public stock offering is registered with the federal government and a month after stock trading begins, to ensure that officers don't release new information that could affect investor decisions. Still, Harold Levy, founder and managing partner of HL Law Group in Fort Lauderdale, which represents insurance policyholders, said the situation sounds like the same old insurance game: deny, delay, defend. 'Further evidence that it is clearly a profitable strategy to take in premiums and not pay claims,' he said, after hearing of Slide's expanding executive compensation and profits. Anne Geggis is the insurance reporter at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at ageggis@ support our journalism. Subscribe today This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 'Grotesque': Married insurance execs earn $50 million in 2 years
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Childcare chain The Learning Experience plans major Central Florida expansion
Editor's note: This story is available as a result of a content partnership between WFTV and the Orlando Business Journal. A national daycare chain is making a big investment in metro Orlando. Deerfield Beach-based The Learning Experience recently announced it plans to open 10 new locations in Central Florida over the next three years. They are: Read: Walt Disney World to expand manatee critical care facility at EPCOT in St. Cloud, at 4930 E. Irlo Bronson Memorial Hwy., in March 2025 in Longwood, at 387 Wekiva Springs Road, in Q2 2025 in Clermont, at 3444 S. U.S. Hwy. 27, in Q3 2025 in Palm Coast, at 19 Market Ave., in Q4 2025 in Davenport, at 6215 U.S. Hwy. 17-92 N., in Q4 2025 in Sanford, at 3284 W. 1st St., in Q1 2026 in Clermont, at U.S. Highway 27 and Golden Eagle Boulevard, in Q3 2026 in Minneola, at 18130 U.S. Hwy. 27, in Q3 2026 in Casselberry, at 1533 Seminola Blvd., in Q3 2026 in Winter Springs, near Michael Blake Boulevard, in Q3 2027 Click here to read the full story on the Orlando Business Journal's website. Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live.
