Guillaume Bonnissent’s Insurance Technology Diary: Beware innoventors bearing gifts

About 400 years ago an Englishman named William Gilbert wrote a book called De Magnete. It was the definitive guide to electricity, and included the new word electricus. Despite the poncy Latin, no one took much notice.

Although privileged, investigative, otherwise-idle men like Newton, Boyle, Franklin, Galvani, Ampère and Faraday played around with current for another couple of hundred years, no electrical revolution materialised – just their eponymous theories, laws and gadgets.

Electricity only became a thing after a load of other famous-named chaps toyed around with the juice. From about the last half of the 19th century, innoventors including Volta, Kelvin, Hertz and Tesla – and especially Edison, Bell, Siemens and Westinghouse – made electricity the world’s must-have phenomenon.

Without them, we’d have no insurance technology more sophisticated than the abacus, and incubators would still be for premature babies. But that’s not my point. Instead, my first Insurance Technology Diary entry of 2025 is about GTSSB: the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I’m not on about any specific GTSSB. Instead, I have advice about all of them, especially those to come. As the new year commences, we should all resolve to be better prepared for the next GTSSB.

I read a blog in late December by Elena Maksimovich, founder of Weather Trade Net (from whom I shamelessly stole the electricity idea). She observed that “when talking about climate risk [data], it feels like revealing the magic of electricity … Why do I actually need it, and how do I use it?”

Electricity was once the world’s GTSSB (excuse my anachronistic acronym, please). Unusually, it really was revolutionary, but for every rare messiah the world welcomes a slew of false saviours. The trick is to identify them early.

In our recent history, blockchain was a biggie. Another, the latest, is AI. It’s the current techno-miracle that many hope will revolutionise their bottom line… but it won’t (trust me). Like electricity, both were deployed before they were famous, but neither was the panacea that electricity itself proved to be.

(Between we had APIs, which may actually bring about a market revolution, but they never had the right PR team.)

When the next GTSSB appears, ask yourself what it’s for and why you need it. Get answers before you hire people for the implementation. It might be another useful tool – one you’re perhaps already using – but it probably won’t electrify your performance.

Guillaume Bonnissent is CEO of Quotech