Accenture: Insurers could boost profits by $20B with intelligent solutions
Insurers must not only think smarter, but execute smarter by embedding intelligence into every business process.
By embedding intelligent solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and analytics into every business process, insurers in the United States could increase annual profitability by as much as $20 billion, according to new research by Accenture.
According to Accenture, insurers that use intelligent solutions to reinvent the customer experience and drive human-machine collaboration are achieving returns in excess of 10 times their investment and could increase industry-wide profitability by between $10.4 billion and $20.8 billion.
Heightened customer expectations, cost pressures
“As insurers face heightened customer expectations and cost pressures, now is the time for them to move from experimenting with AI in the laboratory to deploying it at scale across several business processes,” said Michael Costonis, who leads Accenture’s insurance practice globally.
The report noted that more than half (53%) of insurers surveyed already were using intelligent solutions in one or more business process, and 46% were investing in or piloting them to streamline selected business processes and customer experiences.
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Among the other reasons insurers were integrating intelligent solutions were to reinvent business processes (24%), harness data and analytics to drive new insights (31%), and rethink human/machine collaboration to drive speed, quality, and consistency of outcomes (34%).
Reimagine entire business processes
Accenture found that the leaders in applying intelligent solutions were doing so to help them reimagine entire business processes, worker engagement, and customer experiences, rather than just make small improvements to existing business processes.
In addition, insurers that treated intelligent solutions as a series of isolated technology investments would not get the best return on their investments. The leaders recognized that these solutions represented a new platform capability, similar to existing core systems such as policy and claims.
“Intelligent solutions could enable whole new levels of personalization and convenience for the customer and transform a host of insurance business processes, including managing claims data, generating sales leads, extracting information about key risk factors, and spotting potential fraud,” said Costonis.
Related: Why artificial intelligence could become a P&C game-changer
Victoria Prussen Spears, Esq., (vspears@alm.com) is associate director of FC&S Legal, editor of the Insurance Coverage Law Report, and senior vice president at Meyerowitz Communications Inc.