After spending the last few years building an AI assistant named “Grace” at Afterword, I’m starting a new chapter as CTO at Elysian to team up with the real-life Grace Hanson.

I spent the last several months deep in R&D on agentic systems, looking for a “messy” legacy industry where I could apply everything I learned into a high-stakes, real-world environment. I found exactly that in commercial insurance and with Grace.

Grace is a force in this industry: a 5x Chief Claims Officer who has spent her career untangling the most complex liability cases in the world. Most “AI in insurance” today only handles the easy 20% of admin tasks. The real challenge is the “messy middle” high-severity claims that require deep context and nuanced human judgment. By combining Grace’s domain mastery with agentic orchestration, we’re creating an AI-native TPA built from the ground up.

We’ll be at Lloyd’s Lab in London this spring as part of InsurTech Cohort 16. From one Grace to another, I’m thrilled to be back to building at the edge of applied AI.