What I’m thankful for

As I sit reflecting back on 2020, I think about how much our lives have changed this year. And as the president of Arity, a team comprised of passionate and expert technologists striving to make transportation better, my focus goes to how the way we move has so drastically changed.

Last year in Chicago, Arity’s home town, the average round trip commute was 69.2 minutes. Jump to today, many commutes are simply from the kitchen to the home office or even just a desk in the bedroom. Managed carefully, that translates to more time for breakfasts together as a family, walks around the block, newly formed hobbies, reading, and catching up – from a distance – with neighbors. All of these reclaimed pleasures of life are something in which the entire Arity population, including me, feels gratitude this Thanksgiving.

I also feel immense gratitude and pride in the opportunity to have such a solid team around me to help shape the future. The disruption in how we move also presents an enormous opportunity and responsibility for an organization whose mission is to make transportation smarter, safer, and more useful for everyone. Our Arity team, together with our partners and customers, has embraced the opportunity to reinvent and improve part of the transportation landscape – from understanding commuting habits and associated risks to making sense of the new ways we will live and work.

During this year, we have tried to do our part. At the beginning of the pandemic, we freely made available insights from our more than 300 billion miles of driving data to those adapting to the crisis because our mission to make roads safer trumped business-as-usual. We used mobility data to help the entire industry better understand driving, which has resulted in approximately $14B returned premiums to U.S. consumers by August 2020 and is expected to grow throughout the year.

We have added many innovations to enable Allstate Drivewise program to reward safe driving with lower premiums and used our technology to accelerate the growth of Milewise at a time when so many consumers are driving much less.  We’ve worked with partners to bring their customers new innovations, such as “DriveDown” with Southern Farm Bureau giving drivers extra peace-of-mind in a time when we can all genuinely use it.

I truly feel like I have one of the best jobs in the world.  As the president of Arity, I am thankful to have such a brilliant, resilient, and caring group of employees, my team. At a time of disruption, we get to dream up the possibilities of a future tomorrow. And we are grateful to have the great partners – those that are willing to work with us to innovate to improve efficiency and safety and help shape the brighter tomorrow we have all been craving during this incredibly challenging 2020.

I am immensely grateful for the lessons and learnings of 2020 and equally thankful for the exciting times ahead.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.