Insurance industry embraces artificial intelligence

dubai — The physicist, Stephen Hawking, was once quoted as having said: “In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every eighteen months”. Professor Hawking was paraphrasing Moore’s law which has been true for the last 50 years. The most conspicuous aspect of the quote is the comparison to us — human beings.

With ever more powerful hardware, computing is undergoing the most remarkable transformation since the advent of the internet. The forefront of which is currently artificial intelligence and the technology is getting closer and closer to reaching human-level cognition (artificial general intelligence).

Artificial intelligence solutions are self-learning technologies that go beyond pre-defined rule based automation and perform demanding cognitive tasks. Many of the precursors needed for an AGI are already at super human levels. A simple calculator is faster than the best mathematician and a human will never again be the best chess player.

In business environments, AI is opening the door to address some of the most challenging problems that persists because of the human limitations. Consider the insurance industry. We know from survey after survey, that the average customer’s impression of its support services leaves a lot to be desired. Over 90 per cent of customers say they prefer self-help processes over human interaction. This is where chatbots are making a huge difference. AI chatbots have become so good that they can interact with customers through voice and text to handle most requests.

As a proof of concept, about four per cent of North American P&C life insurance companies have live AI implementations for their customer support and another six per cent have pilot tested some form of chatbots.

Some two per cent of CIOs are investing on conversational virtual assistants as they believe that the technology can improve customer experience. By 2019 40 per cent enterprises will actively use chatbots through ‘natural language understanding (NLU), and by 2022, 30 per cent of customer services will be handled by chatbots. Their use cases are primarily focused to improve interaction, sales and service completion, and personalised content. At the backend, AI software have been effectively helping businesses decode patterns in their customer preferences, lowering cost of operations, and will soon move to handling claims and detecting frauds with zero human involvement.

What this all means is, if you, as customer, want to purchase an insurance policy, you would never have to spend the emotional labour of dealing with a human agent for something as boring as insurance. You will also get better policy suggestions as the bots learn from your preference and most significantly, you’ll get your questions answered by a competent virtual assistant in one phone call.

Impiger Technologies has been involved in building AI chatbots and is excited about the opportunities for the insurance industry on the customer service front.

They have some recommendations for insurance companies to get started with AI technology: realising chatbots are the first entry points into AI, and pick a single use case to start. The writers are Gopinath Jayamalrao – Chief Product Officer, and Peter J. Di Stefano – Vice President, Marketing, Impiger Technologies