Scouting for Growth

AI can prepare the quotation. It cannot take ownership of the decision. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, I sit down with Bastiaan de Goei , who leads financial services marketing at OpenAI , for a conversation recorded live at ITC Vegas about what happens when AI moves beyond an impressive demonstration and into the daily work of an insurer. Having worked across AXA and Instabase, Bas under...

Your next AI pilot will not fix an operating model that cannot scale it. Two rooms. Two cities. One verdict. In this solo episode of Scouting for Growth, I connect the conversations from AI Horizon 2030 in Las Vegas and Majesco’s Frontier Customer Summit in New Orleans, where two very different groups arrived independently at the same conclusion: AI capability is increasingly available. The operat...

Insurance has become extraordinarily good at finding the few. The next competitive advantage may come from clearing the many. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, I sit down with Manjit Rana, Executive Vice President for Insurance across the UK, EMEA and APAC at Clearspeed, to explore a deceptively simple question: can insurers establish trust at the same speed at which they are automating deci...

AI is changing the economics of business. But it is not rewriting the fundamentals of strategy. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, I sit down with Professor Gianvito Lanzolla, Professor of Strategy at Bayes Business School, advisor to boards and CEOs, and co-author of Diversification in the World of Data and AI, to examine what actually creates competitive advantage when access to intelligenc...

Discovery is becoming abundant. Customer ownership is not. In this solo episode of Scouting for Growth, I go inside the Distribution Intelligence Layer and examine what happens when AI assistants become a new front door to the market. Customers can increasingly discover products, compare options, generate quotes, and decide what to do next before they ever reach a company website. The strategic qu...

Four excellent tools can still produce nothing. Intelligence only creates value when it connects, compounds, and scales. In this solo episode of Scouting for Growth, I introduce the Enterprise Intelligence Stack, a practical framework for understanding why promising agentic pilots stall, why different AI agents can operate with completely different views of the same customer, and why the third pil...

Kevin Maney: The Category Creation Formula for Winning Markets in the AI Era AI is making products easier to build, but meaningful differentiation harder to sustain. A stronger feature set, a faster model, or simply adding an “AI-powered” label may not be enough to convince customers that a new market should exist in the first place. Kevin Maney, bestselling author, technology commentator, and fou...

Denise Garth: The Frontier Insurer, One Year In Denise Garth returns to Scouting for Growth one year after the Frontier Firm idea began to move from a strategic aspiration into insurer operating models, technology roadmaps, and boardroom priorities. As Chief Strategy Officer at Majesco, Denise offers a sharper test for the Frontier Insurer: Is the organization simply using AI? Is it redesigning se...

Bárbara Fernández: Human-Agent Collaboration, Agentic AI, and the Rise of the Human Boss The future of work will not be won by humans who move faster. It will be shaped by humans who know how to orchestrate intelligence. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Bárbara Fernández, Deputy Director of MAPFRE Open Innovation and Head of insur_space, to explore one of...

Carlos Falcón: Rebuilding the Insurance Core for AI, Venture Scouting and the Frontier Firm Insurance does not have an innovation shortage. It has an absorption problem. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Carlos Cendra Falcón, Scouting and Investment Lead at MAPFRE Open Innovation, to explore one of the most pressing questions facing insurers today: can the...

Reggie Townsend: Making Responsible AI Irresistible Responsible AI has a design problem. Too often, it is treated as a compliance exercise, a policy document, or a late-stage control, when it should be the operating system that enables organizations to innovate with confidence. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden welcomes back Reggie Townsend, Vice President of AI Ethics, G...

Dale Diamond: When a $25K Claim Becomes a $7M Verdict or More A small claim is no longer a small claim. It can be the first signal of a verdict that changes everything. Dale Diamond, J.D., Vice President of Claims at NAMICO, joins Sabine VanderLinden to unpack one of the most urgent realities facing mutual insurers today: nuclear verdicts are not random events. They are often predictable. And if t...

Willem Paling: From Messy Middles to Autonomous Agents and the Race for Trust at Scale While the insurance sector has long flirted with artificial intelligence, a vast majority of firms find themselves paralyzed in perpetual pilot phases. In this installment of Scouting for Growth, I sit down with Willem Paling, Executive Manager of AI and Analytics at IAG, to decode the transition from mere exper...

Patrick Van Deven: The Frontier Firm's moat isn't data — it's the layer that governs it. In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Patrick Van Deven to unpack one of the biggest hidden blockers to becoming a true AI-native enterprise: legacy data infrastructure. As organizations rush toward the “Frontier Firm” vision championed by Microsoft — intelligence on tap, h...

Brad Wetherall: AI Search, Agentic AI, and How Corporations Must Adapt to Digital Discovery In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden is joined by Brad Wetherall, former Director of Operations at Google and current COO of Esquire Digital, to unpack the transformative impact of AI on search engines and digital visibility.  The conversation explores how search is moving beyond trad...

The App Era Is Over: Wallet-Native Insurance & the Agentic Frontier — Marc Lampe × Ernesto Suarez Talk Collaboration In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Ernesto Suarez and Marc Lampe to explore why the future of insurance is moving beyond apps and into wallet-native, AI-ready experiences. The conversation begins with a powerful reminder of why customer ex...

David Daiches: Inside INSHUR — From Manhattan Uber Rides to Insuring Autonomous Fleets In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden speaks with David Daiches, co-founder and COO of Insure, about building insurance solutions for the on-demand economy. The conversation traces Insure’s origins to a simple yet powerful insight: traditional insurance models were not designed for gig work...

Alan Martin: Why Insurers Who Invest in Wellness Win - The Healthcare Innovation Playbook still works In this episode, Sabine VanderLinden sits down with Alan Martin, founder of Resilient Risk and Health Solutions, to challenge the fundamentals of life and health insurance. The conversation highlights a growing disconnect between insurers, customers, and the health tech ecosystem, and why current...

Xavier Lestrade: From Insurance to Personalized Care Pathways In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden explores the transformation of health insurance from a claims-paying model to a care partnership approach with Xavier Lestrade, Managing Director of AXA Health International within AXA Global Healthcare.  The conversation delves into how AXA Global Healthcare is redefining indu...

From Org Charts to Work Charts: What the MIT Frontier Firm Paper Means for Insurance, Finance & Risk In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden explores a 2026 research paper from MIT CISR on how business models are evolving in the age of agentic AI. Drawing on longitudinal data from nearly 2,400 companies, the research highlights a major shift from traditional digital busines...

The Risk Intelligence Gap: How Exposure Data Deficiency Is Reshaping Property Underwriting In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden is joined by Anthony Peake, CEO of Intelligent AI, to dissect the " Risk Intelligence Gap " reshaping the property insurance landscape. We are both dissecting the recent white paper Anthony commissioned during Q1 2026. With 93% of UK and 90% of US c...

Trust Is the Operating System of the Agentic Enterprise In this episode, Sabine VanderLinden is joined by Franklin Manchester, Global Insurance Strategic Advisor at SAS, and Steven Abel, Global Technology Partner and Deputy Global Head of AI & Transformation at Oliver Wyman. Together, they unpack the concept of "trust by design" in the context of agentic enterprises and AI adoption.  The conve...

In this riveting solo episode, Sabine VanderLinden confronts what she calls "the capacity gap"—a silent barrier that undermines organizational success in today's complex business landscape. Rather than blaming common culprits like strategy, leadership, or talent, she reframes the issue as a structural mismatch between ambitious goals and the finite resources available to deliver on them.  Drawing...

In this episode of "Scouting for Growth," Sabine VanderLinden welcomes Florian Graillot, founding partner at Astorya VC, for an in-depth conversation about the evolving landscape of risk management and insurance innovation. The discussion explores how risk management is shifting from static predictions to adaptive strategies designed for tomorrow's uncertainties, emphasizing the rise of the “front...

In this episode of Scouting for Growth, Sabine VanderLinden welcomes industry veteran Karl Grandl, now of Miss Moneypenny Technologies, for a wide-ranging conversation on the real transformation underway in financial services and insurance.  Sabine VanderLinden sets the stage by emphasizing that digitization is no longer enough—true change means re-architecting operating models for velocity, intel...