Building Economic Health With AI
Katie Giometti |
We’re often asked how we define “Economic Health.” For us, it means building a healthier, less fragile U.S. economy that benefits all stakeholders. We center this goal on three core concepts:
- Economic Protection
This is the foundation, and it starts with affordable insurance and robust fraud prevention so Americans aren’t vulnerable to unexpected shocks. - Economic Mobility
Expanding prosperity requires access to the tools and opportunities that help people find, perform, and continually upgrade their best work. This is especially necessary for small business owners who are spread thin and can benefit from specialized skills at lower prices. - Economic Independence
At the top, independence is for individuals and businesses of all sizes to not only survive financially but thrive—through personalized financial advice and better access to services traditionally limited to the wealthy.
We focus on solutions that directly address these core areas. And we believe AI can supercharge this progress. Here are the major opportunities we see:
ECONOMIC PROTECTION
Making insurance more affordable
Homeowners in many states are grappling with soaring property insurance rates. Between 2018 and 2023, premiums rose nationwide by 29%—dramatically faster than general inflation—driven by escalating material costs and the rise in costly climate-related disasters. Worse yet, a growing percentage of Americans (now around 7%) have lost coverage entirely, translating to an estimated $1.6 trillion in unprotected market value.
We believe a solution to runaway insurance premiums is reducing administrative costs, which account for an eye-popping 35 to 40 percent of insurance premiums. AI co-pilots and agentic workflows can streamline underwriting (especially for complex commercial use cases), claims processing, and back-office tasks (like BDX reporting). By lowering operational overhead, these tools can help stabilize or even reduce costs for every policyholder.
Reducing fraud via enhanced prevention and detection
AI is making malicious impersonators ever more convincing—it now takes just 3 seconds of audio to clone a voice. And the costs are staggering: According to the FTC, consumer-reported fraud losses hit nearly $10 billion in 2023, and are expected to climb higher. At the institutional level, 60 percent of financial institutions and fintech companies reported an increase in fraud over the past year.
We believe AI can be just as powerful for prevention and detection as it is for perpetration. Just as AI can be used to mimic real human behavior, it can also be applied to analyze massive datasets and identify anomalous behavior with far greater accuracy than humans or static rule sets. We’re particularly excited about fraud consortiums that enable real-time data sharing, higher-quality SMB verification networks to protect merchant identity and block bad actors, and improved deepfake detection that identifies AI-generated manipulations before they do damage.
ECONOMIC MOBILITY
Helping people find and do their best work
Frequent job changes and the “silver tsunami” of retiring workers will further strain the labor market. Obvious has long invested in labor marketplaces for skilled workers (i.e., Incredible Health and Howdy), and we continue to be excited about building in this area. We see growing demand for worker coaching and upskilling, especially as AI automates many low-skilled roles. According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs report, 40 percent of workers will be outdated within five years, and 63 percent of business owners cite skill gaps as the primary barrier to business improvement. We are particularly interested in solutions that help workers to uplevel, adapt, pivot, or shift their skill sets toward work that cannot be easily automated.
Supplementing work with agents
We believe certain jobs simply shouldn’t be done by humans or can substantially benefit from AI support, making them ideal candidates for agentic solutions. These are jobs in industries that are:
- Dangerous, with high injury or fatality rates, like in warehouses and last-mile delivery. More advanced robotics can make an especially big difference here.
- Inflationary, in industries where cost is outpacing the Consumer Price Index, such as in healthcare, education, and government.
- Scarce, in areas where a shortage of human talent is limiting growth and efficiency, such as in accounting and wealth advisory.
- Computational, requiring coding and web development, where democratization can enable anyone to create custom websites and applications.
We seek agentic solutions to address jobs that fill critical gaps in our economy in a way that benefits all stakeholders, including existing workers, their employers, and the recipients of their services.
Reducing cost and boosting outcomes for SMBs
Small businesses make up 99.9% of U.S. companies in America. They employ nearly 46% of American workers and are responsible for 44% of the country’s GDP. Today, they spend close to a fifth of their budgets on outsourced professional services—such as accounting, bookkeeping, and legal counsel—and are frequently led by owner-operators juggling countless responsibilities.
Agentic solutions offer a way for these businesses to reduce reliance on external providers without sacrificing results. Agentic bookkeepers can reconcile all sources of financial data, close the books, and pinpoint savings opportunities; agentic marketers can create customized websites, regularly publish targeted content, and refine it using performance insights; agentic lawyers can deliver affordable, real-time legal advice; and agentic customer service agents can promptly and accurately handle customer inquiries. In some cases—such as with one-employee “solopreneur” businesses—an all-in-one package of these tools can transform an idea into a viable business faster than ever before. Taken together, these are powerful advances that we believe will enhance broader economic mobility.
ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE
Opening hyper-personalized financial advice to all
As we wrote in our 2025 World Positive Report, the idea of “wealth management” is irrelevant for many Americans—37 percent can’t cover a $400 expense, and only one-in-three workers feel on track for retirement. High-quality and personalized financial advice remains accessible mostly to the wealthy. Although robo-advisors have expanded access to basic portfolio management, they often lack nuanced personalization and can’t address the complexities of an individual’s full financial life.
AI can. AI can train on vast financial behavior and market performance data while dynamically “learning” each person’s needs. Tactically, AI can put financial management on autopilot by automatically transferring extra cash to a high-yield checking account, redirecting a paycheck to pay off loans to optimize credit performance, and ensuring appropriate retirement savings. Yes, the stakes are high, and the fiduciary standard is stringent, but the upside for consumers is immense.
If you’re tackling any of these challenges, we want to hear from you. Get in touch at economichealth@obviousventures.com or catch Katie, Kahini, or Vishal in person March 10-12 at HumanX or Fintech Meetup.
