Adapt and fly — With Panos Leledakis

We often hear the adage “adapt or die.” Panos Leledakis wants to change that mindset to “adapt and fly.”

Leledakis is referring to artificial intelligence, which he has embraced as a way to prospect and sell to his target market. Now he is branching out to share the secrets of using AI’s power with as many advisors as possible.

He is the founder and CEO of IFAAcademy, an insurance futurist, an expert in the use of virtual reality, and a member of the NextGen Advisory Task Force at The American College. He is an award-winning inventor of software for insurance needs analysis.

Leledakis is an international public speaker with hundreds of hours on stages around the world, giving presentations characterized by his passionate way of expression.

In this interview with publisher Paul Feldman, Leledakis describes his enthusiasm for AI and VR and explains how technology enables advisors to do what they do best — create relationships with clients.

PAUL FELDMAN: How did you get into the business?

PANOS LELEDAKIS: My story starts in Greece. When I was very young, my father’s dream was for me to become a lawyer. We were a poor family, and he sacrificed everything to get me the means to start preparing for the local university.

In my first year in the university, I was working in fast food to pay for my studies. I met a manager in the insurance industry, and he proposed that I become a part-time insurance advisor. I was fascinated by the idea, and I loved it so much that after six months, I started working in it full time. I have had an amazing career in it for 27 years now – I started in the insurance business in 1999.

In 2010, we experienced the default of an insurance company in Greece while the country was in a recession, so we lost everything and had to rebuild. Then I became specialized in corporate insurance. 

I wasn’t happy with the way I was taught to sell insurance, so I began researching what I call three pillars. The first pillar is that, instead of selling, we can consult with either the individual or the corporation. I found out that we can use risk management science based on ISO 31000; there is a procedure in which you can identify all the risks, measure them, prioritize them, quantify them and instead of trying to sell your product, give a risk assessment that’s a diagnosis, and then we can decide if insurance is the best solution.

The second pillar was neuroscience and behavioral economics. We know why the human brain is not compatible with the idea of risk, and if you don’t understand the problem, you don’t care about the solution. So that’s why people are not eager to learn about insurance. 

The third pillar was around technology. I began selling through Skype in 2023. I was prospecting with webinars in 2010 and have been using virtual reality technology to do meetings since 2017. I founded an insurtech startup, and we developed a consulting methodology and software. 

We dominated the market in Greece, and in 2018, I started traveling around the world to see whether my idea had merit. In 2020, I moved to New York to scale my company. We were researching AI before it was cool, before ChatGPT came into play and changed everything. I moved to Miami two and a half years ago, and that’s where I’m based today. 

For the past five years, I have been in the venture capital world. I’m doing a specific key-person insurance project for big startups.

FELDMAN: I’m interested in your use of virtual reality. I think VR could be one of the greatest things ever invented to bring new agents into the business and train them. Tell me about your experience with it.

LELEDAKIS: I think both AI and VR can bring young advisors into the profession. The younger generation is using AI and VR to play and to form communities. They don’t hang out on social media anymore; they hang out in the VR world. 

When I first started using VR, I was using it for meetings and to find communities. With VR, you go inside as an avatar and you can meet people, so you can socialize and network at a conference.

FELDMAN: You wrote a $35 million case on somebody you met through VR. Tell me how that happened. 

LELEDAKIS:  When I was using VR, I was invited — along with a very small group of beta testers — but they were high-level executives, to a VR tour from Meta. 

We were in a VR presentation as avatars. Another avatar was standing next to me. We began talking, and he told me he was a startup founder. I asked him about his project, and he said they raised $200 million just for the first round as a startup. I asked him whether he ever had a meeting in VR aside from playing or training, because I would love to do a presentation on my key-person insurance in VR. 

I invited him to the meeting room, and we had floating graphics, screens everywhere. It was very impressive. I pitched him my idea, and we even signed the agreement in VR.   

FELDMAN: How can VR help with training?

LELEDAKIS: With training, you can have a meeting. But training with VR is even better because you can create some rooms. And now AR — augmented reality — is coming, and it will be even better. 

With my VR, I have floating graphics inside. People feel like they are in the same room with me. I have different screens. I can make it appear as though I’m by the pool or in a helicopter or inside the Oval Office. Training inside VR is so impressive and so engaging that it’s better than Zoom training for sure.

We have combined VR with AI technology now. We can have a discussion with a VR chatbot. I can appear as a hologram. Training with VR is so much fun, engaging and more effective.

FELDMAN: What are your thoughts on AI?

LELEDAKIS: Everybody’s underusing AI big-time. We’re not using enough of the capabilities that large language models have. 

Here is a cool thing we can do. There is a program called HeyGen. It’s an avatar creation software where you record yourself, or you give it a picture and you can give it a script and you will see yourself narrating and making the video without you having to make the video. 

I’m doing something innovative with it where I use it to create avatars of other people and use them in presentations. 

Now, imagine that we do that for clients. First of all, they sign easier. Second, they will ask for the video and share it with their friends. Then their friends come to me just for the experience because we are living in the experience economy, so we need to give them experiences.

We have our blank near field communication card, and you can program it to do whatever you want, and you can do it with a free software called NFC Tools. And I can put an avatar of myself in an NFC card. So when I speak to my clients, I say, “Listen, I’ll be here for you 24/7. Call me whenever you want, but in case I’m in this interview or I’m flying or whatever, take this card, and if you need me, just tap this card to your phone. My avatar will come up, and you can ask anything like it’s me.” How cool is that, and how convenient? 

FELDMAN: What else can you tell us about AI?

LELEDAKIS: The only thing I can tell you is that it’s going to change everything. It’s changing the way we think, the way we interact, the way we work, the way we communicate. 

It’s the fastest revolution humanity will ever experience. We used to be the smartest species in this universe, but not anymore. AI is the smartest-like creature, so it’s going to change everything. It’s going to change everything fast. My motto is “adapt and fly” because I don’t like negative messages. People may say, “adapt or die,” but we say forget about dying — adapt and fly.

FELDMAN: How do you see AI working for advisors today?

LELEDAKIS: There are two kinds of people out there — those who are scared and overwhelmed by AI and those who decide it’s something new that they need to embrace quickly and learn. 

But it’s about the prompts. Prompt engineering is the skill of the 21st century. We have had generative AI up to now. That means I’m prompting and I’m getting a response. That’s why it’s called generative AI. Now we are in the era of agentic AI, where AI will do tasks for us like an employee.

We already have Claude Cowork. It can work with your computer and your files. It can do things for you on the internet like an employee. You don’t need to prompt it. You need to create a job description and the steps. It’s called end goal or looping, but it’s a different process than prompting.

And there are third-party software tools that can make it easy to create content for content marketing and social media, to publish the content, to prospect for you.

We’re going to save time by automating many of the boring and mundane tasks that we have. We’re going to have more clients because, in the AI era, if you know how to do that, prospecting is not a problem anymore. Then you can sit down and do the happy and nice part of the job, which is to convince people and create relationships. This is the new landscape.

FELDMAN: Tell me more about how agents can prospect with AI.

LELEDAKIS: They can use LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT to go out on the internet every day, give them a specific target market and bring back names with emails and everything they need to approach those names in a quantitative way. They also can have LLMs approach prospects in an automated way to send them emails or text messages or WhatsApp messages to try to book appointments. 

I’ll give an example of something successful for me. 

There are many social media groups for everything that you can imagine. My niche market is venture capitalists and startup founders. On LinkedIn, there are groups for that — either for investors or startups. So I’m using AI to create content to post in these groups. The idea is called “give, give, give, give and then ask.”

You need to give value to the things that they are interested in. You need to create content that they’re going to watch or read and say it’s useful to them. 

After a while, I’ll create a landing page that says I have a free book for them. If they want to download it, give me their email. I format and design the book with AI, and I can do it in less than 30 minutes. 

When people download the book, I gather thousands of emails of people that I interact with online. Then I invite them to a free webinar about something they care about or want to know. After the webinar, my team will contact them to book an appointment with me. The last time I did this, I had 1,700 people at the webinar and 500 of them said they were interested in learning more; 175 booked an appointment, and I wrote 95 policies in two months.

FELDMAN: Let’s talk about creating content using AI. How do you prevent AI slop?

LELEDAKIS: It’s in the prompting. You need to give examples of what you want to do and describe what you want. You explain that you want content in a certain format; you tell the LLM the voice or the style you want to use. Tell it you want to use human voice and not be chatbotic. You give it the kind of phrases you want it to use.

You also can upload articles that are similar to what you want to put out there, so now your project will be trained with those files. 

FELDMAN: Let’s talk about agentic AI. What is it, and where is it going?

LELEDAKIS: Generative AI is like the brain, and agentic AI gave hands to this brain. So now it can do tasks for us. In order to create an AI agent, you need to create memory. It’s called RAG, retrieval augmented generation. Agentic AI is all about creating automation with steps, so you can replicate workflows, and they can do tasks for us. 

FELDMAN: Recruiting is a big problem in this industry. How can AI help the industry bring in more people?

LELEDAKIS: The ways I described using AI for prospecting are also similar to ways of using it for recruitment. 

Two things that stop people from coming into this business are prospecting and rejection. They don’t want to represent something that’s not so sexy in the consumer’s eyes, and they don’t know how to find clients. If you give them an idea of how they can use AI to find clients and become the AI advisors, it will be a game changer that will allow us to bring in more talent if we reengineer and rebrand the way we present our career.

So imagine you can have training programs with AI. You can have chatbots to support them 24/7. Let’s say you are my new advisor. I should come with you to every appointment to see what you are saying and tell you how to become better. Right? This is the best training that we can have in the field. We call it field training. Now it’s not needed because I’m going to give you an AI notetaker. 

You will have the client’s consent to record the meeting. Then when you finish the meeting, I’m going to have a sales mentor trained with my material. So when you finish the meeting, the transcript is going to go directly to the sales mentor, and it’s going to tell you how you could handle this meeting better. It’s going to analyze the client’s personality. It’s going to take all the tasks and the follow-up things that you need to do, and it’s going to put them directly into your customer relationship management system and your task management system. 

By finding more names, by presenting a career that is much different than what they know, and supporting them with what they need to survive and grow, AI will be a game changer.