Can a yes-or-no answer speed up a claim? Clearspeed on voice analytics and “trust faster” at ITC Vegas 2026

What is Clearspeed?

Clearspeed, based in San Diego and led by CEO Alex Martin, makes voice-based risk assessment technology. It was first built for the U.S. Department of Defense, and the company was a first-time honoree on Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 500 list.

At the booth, McIntosh said the first use case was clearing commandos to work beside U.S. forces in a foreign battlefield. The problem was the same one insurers face: understand faster who you are working with, and get to a point of trust. That is where the company’s slogan comes from. “Our slogan is always ‘trust faster,'” he said.

Why clear the honest customers first?

“We’re really about clearing the hay instead of finding the needle,” McIntosh said. Many fraud and risk tools spend their time trying to find the bad person. Clearspeed flips that. Most customers are genuine, yet they all go through the same rigorous checks. A claim can take weeks to settle because it passes through five or six steps.

On a claim, Clearspeed asks a few simple, automated yes-or-no questions, in whatever language the customer speaks. If no risk signal shows up, the insurer can move that person through with confidence. If a signal does show up, the insurer knows exactly which question raised it, so investigators can focus their time there.

What can it find that a database can’t?

In underwriting, insurers already buy a lot of data. For a home, McIntosh listed GIS data, drone images of the roof, past claims and the home’s value. But some questions have no dataset behind them. Is someone running a business from the home? Did the owner do their own electrical work? Is there a dog with a bite history?

“That data rarely exists in a database anywhere,” he said. Clearspeed asks those questions as simple yes-or-no prompts that take moments, and returns the results in seconds. It matches the line on the booth screen: “The most valuable signal in any trust decision doesn’t exist in a database.”

Where does AI fit, and where does it stop?

McIntosh made a sharp point about AI in insurance today. Much of it is built to process data faster, but that data is often historical and messy. In his view, speed alone is not enough when the data underneath it is old. His answer is to add in-the-moment signals of trust alongside the data insurers already hold.

He was clear about limits. Clearspeed uses AI to speed up its own processes, such as speech-to-text and language processing, under a responsible AI policy and company-wide governance. But the AI is never the trust signal itself, and never reaches the decision. “It is simply used to surface a risk point,” he said. From there, “it is now up to you and your human persons to review that and formulate a decision.” He added that Clearspeed is not used as a rating factor.

On data security, he said Clearspeed is SOC 2 compliant, compliant with GDPR, tracks the EU AI Act, uses its own encryption, and works to understand the rules in every market it enters.

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