Firm Asks AI What Susan Thinks Because Susan Keeps Getting It Wrong

CALGARY, Alberta  A commercial insurance brokerage in downtown Calgary has instructed staff to stop asking its claims operations manager questions directly, after an internal assistant trained on her emails was found to represent her views more accurately than she does.

The instruction was issued in March by Marcus Pryde, head of digital enablement at Bow Ridge Commercial Broking on 8th Avenue SW, who confirmed that Susan Okonkwo, 52, remains fully employed, is well liked across the 90-person firm, and sits at her usual desk on the fourth floor.

“Susan is an enormous asset and the model reflects that faithfully,” Pryde said. “The difficulty is that Susan continues to have new opinions, which the model has no way of knowing about and which we have not reviewed. When she contradicts the assistant in the kitchen, that is not the assistant being wrong. That is Susan going off-script.”

Internal figures show 1,140 queries directed at the Susan module between March and September, against 61 emails sent to Okonkwo herself over the same period, 38 of them automated. The module is assessed quarterly under a document titled Persona Accuracy Review (Q3) by a four-person panel drawn from claims, compliance, IT and HR. Okonkwo is not on the panel. Pryde said this was to protect the integrity of the scoring.

The Q3 report rated the module at 91.4 per cent fidelity, down from 93.2 per cent in Q2. An appendix attributes the decline to “source divergence,” defined in the glossary as changes in Okonkwo’s actual opinions since 2021. Remediation is listed as ongoing.

“We had a run of conflicts in June, right in the middle of the hail claims, and it was genuinely difficult for the team,” said Priya Nandakumar, a senior account handler who has worked six feet from Okonkwo since 2019. “You’d get an answer on a roof deductible and then Susan would say something slightly different by the sink. Marcus was clear that the assistant is the reviewed version, so now we just don’t put her in that position. I’d say I know Susan better than I did when I was talking to her.”

Okonkwo declined to comment at length, saying only that she had been asked to keep her email style consistent to reduce further drift, and that she had received a calendar invitation to a session titled Being Yourself: A Refresher.

Okonkwo has taken to opening Broker Copilot on her second monitor and asking it about the escalation threshold for commercial fleet claims, a threshold she set in 2022, to check what she thinks before she says it out loud.