Cyber risk is no longer just about firewalls and passwords—it’s about reputation, trust, and preparation in a world where AI can amplify threats. Awais Farooq, Head of Digital Claim Solutions, Catastrophe, & Contractor Connection in Canada for Crawford & Company, joins John Riley to unpack the evolving cyber risk landscape, from phishing scams and “Shadow AI” to the growing role of cyber insurance. He explains why reputational damage can outweigh financial loss, how organizations should prepare for cyber disasters, and why proving preparedness matters more than promises.
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Preparing For The Cyber Storm: Insights On Risk, Insurance, And Reputation With Awais Farooq
We have an awesome guest and he speaks four and a half languages fluently. We will talk about the four and a half, I think. First in his family to earn a college degree. He’s got an incredible story of resilience, once falling off a roof and walking off with a laugh. He’s the head of digital claim solutions, catastrophe and contractor connections in Canada for Crawford & Company Insurance. Welcome, Awais Farooq.
Thank you, John. I’m really looking forward to the conversation. You guys captured a lot more details than I thought you had about me.
How did you get four and a half languages? That’s what I’ve got to understand.
I can read and write Arabic very fluently. I don’t fully 100% comprehend it, but I can write word by word what you’re saying. There’s that half. I consider it a half.
That’s a pretty good half, I’ve got to say. What are the other four?
I speak Urdu, which is from Pakistan, Punjabi, Hindi, English. In addition to that, I grew up around a Brazilian neighborhood, so I could do Portuguese and Spanish. I could get my way in and out of trouble.
The Cyber Shield And The Storm
We have a lot in common. I like it. All right, so we’re going to jump right in here on this next piece, which is the actual episode piece. How would you explain that difference between what cybersecurity is and what cyber risk is?
I look at cybersecurity as the shield and cyber risk as being the storm. I think a lot of people just think about risk in a very unique way. You historically had your personal possessions. Back in the day, when you owned a lot of gold, you would protect that, put it in a safe, then it evolved into the materialistic things and your money being in the banks.
You’re trying to minimize your risk when it comes to making sure that the impact it will have on your wellbeing as well as your financial net worth or financial impact as to you as a whole. The entities and so on, so forth. I think cyber is something new to us when we start thinking about theft. If somebody came in and stole your car, that’s a huge impact. If somebody walked into the building a bank and just took everything that was in the safety deposit boxes, that’s a huge risk.
When you think about the silence of cyber risk that exists out there, you don’t even know it’s gone. By the time you know it, it’s too late. It’s like, what do you do with that? I think this has been a huge growing industry as a whole, whether it’s cyber security or cyber risk, I think organizations are realizing that they have possession of data and insights about people and about their processes, which is much more powerful, if not equally powerful as money.
That same data that they’re using to mine the person, or for whatever reasons, for marketing purposes or for whatever customer acquisition that they’ve got. As I said, back in the day, when internet was just starting out, if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. With all that data that they’ve collected, and now it’s a matter of protecting it because, as you said, you don’t even know.
I think one of the stories that I heard was regarding a studio like Pixar actually lost one of the films that they were working on because somebody had stolen like 6 gigs of data off of their server before they realized it. It was for our new feature release and it was bad. It’s interesting that the data there, whether it’s human data or computing data, IP, intellectual property of some sort, most things are stored digitally. Especially with an AI world coming around the corner or here, or not sure if it’s here or around the corner yet, but I think that that’s going to be another interesting facet to that.
I agree with you. I think there’s so many stories about that. You have entities just being locked down where the employees can’t get into access their own emails or just the blockade of things that can be done. It is as simple as leaving the doors unlocked. How do you make sure that at the end of the day or at the end of whatever you do using, whether it’s your vendor engagement, whether it’s just your release of information to other entities as a part of that, or a bridge that you’re giving them, there’s not a defect in that. How do you protect against just not simply locking the door, but then checking every single facet of it.
Makes it interesting. Along those same lines then, what do you think the most significant threats are to a company nowadays?
AI, Employees, And The Trust Factor: Top Cyber Threats
I think AI, of course you talked a little bit about that. It’s making its waves and it’s all the algorithms and all the data that’s out there is just creating a lot of opportunity for entities as well as a lot of risk when it comes down to knowing your most valuable assets in an organization are people, are your employees. Depending on how those employees have accesses, what permissions they have, how do you administer all that?
I think that’s what the AI is really good at doing, understanding and knowing everything about your employees, and then leveraging those employees to be able to do the things that are simple as, once again, leaving their badge behind. It’s no longer about, “Don’t leave your badge on the table, or don’t leave your laptop unlocked.” It’s more about manipulating the employees to doing things that they normally wouldn’t do.
I’ll tell you, there was a time where I was trying to get hacked nonstop, where I would get an a text message from my CEO that would just need very important piece of document from me. It was always on Friday, it was always 4:00 PM and apparently, a CEO of a 12,000-people organization cannot access anyone but me to be able to give him that valuable asset.
I think the vulnerability of people and the trust of people is being manipulated. I think there’s a lot to say about that because when you think about cyber risk and you think about the people that are impacted, a lot of that is just naiveness or not knowing how do you safeguard and what are the protocols that you have to make sure that the access of your employees and access of their information is protected and safeguarded.
I think that’s a partially a trust thing. Obviously, the longer an employee’s been with you, the more trust that you give them. The other side of that is sometimes an employee could be going through something personally that causes them to be distracted. When they get that 4:00 email on a Friday afternoon in the payroll department to change the CEO’s checking account and update their whatever. It becomes one of those things where maybe they had a fight with their spouse or something happened. They’re not doing the normal protocol things, even though they may have been a long-term employee. It’s just that it happens to be that day. You’re talking to ceos and such, how do you talk to ceos about prioritizing that risk of cybersecurity?
I think there’s this misconception that cyber risk is only about the data that is stolen. We can start to think about those mitigation strategies of what do we do? The biggest risk is the reputation. When you think about an organization that protects people’s assets and always there to safeguard those assets and that valuable information, going back to that trust issue, how do they trust your organization do work again?
You can have a mass exodus of Zoomer population. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s a huge concern. We know this again and again. There’s been vendors that had data breaches and had massive cyberattacks. What do we do? We said, “We’re no longer going to do business with that entity because we have some serious concerns.” You get into spending ten times as much effort to regaining that client, to regaining that customer.
I think CEOs know and good CEO has that understanding of knowing that it’s reputational risk beyond just the financial impact that it will have and the emotional impact it will have on people. It’s about how will the clients remember that experience of what it went through. I think that’s what I would say is more important than anything else to bring value into the cyber space, that reputation.
You actually just touched on the next question, really. When you’re dealing with cyber disaster, what does that look like for a CEO? If you were in their shoes, it sounds like you might’ve worked with a couple CEOs that were in that situation based on what you just described. How does that normally go? What feeling? What are they experiencing?
I think you go through this motion of immediate panic of what’s happening. You are calling everybody in, everybody’s jumping on calls nonstop and trying to figure out, “What do we do? What is the strategy?” The next piece is the blame gun throw gets thrown out. “It was a finance department,” “No, it was the IT department,” “No, it was the operations and this person did this.” You’re trying to manipulate and trying to figure out where did this start? You’re trying to get to that next phase is root cause.
Next phase is eventually coming in, somebody, a CEO or whoever the executive is saying, “We need to figure out where this started. Let’s put the blame gun aside and pointing fingers aside and focus in on the root cause.” By the time you get to the root cause, the person who hacked you already is reading your emails about all this going back and forth.
They are two steps ahead of you before you can even realize it. I think it’s that phased approach of making sure that best advice that I received when I came to a leading catastrophe operations. In a catastrophe environment, you’re in a pond infested with alligators and you’re in the middle and if you panic, you’re going to attract a lot more attention and they’re going to come for you. If you’re calm, collected, have a thought process, you may be able to get out of there alive.
I think that’s the same scenario when it comes into this. It is a catastrophe. It is a huge concern. Time over time, what we see is the entities that go through this, I wouldn’t call it an exercise, this catastrophe, they realize that they need to strengthen up and they do ten times what they did before. It’s about the preventative measure more than a post event because you can and will get hacked again. I’m not saying you won’t, but if you don’t protect yourself at the first place, you’re leaving that door unlocked and go back to that analogy, it’s going to happen.
The Evolving Cyber Landscape: AI, Shadow IT, And Third-Party Risk
I’ll be honest with you, one of the big things that we find is that when somebody has a scare, maybe they didn’t get a full breach, maybe they just had somebody send them something and they thought, “No, I might have,” that feeling is what really gets them to think about that. It then becomes a matter of how do you want to practice that?
Do you want to be standing in the Everglades with all the alligators around you, trying to figure out how to deal with them or do you want to maybe have a chance of like some cardboard alligators to start off with to figure out what it should look like? I definitely like that idea for being able to help the ceos and/or executives just trying to understand what that you don’t want to be in that situation. From your perspective, what do you believe are some of the new trends that are coming? What a profound impact will they have on the future?
I touched on it a little bit earlier. I think the biggest challenge ahead of us is the fact that every single organization is jumping into the AI train. At this point, I think every organization is trying to do something with it and rightfully so. You have to improve processes. I’m a big supporter of technology and advancement, but I think it opens doors into so many challenges.
When you think about if you’re engaging a vendor or if you’re engaging with a model that now gets access to your information or you’re feeding into that model, what happens then? Where does that go? I think it’s just complicates things even more because now you’re not just responsible for your data, you are not just responsible for the data that went out to the vendor. You’re also responsible for the data, how the vendor is leveraging it with the eighteen other vendors that they have and the support mechanism that they’ve built around them to curate and give you whatever solution that’s provided.
I think it’s just a trickle-down effect of making sure that there’s clear language in your contracts as well as in your process discoveries of making sure that you’re not opening yourself up to something much broader because the data that you have, it may not even belong to you. It belongs to the clients. What kind of agreements that you have there?
I think it’s just complicating so much more because this AI hype is now put data everywhere. Whether it’s the employees just putting easy information into a model that somebody’s built on back of a napkin and now they got the information by looting in the employee and saying, “We’ll give you a summary of a claim. We’ll give you a summary of your client success. Just upload your financials. Just upload the claim details.” Now that gave so much more information out there that’s just floating around. I think we have to be cautious around what goes where, when and how.
Talking about that, that’s one of the things that’s actually been driving our business as well as third party vendor risk management, TPRM, because people are having to check your vendors. What I always like to equate it to is that you’re the vendor that has access to the database of your customer, it’s really hard for somebody else to come in and compete on price if you’ve got the trust and you haven’t lost the trust by, by losing the data.
Now you’re providing an invaluable service on the data that the customer already has. You’re not competing on price anymore. You have a true value-based service or whatever that that customer’s not going to go searching for, saving a dollar. They’re not going to just bring in another vendor for that. As long as you can prove that through your third-party vendor management or through and then now your vendors are doing the same thing, that trickle down of how to build those cybersecurity programs is becoming more important.
As far as AI goes, yes, it was interesting. I was talking to somebody and they were talking about how AI, it’s shadow AI these days because what happens is the employees want the productivity boost. They went and did this audit and found out that all these things were going across the firewall with AI. They went to the CFO and said, “How much are we spending on AI?” The CFO said, “Nothing.” They said, “What do you mean?” They went and asked some of the employees like, “What’s this data?”
The employee was like, “I use chatgpt and these other services and what I’m doing is I’m taking this data and I’m uploading it.” They’re like, “Are you not paying?” “That’s $20. I’m paying for it out of my own pocket and I’m it makes me faster so I get paid more and I’ll get a raise yeah. $20 a month so I’m not even expensing it.”
You’ve got all the shadow AI that’s happening and what’s really, then you’ve got a question like, “What data is going out? What did you upload to them?” As you said, it’s there and available now, once you’ve given it to them. It’s going to be an interesting time to see. I’d love to be a fly on the wall to see the stuff that people upload.
There’s going to be some lawsuits, for sure. It’s going to be very interesting to see like some of the things that I hear of just people, at least in the insurance industry, and they’re like, “I just uploaded a claim.” Not our company, but just in general. I’m like, “How are you doing this?” They’re like, “We’re a small insurance company. It doesn’t really matter. We’re just blanking out the information and you’re manually doing this.”
It was giving me a heart attack there. I’m like, “No, do not do that. You don’t understand the impact of it and there’s ways you can leverage that.” We’re partnered with Copilot and have done some very good use cases internally to help safeguard and protect that data because we don’t want our employees leaving out of the system to be able to go anywhere.
I think companies have to start giving access and ability to people, to your point, in a way that’s keeping it controlled. It boosts the productivity overall as entity because now you experience it from hundreds and thousands of employees and you’re like, “This is the information that we need,” because now you’ve done your research in a matter of minutes or hours versus what took you years to gather on which process to automate and what do you need to do? If everybody’s going to your model and writing a denial letter and claims for example, or whatever it may be, and that’s all they’re doing, why not plug that into your own system and it becomes an opportunity?
What are you currently working on that you’re most excited about?
I’m very much excited on, to your point, like we’re working on voice AI. We’re taking that to market and activating it within my own organization here, which is exciting for me. We’re doing it in a controlled environment, making sure that we’re able to service the policy holders right during catastrophes and during just high volume as well as just traditional volume of giving people that ease and personalized service. When people are calling in and they no longer have to wait 30 seconds, 60 seconds or whatever our turnaround times are. We’re answering calls under like 10, 15 seconds in most cases. Second, third, fourth ring, we’re picking it up if that. With that being said, I think it’s important to not even let it ring. How do you create that experience?
That’s what we’re all about. We’re about building that connection that when people are contacting us, when people are inquiring about their claims or setting up a claim, it’s very personalized to them. It has that element to we care. We have an approach of human plus AI versus just an AI. We don’t leave it at autopilot. We have a copilot strategy of making sure that you have the human enablement where, when, and how it’s needed. The human is doing as little to no manual work that can be done in today’s technology. I think it’s moving at the speed of light and we’re trying to make sure that we’re taking claims forward with that.
Cyber Risk: We have an approach of human plus AI versus just an AI. We don’t leave it at autopilot; we have a co-pilot strategy to ensure you have that human enablement, when and how it’s needed.
Crawford & Company: Revolutionizing Insurance Claims
That’s great. I live in Florida, so insurance has been an issue down here. Tell me a little bit more about the company. What companies, who do you help? What kind of insurance do you provide?
We are a service provider to the insurance company. We are a claims engine for the industry, Crawford & Company. We offer anything from the start to finish of a claim and even beyond that in subrogation and other elements of fulfillments, etc. We handle a small fender bender, small leak in your room, houses being completely gone, buildings being disrupted, ship running into a bridge to a satellite in the space damage.
We handle everything, all types of different claims and specialties that exist out there. Cyber being one of them. We service all different types of lines of businesses, but more importantly we have an ecosystem within the claims environment to be able to partner with our insurance carrier partners as well as MGAs and other captives that want to be able to do claims more efficiently and build a solution.
I’ll give you an example. I’m running our contracted connection model in Canada. Essentially, traditional model is that you go in, an adjuster will call you, you’ll set up a time to go in, look at the property, they’ll write an estimate, cut you a check, you’ll get a contractor. Contractor will come out, give you their estimate, and then you go back and forth and nobody really is happy because everybody’s trying to get the best for them. We eliminate all of that process with contract protection.
Our goal is to bring you to pre-loss condition, what’s affordable in the policy. We work with the insurance companies to understand what are their policies, guidelines that they would like us to follow, and we build an estimate and we provide the actual contractors to be able to repair that property instead of just saying, “Good luck.” It’s more than just cutting a check.
As a homeowner, it’s so frustrating to get a contractor to come to your house, give you an estimate, and as soon as they hear insurance claims, some of them will be like, “Don’t call me. I don’t want to deal with it,” or others will be like, “Great opportunity. I can inflate this estimate. I could get you a new kitchen, I could do this, I could do that.” All the promises that go along with it.
As a consumer, you’re overwhelmed. We provide that solution. We warranty the work. We make sure that the policy is made whole. Other instances where we have digital and AI capabilities of voice AI, we make sure that the estimates that are written by contractors, adjusters, they’re up to the standards of the insurance company. We have several digital solutions that offer that.
At the end of the day, John, our biggest focus is that we are building the future of claims. We’re providing enablement for anyone that has claims to be able to come to us and have a either end-to-end solution from a first notice of loss of when a claim is filed to all the way to recovery. Provide everything in between.
That’s honestly really cool. From my perspective, I’ve been on the both sides, more on the side of trying to work with insurance companies and that type of thing, but the ownership of the process and everything, I can see why you’re successful at running that for an insurance company. Especially bringing in all the right resources and your contractor connection, that’s an amazing piece that as a differentiator that I, as a consumer, would really appreciate that. Becoming whole without having to prepare for the fight of making sure that, “I’m going to get what I need to get back to where I was.” That’s amazing that you guys are on the right track there. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from? Where are you at now?
A Journey Through The Insurance Industry
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been in the industry for many years. I started with State Farm. I spent nine years of my career there. I started off in claims area with auto property and then manage catastrophe operations in the East Coast and pretty much loved it. I love catastrophes, not having them, but I like helping people and getting them rebuilt and being put together. There’s a fulfillment element to that, which is different.
When you walk into somebody’s house and nothing is left except for the foundation and you’re there holding their hand and saying, “We’ll make this right,” I love that element of it. That’s what got my passion for claims. When I left school, I didn’t even know I was going to go to the insurance industry. It was more of an accident. As with most consumers, I was like, “This insurance is just a scam. They just take your money. Don’t know what they give you.”
Having been in the industry, I can say it’s a very rewarding and fulfilling work that I’m very passionate about. Since then, after State Farm, I went to Chubb Insurance. I led their North America commercial claim operations. Essentially, all the ACE businesses were so expanding from property to now nineteen different lines of businesses, including cyber, DNO, directors and officers and environmental to aircraft insurance. Everything in between.
The things I didn’t know people were insured for was a fascinating experience. I had the opportunity to go to a Berkshire Hathaway company where I started a PNC, property and casualty claims department for them, and ran all of their property claims for personal and commercial lines. I went to a tech company and focused on productivity and utilization. It became a passion of mine.
A lot of people complained about, “I don’t have enough work,” or people said, “It’s too much work, and what is the balance in between?” That passion really led me into joining that organization and focusing my energy into figuring out what is the right balance of how do you keep people busy so they’re not burned out, but at the same time, they don’t have so much capacity that they feel bored at their job? There’s something in between there.
I’ve been at Crawford & Company for a few years. I told you a little bit about that. I was running our strategy and transformation for our North America business and currently in the interim role of running part of our Canadian business. It’s been exciting. I started in January, but Canada gets very cold in January. Having realized that, I made a lot of trips. That goes to show my commitment to the organization that I’m willing to travel to a very cold place if needed and do whatever’s needed.
I’ve had similar experiences traveling around, part of the job sometimes, to cold places or the hot places. It just depends on which way you got to go. How would you like people to reach out to you? Do you like email? Do you like them to reach out on linkedin? What’s the best way to reach you?
The best way to reach out is LinkedIn. Connect with me, follow me. I’ve put a lot of content out there relating to the insurance industry and would love to get your feedback. If anyone has any questions or want to dive deeper into any of the topics we’ve discussed, I’m passionate about this whole thing. Specifically cyber, because I think it’s a new product and new offering that’s just like emerged in the last decade to the next level, and it’s revolutionizing how and what we operate. LinkedIn would be the best way to get in touch with me and I’m happy to connect and bridge connections.
Cyber Insurance: Navigating The Evolving Risk Landscape
Let me ask you a question about that, because one of the things that I’ve seen in the industry from this side of it is that insurance started off very inexpensive, I’m not going to say cheap, but very inexpensive for cyber because there wasn’t an understanding of the risk. I think some of the claims started coming in and they started going, “This is costing us more.”
I think it’s starting to get to a more mature model where the costs are getting up there, there’s enough margin now for the insurance company, but I think it changes more quickly than most organizations or most insurance. You’ve been insuring planes for a long time. Planes only have a certain amount. You can know what it’s going to look like. When you’re talking about new revolutionary things like AI coming out or other things, and things leapfrog as much as they do, how do you think that the industry deals with those types of things?
No, a lot to unpack there. I will say, I agree with you. I think the space is maturing quite a bit when it comes to the premiums and when it comes to understanding what type of risk that we’re looking at. It still, I think, has a long way to go. It’s no different than ensuring anything that you own. If you own a vehicle in a bad part of the neighborhood and there’s a theft there every single week, your premiums are going to be pretty high.
If you’re driving on a highway, which has a lot of accidents, your premium is going to be high or if you yourself had multiple accidents, you go to buy auto policy, your premium is going to be high. I think there’s a lot of that built into it where organizations are looking at behaviors of companies that are looking for cyber insurance.
What practices do they employ? What are they doing as a preventative measure? How are they engaging you in your organization of making sure are you doing everything that you can in your power to prevent it? Insurance is not there for the loss to happen. We’re there if the loss happens, and if companies are expecting it will happen, and we just want to make sure we’ll get paid, that’s a wrong strategy. As an insurance company, I wouldn’t want to ensure that, I want to ensure for the people that are doing their best to make sure that the hurricane doesn’t impact their house as much as possible. That way, they don’t have to go through that.
That’s partially the usage of the questionnaires that come along with the policies in the beginning. I think that a lot of times, what happens is that it’s a CFO or somebody that fills that out, they may not be qualified for answering some of those questions about what protections they may have in place. They may think that they’ve got something in place, but the IT person’s like, “No, we don’t have that you didn’t want to pay for that one.”
I think that that’s one of the other disconnects that we see a lot of times with that is, if you’re reading this as an executive and you get one of those questionnaires from your insurance company, please go talk to your technical people and make sure that everything on there is correct. Don’t just fill it out and send it back. It will come to bite you in the butt if something does happen.
We also like to say that it’s a win. It happens because no matter what I mean, cybersecurity, yeah, it’s not if it’s a win. There’s always going to be that you can only do so much and there’s a certain amount of risk of just breathing. I think we learned that during COVID. There’s just a risk. You’re trying to reduce that risk as much as you can and move forward the best way possible.
I think that’s where it’s important. To your point, it’ll come back and bite you because of the fact that when you go in and your data’s impacted and your entity’s impacted, and you go to the insurance company, insurance company goes, “You don’t have all these things that you said.” The person who filled it out is no longer there to defend that. How do you go about that?
I agree with you. I think it’s partially the fact is when, but at the same time, it’s minimizing that. When you’re thinking about it, you’re not thinking the worst-case scenario of saying, “My company is going to be impacted all the way around,” because that point, insurance companies are going to have much higher and different model for that.
An example of that is like the warranty aspect of things. Where over time something’s going to wear down and things like that. I think there’s a lot of education to be done. There’s a lot of information that needs to be shared around what are the things that you can do to prevent it at all. There’s always breaches that we don’t even know about. The IT team never brings it because it was so minor and that leak just turned into some something massive.
Actionable Advice: Proving Your Cyber Preparedness
Here’s the last question for you and then we’ll wrap it up here. We’d like to end by giving our audiences some action items. What’s one piece of advice or a tip for reducing the cyber risk that you would give to our audience?
Yeah, I would say preparation is not about what you said you did. It’s what you can prove. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the action item of what you actually did. When you take a step back in your roles and you look at what are you doing in your control, you may not be the CFO signing off on these deal you may just be the operations person, or you may just be the IT person. Are you raising the questions when it comes up. Are you making sure that you’re able to articulate that as well as you can instead of just getting frustrated? It’s very easy.
In bigger organizations, it is about how you articulate your message and who gets in front of it at what time they get in front of it, or is it past the budget? Is it after the budget? Where do we stand in all of that? The most important thing is don’t get frustrated. Have a methodical approach to what is your problem and how can you relate it to that person. When you go to a CFO and if you say, “We can have a security breach and it can impact X amount of policies. It can be very harmful for our organization,” that is a different audience.
When you translate that into numbers and you say, “If all of our policies are impacted, we now opened up the door to $1.2 billion of an impact to our organization,” the wheels start turning. If you go to an IT organization and you say, “You’re going to need a whole team to recover from an event like this, that will take you five months and you’re going to need a team of twenty people working at it,” they’re calculating this and saying, “All that coding, all that protection that we need to do.”
You’ve got to get people to the end state in wherever role they’re at to be able to realize what your solution is. I think it’s important, even from the front lines, as people are seeing some concerns and saying whether it’s phishing scams or whatever it may be, is share those ideas with your group and be very methodical in how you approach it.
I think that a lot of people are buying on feelings these days too. That feeling of what’s that going to feel like? The specifics of $1.2 billion, as you said, that’s when somebody goes, “It made my heart skip a beat there for a second,” versus, “There’s a problem.” You go, “There’s a problem.” It’s like, I got a flat tire.” $1.2 billion is more than a flat tire. I think having the data and understanding what the real problem is and understanding where the data is a huge part of that.
Awais Farooq, I appreciate your time. This has been an awesome back and forth and it was good before we started and kept it going, so I love it. To our audience, thank you for reading. I hope you’ve learned something. I sure have as far as the insurance industry, so I appreciate that. There it is. It’s been another great episode. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.
Important Links
About Awais Farooq
First in the family to earn a college degree.
Has an incredible story of resilience, once falling off a roof and walking it off with a laugh!
The Head of digital claims solutions, Catastrophe, and Contractor Connections – Canada for Crawford and Company Insurance.
Awais is a senior executive and industry thought leader who has built his career transforming some of the world’s largest insurance companies. With experience spanning operations, claims, strategy, and technology, he has held leadership roles at respected organizations such as State Farm, Chubb, Berkshire Hathaway, and Crawford & Company.
He currently serves as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Transformation at Crawford, where he helps shape the future of claims through innovation and people-first leadership.
Awais is also a published author and keynote speaker, known for his insights on how AI and technology are reshaping the world of work. His upcoming book, The Future Isn’t Fully Automated: Why Humans Still Matter in a High-Tech World, challenges the narrative that machines will replace people and instead shows how today’s professionals can thrive by adapting, learning, and leading with empathy.
His strategic vision and operational expertise have earned him widespread recognition, including accolades such as Mentor of the Year and the R.I.S.E.’s ’35 Under 35′ award. These honors reflect his significant contributions to advancing industry practices and cultivating a forward-thinking culture within the insurance sector.
Awais is passionate about helping the next generation find meaning in their careers, embrace change, and unlock their full potential. Whether he’s speaking to students, executives, or professionals, Awais brings energy, humility, and actionable wisdom rooted in real-world experience.
