In America today, 36% of workers freelance; during the Covid-19 pandemic, freelancing generated $1.2 trillion for the US economy. The growth is similar elsewhere; gig work has become an accessible option for those unable to find or support conventional roles.
But this gig work is mostly in closed entities e.g. uber. Drivers cannot receive and accepts jobs or tasks from Lyft or other companies. But in an ideal world shouldn't they be able to?
Applied to the insurance industry many participants in claims management supply chains are independent contractors working for a variety of companies or individuals. Loss adjusters, surveyors, subsidence engineers, bridge engineers, motor engineers.........
"The gig economy today is composed largely of blue-collar jobs, such as driving cars or delivering packages. HUMAN Protocol dramatically expands the gig economy to accommodate a greater variety of backgrounds. To empower, in the first instance, globally representative machine learning through improved data labelling, tasks can require not only visual inferences — for example, in the case of captcha systems — but detailed observations and feedback, such as the identification of a malignant tumour, a car part, a line of code, or the cultural-specific interpretation of a piece of clothing.
Similarly, HUMAN Protocol supports marketplaces in which big tasks can be atomized into composite smaller tasks. Entire projects may be completed through the diverse expertise and background of a global workforce. As we become micro with our time — managing it to account for a greater degree of variability, obligation, and uncertainty — so must we with our work.
"
Kieran Costello HUMAN Protocol
In parallel other disruptive changes will change the nature of work, services and evolving ecosystems.
- The longer-term changes impacting vehicles and travel with autonomous driving, smart cities and highways
- The smart home and commercial property connected to insurers and contractors
- Parametric insurance based on smart contracts and blockchain
- Embedded insurance delivered at point if sale, lease or mobility services
Today, eCall in a vehicle can automatically initiate FNOL and operations like Onstar in the US and Bosch Mobility Services practically globally, triage emergency services, roadside assistance and vehicle recovery and repair. They do so via a variety of local service providers which contract with multiple Auto OEMS, Insurers and Roadside Assistance Service Providers.
The matrix of overlap results in a complex, fluid and probably inefficient picture. A diorama of Venn diagrams unintelligible to observers.
It seems a problem that insurers, supply chain partners, workers might not know they need a solution for right now but will as all these rapid changes impact the world. There is space for labour and specialist and supply chain exchange platforms like HUMAN Protocol.
You can see the first steps in an area that was once steeped in traditional practices- interpreter services.
UK courts faced with non-English speaking litigants would contract with a service provider to deliver an interpreter to the courts between 14.00 and 16.00 on 14h June 2021. The case would be delayed and the interpreter would sit around for hours. Who pays?
Every party looses out; the Courts paying for idle time, the interpreter who is mostly self-employed and the service company that was brow-beaten into a low rate. Then an exchange platform came to the market with four key components
- Formal agreements with globally located native speaking translators and interpreters
- Clients can book interpreters by the minute and even millisecond as and when needed
- Connectivity via phone, tablet, Zoom Teams etc with full security
- Automated Billing of clients and payment of interpreters
- Quality control over the whole lifecycle
See InterpretersPortal - a Netflix answer to a traditional legacy model.
HUMAN Protocol takes that further to global and national and local service provision. I can see it as the next-gen model to current supply chains that are full of bottlenecks, waste time and materials and unwanted cost.
The first step is the supply chain management, orchestration, collaboration and communication seen in a few digital claims management platforms. These are generally deployed by an insurer to its supply chain network i.e. a closed model like uber.
The next is combining these platforms with current service providers- the likes of Sedgwick, Crawford & Company, Davies Group.
On the other hand platforms like HUMAN Protocol will encourage new entrants to the market just as InterpretersPortal was born out of a platform technology. The combination of flexibility, agility, smart contracts and reverse auctions in a global economy is enticing.
In the future I can see service providers spanning multiple ecosystems leveraging technologies like HUMAN Protocol. They can span multiple insurers, multiple supply chains and enable customised value-add services for each market and customer. .
HUMAN Protocol — a blockchain-based infrastructure for distributed labor markets — powers the gig economies of the future: decentralized, accessible, and abundant. Through the Protocol, jobs are replaced by open, global marketplaces of tasks big and small, requiring different knowledge, background, and skills. These include data labeling and data feedback, empowering a new generation of gig workers — and, through them, a new generation of AI and ML technologies.
unknownx500
