How AI Is Transforming Insurance & Risk Management: Panos Leledakis on Revolutionizing the Industry

You’re about to meet Panos Leledakis, a global advocate for AI in financial services who’s reshaping the way advisors connect, educate, and serve clients around the world. 🚀

In this episode, Panos Leledakis sits down with Amber Stitt to reveal how technology transformed his life and practice—from pioneering Skype meetings in 2003 to embracing virtual reality and AI-powered solutions today. 

Discover his exact strategies for adapting to rapid tech revolutions, his favorite hacks to unplug, and why the next wave of success in financial services is about being a superhuman advisor, not a robot.

We talk pivoting (not just surviving change, but thriving with it), building systems that give you more freedom, and the secret to staying ethically sharp in an AI-driven world. 

If you’ve ever worried about being left behind, or want to future-proof your business, this episode is your invitation to embrace innovation and action. 🙌

Let’s dive into global perspectives, tech tools, and the human side of transformation.

📽️ To watch this episode:  https://youtu.be/bAf1jiEfoyQ 

🔗 To connect with Panos Leledakis:

📲 Website: https://ifaacademy.global

📲 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/panos-leledakis

📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/panosleledakis1

#AI #financialservices #naifa #pathwayswithamberstitt #amberstitt #panosleledakis #metaverse #ethicsinai #ifaacademy #e3conference #naifae3

📻 Thank you for tuning in to Pathways!

🔗 Connect with Amber on Social Media:

• AMBER’S INSTAGRAM
• AMBER’S LINKEDIN
• AMBER’S FACEBOOK

📲 Be sure to visit Amber's website:

www.AmberStitt.com

🎬 And remember, let's take action today!!!

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Transcript

Panos Leledakis [00:00:00]:
Some people say, "Okay, I'm good where I am.

Panos Leledakis [00:00:02]:
I don't want to leverage AI. I don't want to save time." And I hear it. It's okay.

Panos Leledakis [00:00:06]:
The thing is, what they don't understand is that the consumer will expect from us using AI to service them in a better way. And in one year from now, not more. If you don't have your own chatbot to service them 24/7, you're going to look like a dinosaur. It's like asking somebody, "Fax me the documents." Let's say something like that.

Amber Stitt [00:00:23]:
Hello and welcome to Pathways e3, a special edition of Pathways with Amber Stitt. The Pathways e3 podcasts were recorded with special guests who were attending and collaborating at the NAIFA e3 conference in Newport Beach, California in September 2025. Let's join the conversation. So we are live at NAIFA e3.

Amber Stitt [00:00:45]:
And we have our guest Panos with us today, just flying in. We just got him right out of the airplane, didn't we?

Panos Leledakis [00:00:52]:
Absolutely and I'm glad to be here.

Amber Stitt [00:00:53]:
And it's so important to share that you're on a global mission, essentially. And we're not joking. You are literally going country-to-country and on a mission. So all of the above. And I've known you for a while, but I want everyone to learn why this is so important to you to go from country-to-country talking about AI technology. But there's multiple facets to it, so I'm going to let you explain it to the audience.

Panos Leledakis [00:01:16]:
There are many reasons a multifactor, like vision. So first, technology saved my life when I was younger because when I started this profession, my father died, we had to pay an inheritance tax, and I was like, just in the first year of my career and I didn't even have a car. So if you can imagine, I started doing Skype meetings with clients in 2003 when Skype was a new thing. So I was ahead of the time. And then I saw what technology can do because I could do like 5 appointments a day with Skype. Nobody could do that at that point. Then in 2010, I started prospecting with webinars. That was an amazing new thing.

Panos Leledakis [00:01:51]:
Yeah, nobody was doing that, again. And then I turned my whole practice at 2015, I didn't meet people anymore. So this gave me the freedom to be able to work from wherever I want the world. So it did many things for me, technology. And then I did some things, like with virtual reality meetings with clients and everything. But also I love so much our profession and I believe, especially after 2023, that ChatGPT came into play, that it can give us such a huge voice to do what we couldn't do in the past, to educate the consumers about the importance of risk management, financial planning, and insurance. So I cannot be more excited to share my expertise with our colleagues in order to use it and change our profession and change the image of our profession.

Amber Stitt [00:02:32]:
Now, where you grew up was not in the U.S..

Panos Leledakis [00:02:34]:
No, Athens, Greece.

Amber Stitt [00:02:37]:
Let's not go back in time on this question. Current day, you're traveling around, people are all over the place, so excited to meet you. We see it all the time on LinkedIn. What countries are adapting more so with technology than others?

Panos Leledakis [00:02:49]:
I will tell you the countries that they are ahead of their time, not ahead of their time, but they are better than all the others, are the Asian countries. I have seen that many times before. In the USA, we are doing good, in Europe, the same.

Panos Leledakis [00:03:03]:
And Latin America is, again, a little bit like the same as all the others, the western world. So, yeah, I think the Asian countries are the most advanced for now.

Amber Stitt [00:03:11]:
Well, and anyone that's not familiar with MDRT, or some of the organizations, there are people selling financial services all throughout the globe. So you're meeting these people. Is there a fear factor as to why, or they're just maybe slow to learn a new technology. Is there anything that you've seen as the reason for that?

Panos Leledakis [00:03:27]:
To be honest, the AI, it was the fastest revolution and the biggest that humanity will ever experience. It goes with so much speed that even with a research team, we cannot keep up.

Panos Leledakis [00:03:39]:
So people either they are excited, but they don't know exactly how to leverage the whole thing and they're searching. And some others, they are afraid of AI because they are afraid that they can be replaced, or that they cannot follow, or keep up, or whatever. And that's part of our vision, to the excited part, to the excited people to give them strategy and to the others to explain that it's simple, if somebody shows you.

Amber Stitt [00:04:02]:
Okay. I think there was some sort of statistic that there's still not a lot of people using, even ChatGPT. And you're using a number of things, or have. And I'm sure there's been more since I saw you last.

Panos Leledakis [00:04:11]:
Hundreds.

Amber Stitt [00:04:12]:
Yeah. And so that is interesting. I don't know if people think it's going to turn into the Terminator. You know, warlords and then all of a sudden we're all going to...

Panos Leledakis [00:04:20]:
I have a suggestion that whenever you use ChatGPT, you have to say, "Thank you," and "Please," because when AI will take over the world, it will remember that you were kind and may spare you.

Amber Stitt [00:04:28]:
Well, then you get yelled at by the founder, Sam. Because he said it costs him so much money to do that.

Panos Leledakis [00:04:33]:
But beyond jokes, we have to be, I explained to people this, there are so many solutions now and you have to be an orchestrator. You have so many tools that can work together. So you will become an orchestrator and you can do things that in the past were absolutely impossible. And that's the exciting thing. But we need to show people the way because it's something new. It's not something that you have to improve, let's say prospecting, or closing, or financial advising, or whatever.

Panos Leledakis [00:04:59]:
We need to create new skills starting from the simple, like the prompt engineering, and then go to the more advanced.

Amber Stitt [00:05:05]:
Yeah, and there was a different conference that I was at just even last week to get ready for this. It was a perfect timing because people are talking about the jobs that will be replaced. There won't be any jobs. But this one person said with the jobs being kind of redirected, there might be 70 million. There was some crazy stats.

Panos Leledakis [00:05:20]:
85 million.

Amber Stitt [00:05:21]:
Okay, yeah.

Panos Leledakis [00:05:22]:
Will disappear, but 95 new will appear. Okay, so that's the stats for now.

Amber Stitt [00:05:27]:
And the media doesn't like to talk about that second one. It's just like be scared, watch out for it.

Panos Leledakis [00:05:31]:
They have to pivot people. They have to create new skills and do different things. That's what I'm telling you.

Panos Leledakis [00:05:36]:
At least in our industry they don't have to worry so much. At least for the next 10 years, it's too much because nobody will know what's happening in 3 years. But anyway, I mean, because unfortunately the consumers are not searching by themselves the financial advice and the insurance advice and the risk management advice. We need to educate them, to inspire them, to guide them in order to ask for the solution. So if somebody doesn't ask for the solution, they will not go to AI to ask. So AI will take the mundane and the boring tasks. So we're going to save time to have more time to go to the clients, to create relationships, to make them trust us, to guide them and inspire them and educate them to have a culture of future planning and risk management and everything.

Panos Leledakis [00:06:17]:
So this is our new role.

Amber Stitt [00:06:18]:
Yeah. Okay, so when you're talking with people, are you mainly speaking to the advisory world, or is this for other business owners, too?

Panos Leledakis [00:06:25]:
For now, I love so much our profession, so I'm sticking to our profession. But it can be implemented to any profession.

Amber Stitt [00:06:30]:
Yeah. And that's where the systems, these things are here to help us so that we can spend more quality time doing the work.

Panos Leledakis [00:06:36]:
Yeah. Saving time is one of the aspects, but we can be superhuman advisors. You can make a marketing out of this world. You can save time. Prospecting will not be a problem.

Panos Leledakis [00:06:44]:
There are so many new solutions on prospecting,

Panos Leledakis [00:06:47]:
that it's going to be crazy easy from now on. We need to create other soft skills now.

Amber Stitt [00:06:51]:
And that's the other thing, too. We need to keep evolving and iterating ourselves because it's like you said, it's so fast. If we get left behind, it's going to be really hard to adapt.

Panos Leledakis [00:07:00]:
If I may add to that this is not the only problem because some people say, "Okay, I'm good where I am.

Panos Leledakis [00:07:05]:
I don't want to leverage AI, I don't want to save time." And I hear it, it's okay.

Panos Leledakis [00:07:09]:
The thing is what they don't understand is that the consumer will expect from us using AI to service them in a better way. And in one year from now, not more,

Panos Leledakis [00:07:18]:
if you don't have your own chatbot to service them 24/7, you're going to look like a dinosaur. It's like asking somebody, "Fax me the documents." Let's say something like that.

Amber Stitt [00:07:26]:
Well, that's an interesting point because with Covid, you and I were already digital. I've only taken one insurance application in-person over 15 years.

Panos Leledakis [00:07:32]:
Perfect.

Amber Stitt [00:07:33]:
I think it's actually more awkward for me to sit next to someone on a laptop and be like, "Fill in these documents with me." But when Covid had happened, a lot of offices were figuring it out. We were just lights on. We just kept going. So that is a good point because we didn't miss a beat. And so thanks for sharing that.

Amber Stitt [00:07:50]:
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Pathways. Please consider giving us a "Like" and subscribing to the channel.

Amber Stitt [00:07:58]:
Your support goes a long way towards

Amber Stitt [00:08:00]:
helping us bring you more compelling content. Remember, let's take action together! Now, let's jump back into the conversation.

Amber Stitt [00:08:09]:
There's another aspect, too. There's an ethical component that's really important to you.

Panos Leledakis [00:08:13]:
You read my mind.

Panos Leledakis [00:08:14]:
The ethical and the compliance part. Because this is a tricky thing for all the parts now, the regulators are having a hard time regulating the whole thing because it's changing all the time. But the thing is we need to use AI, the consumers are expecting us to use AI, but at the same time we need to use it ethically, to be transparent on how we're using it, and explain that to clients because they expect us to use it, but they want also to know how we use it and how we handle the privacy of the data. Because many advisors, they're doing a lot of mistakes like setting information with ChatGPT.

Amber Stitt [00:08:43]:
They don't realize what they're giving.

Panos Leledakis [00:08:44]:
But there are solutions. That's part of my speech tomorrow that they can install local LLMs in their laptops so they don't share with anything. So today there are solutions, but people they don't know about them. That's my mission, to share this information with the people.

Amber Stitt [00:08:56]:
Okay, I'm excited to hear about that. So other presentations, I know this is going to go a little more silly, but I hope you don't mind.

Panos Leledakis [00:09:03]:
There's no silly.

Amber Stitt [00:09:04]:
Do you still have a drone and what is its name?

Panos Leledakis [00:09:07]:
Of course. Now I have an advanced one that I'm going to fly tomorrow. So this is an AI drone now.

Amber Stitt [00:09:12]:
Oh my goodness.

Panos Leledakis [00:09:13]:
That means giving some like directions like how do you want to shoot the footage and everything. It's like you have a videographer on demand. Sorry, my friend, maybe now you have to be careful for your business.

Amber Stitt [00:09:23]:
We'll see if we can be forward thinking then that's part of it is how do you then the soft skills to then go, "Oh, I need to do this just to pivot." And it's funny that you use the word pivot because with the Pathways framework, we're not talking about that this week, but the word pivot, it's really not like a complete change of your world. It's an enhancement, a strategic move.

Panos Leledakis [00:09:44]:
Let me give an example now that we're discussing from our friend here that doing the podcast, he's not going to lose the job. But they say, "You have new tools," maybe you know them already, that you can edit the podcast. Something that it would take you like 4, or 5, 6 hours, maybe a day.

Panos Leledakis [00:09:59]:
Now you can just put in 10 minutes, you're going to be ready. But we need to understand how this tool works and we're going to be 10x more productive.

Amber Stitt [00:10:06]:
So back to the drone. Not the one that's at this conference, but you did lose a drone once and I just wanted to see, can we talk about that story? Because I was about to go buy one, and I thought, I can't trust myself to fly it. So is there a better way to own a drone?

Panos Leledakis [00:10:19]:
This drone was an AI, again. But the mistake that I did is when they fly, they need a hard surface, like to be on the ground. I tried to fly it on the sea. So when they are on the sea, the infrared that they go through, they cannot understand where to fly and they dive into the sea.

Amber Stitt [00:10:34]:
Oh, my gosh. Because I thought it was trees, or something, but that was...

Panos Leledakis [00:10:36]:
No, I lost another one. That's another story. But that's how you learn, you know?

Amber Stitt [00:10:40]:
Yeah, well, exactly. So that's why I want people to know they need to come watch you first before they spend any money on this type of thing, because then you can give them the...

Panos Leledakis [00:10:47]:
It's easier if you know the rules. Again, if you want to fly a drone, like with a controller and everything, it's a matter of experience. And that's where maybe you will lose some.

Amber Stitt [00:10:55]:
And that's where my podcast manager knows Amber should not open the box to try to figure out the technology. Okay, so kind of wrapping up here, I see you moving so fast. Like we talked about, you're traveling all over the place. What are your, we'll call maybe hacks, that help you unplug. So you build all these systems. Things are running smooth.

Amber Stitt [00:11:13]:
So then are you truly able to just unplug? Because I'm just picturing you like a gamer. You're just learning this stuff, and you're just constantly building and tinkering and learning for us all. But do you literally unplug and just take time off?

Panos Leledakis [00:11:26]:
This period of my life, I'm unplugging more than ever, and I'm passing the best phase of my life because AI is working for me. It's really working for me. I do things so much more easier and faster, and more efficient, more impressive, that everything gets so much easier that I have more time to unwind, or do my sports, or do whatever. So that's why I'm so excited about that, because I see the benefit, first to myself.

Amber Stitt [00:11:48]:
And are you still using the Metaverse?

Panos Leledakis [00:11:50]:
Of course. Yeah. I do meetings in the Metaverse, and I lost a lot of weight in the Metaverse because I'm exercising in the 3D environment, the virtual environment.

Amber Stitt [00:11:57]:
Okay, so I've seen you talk about this a few times. So for the audience, can you just give a couple...how much fun you have with clients in the Metaverse? I think there's so many people that just don't even understand what you're talking about.

Panos Leledakis [00:12:09]:
Yeah. So you need to have a virtual reality headset. So you wear the headset and you're getting in a 3D different world. You are in another world.

Panos Leledakis [00:12:17]:
So there you can do whatever you can imagine. What I'm doing with clients is I'm playing table tennis that's so realistic. I didn't know how to play table tennis. I practiced around the year.

Panos Leledakis [00:12:27]:
It's a work out, but I practice one year and then I played in the real life and I knew how to play, so it works. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And I'm finding new clients there, or I'm hanging out in some virtual worlds and it's like here where we are in the conference, we're going to meet, let's say 500 people. The same that I can do in VR. And if in the Zoom, you have to be dressed at least waist up, in VR you can be naked, nobody can see. And I can have my suit, six pack and everything. My avatar is amazing.

Amber Stitt [00:12:53]:
The visual for everyone else could be very interesting. But hopefully you're at your own office yourself if you're doing it.

Panos Leledakis [00:12:58]:
Yeah, I'm by myself. Of course, I'm doing it from home.

Amber Stitt [00:13:01]:
I think what you've explained, and this was years ago even you were talking about this. And I think even the people that were moderating the event, they didn't even know what to do with you. They're just like, "How do we bring this up?" And they're trying to organize it. I think the point here is, and I talk about about this with a little bit of a tagline of "taking action today." I mean, there's really no excuses if you want to meet more people, grow your business.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:23]:
Absolutely.

Amber Stitt [00:13:24]:
There are so many ways to do it. And if you don't have any time to invest in it, I mean, you can certainly check you out online, but there's things that you can be learning more about to really try to level yourself up until you can afford to maybe go to the conference, or learn, or hire an executive coach, or somebody to help you really get better.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:39]:
We need training. I will tell you, we need training. And I don't say this because we have training programs. I will tell you absolutely the truth. If you want to learn something today by your own, it's so easy.

Amber Stitt [00:13:47]:
Yeah.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:47]:
There is a free university for AI. Do you know?

Amber Stitt [00:13:49]:
No.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:50]:
It's called YouTube.

Amber Stitt [00:13:51]:
Yeah.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:52]:
Yeah. I was like, "Oh, no, you can find anything."

Amber Stitt [00:13:56]:
Oh, my God.

Panos Leledakis [00:13:57]:
Also, you can ask AI to teach you whatever you want to be taught. But the case is that you're going to lose so much time in order to understand and put everything together. Because I know, we did it ourselves.

Amber Stitt [00:14:06]:
Yeah.

Panos Leledakis [00:14:07]:
That it's not worth it. It's better to find somebody that it's ahead and teach you the things easily and how also to orchestrate them in the strategy to have results, because the first is to understand what you're doing, the strategy, the other is to implement it and the other is to have results. So it's the 3 pillars.

Amber Stitt [00:14:22]:
Okay, so wrap up question here for you. Are you always learning, or always teaching?

Panos Leledakis [00:14:28]:
I'm always learning and try to learn more in order to teach more efficiently. This is my passion now. And I love what you're doing also because you are teaching here now and you're doing a great service for our profession. And thank you for that. I really congratulate you about that.

Amber Stitt [00:14:41]:
I'm so happy we can make this work out. We got lucky.

Panos Leledakis [00:14:43]:
Absolutely.

Amber Stitt [00:14:44]:
All right, well, that's Panos, thank you so much for being on our podcast episode today. Adapt and Fly, guys. Thank you.

Amber Stitt [00:14:51]:
Thank you for joining us for this special edition of Pathways e3 recorded at the NAIFA e3 conference in Newport Beach, California. Join us for more insightful conversations with the experts and leaders of their industries. Until next time, keep taking action on your unique path!