Recently, Lemonade (LMND 6.37%) announced its involvement in a cryptocurrency project to bring crop insurance to farmers in Africa. In this video clip from "The Crypto Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on March 23, Fool.com contributors Travis Hoium and Jon Quast discuss how the insurance technology company plans to use its AI for this new venture.
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Travis Hoium: Yeah. I also have a lot of questions about DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. So just in a broad sense what you do is a token gives you a vote, so it's a little bit like a stock and you get voting rights if you own shares of a stock. But this is a relatively new structure. We know how stock voting works, the good and the bad of it. But decentralized autonomous organizations, I think, come with some of the same opportunities and challenges and we don't really know what the challenges are or where the problems will be until we see them, so that's the other question that I have with this.
I really like a company like Lemonade and these cryptocurrency blockchains trying to tackle these problems in parts of the world that maybe don't have the banking infrastructure that we have in the U.S. But there are a lot of questions about something like DAOs, how would they play a role in this? And I say that not just for this project but for other DAOs as well, so love the concept. Hopefully, these are the things that allow us to mature as an industry and figure out what are the rules behind a DAO? How do you run a good one? What infrastructure do you need? We'll see how this plays out but I love the concept for sure.
Jon Quast: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that there is a need to be a little bit skeptical all the time. Not just this news. But with Lemonade, I don't think this moves the needle with them financially, so if you're a Lemonade shareholder, I wouldn't go out double my stake on this news. I don't think it really moves the needle financially.
It will be interesting. Part of me wonders, Lemonade is all about their artificial intelligence trying to more and more take out the human component of building and structuring their policies and this is an opportunity to really grow that technology because now we're not using information about the consumer necessarily. We're building it out based on past weather cycles, current weather cycles, where the field is located, the crops that they're growing, trying to bring in all of this information into a predictive model that creates or you can write an insurance policy and have it break even is the goal in this case.
But part of me wonders if this isn't an attempt to really push the boundaries of what its AI can do. This is a skeptic talking not a whole lot of downside risks because if you're ensuring somebody in the U.S. with a loud voice if you do something wrong, you're going to hear about it. But maybe in another region of the world, something goes wrong here the fallout is a little bit less. After all, it looked like you were trying to do your best with a charity. I don't know. Just thinking out loud here. Is this Lemonade trying to grow their AI in a way that really comes at a little downside to the company? Anyway, just some thoughts there and we'll see how that goes over time.
