AI and CSP: Keys to digital transformation in insurance
Here are three ways that technology helps drive innovation in the midst of disruption.
Change is never easy. For years we have talked about digital transformation, but those efforts are accelerating at an unprecedented pace. In insurance as well as a myriad of other industries — including banking, retail and manufacturing — innovation is happening practically overnight.
Amid such disruption, insurance companies are being forced to rethink their business models and go 100% digital.
This sudden shift emphasizes the need for more technology. Companies that use the right tools and solutions will be the ones to survive in our newly expanded digital world.
How to get digital transformation (DX) right
Every digital transformation begins with information. Think about it. Content drives your marketing. Content fuels your website. Content is consumed across different channels and mediums. In a recent blog post, the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) stated that information “…is the currency the fuels and funds the digital transformation journey,” and that content is “the common denominator in customer experience, business agility, operational excellence and automation.”
Indeed, we live in an information economy and never before has information played such a vital role in business as it does in today’s digital age.
Our new remote reality
Now more than ever, insurance organizations are challenged to make their content — in all of its forms — more readily accessible. To succeed, content must be easy for employees and customers to find. It should be securely available to the people who have rights to it anytime, anywhere, and across different devices and channels to facilitate the flow of business.
In our newly expanded, work-from-home world, the continuation of critical business processes is a must, and the key to virtualizing these processes is content. So it’s critical that businesses focus on keeping different sources of information connected. That imperative demands a tool that can very intelligently work across platforms and devices with all different types of content: not just traditional documents, but also videos, photos and audio files. This is where an AI-driven Content Service Platform (CSP) comes into play.
The rise of intelligent CSP
The silver lining of digital disruption in insurance may well be the deployment of AI-driven CSPs.
These intelligent systems, which we refer to as the next generation of enterprise content management (ECM) offerings, not only support insurers in their digital transformation journey but can also help modernize and automate companies. They even promote innovation.
Following are three ways that AI and CSP will likely empower agents, brokers and employees in the months and years ahead:
No. 1: Fraud detection
One of the coolest things a modern CSP with advanced AI capabilities or integrations can allow insurers to do is automate fraud detection. We can have the system look at an image of a car that was involved in an automobile accident and use it to read the license plate number. The system can also compare the image with other images of automobiles involved with similar accidents to see if perhaps someone had used the same photos in a previous claim. Believe it or not, a lot of times, fraudulent claims use duplicate photos. Given there are thousands of underwriters, the odds of someone coming across the same image twice is very low. AI can address that issue.
No. 2: Repair estimates
With a modern CSP, you can compare accident damage across different sets of photographs and perform analyses based on existing information within your organization’s systems. This lets you make more informed decisions about different areas of a claim, such as comparing and contrasting with other images of the same make and model with similar damage to provide better damage estimates. They may also want to use that information when they send the automobile out to the repair network to determine whether those estimates are in line or out of line with previous work or even find suspicious activity within their repair network.
No. 3: Holistic data sets
There are a lot of reasons to want to aggregate information across an organization. For insurance companies, having a holistic set of information about a particular customer may have implications from a customer-service standpoint. But it can also help organizations make better, more informed decisions because they have the ability to compare and contrast information that they’ve never had before. Having a human make such comparisons and correlations would be impossible, but with an AI-infused CSP you can understand content and data on a deeper, more comprehensive level — all at enterprise scale.
One of the main benefits of machine learning and AI is that organizations no longer have to rely on generic models and data. They can use it to train their own custom models that will return data that is much more specific to the needs of the business. That ‘business-specific’ data can then be extracted and entered into specific fields or forms to automate processes, such as sending an alert that new information is available for a claim.
We can also leverage AI to scan and quickly detect what information is missing or wrong with a provided form and automatically route it back to a customer or customer service representative for remediation. There are many other powerful use cases, including automated records and retention management, for example.
It is now clear that remote workflows aren’t going away. The digital cat is out of the bag (if you will), and it cannot be put back in. That means content that is hosted or stored in various systems and applications outside the four walls of an organization can create even more silos and gaps in the customer experience. Using a CSP with advanced AI capabilities can tear down the walls that exist between content, bring new data into the mix, and help businesses not only achieve new insights but also new levels of automation for key business processes. Yes, the benefits of AI and machine learning are very real, and very necessary in a suddenly remote world. Fortunately, modern CSPs have evolved to the point where they now have advanced AI capabilities that enable the insurance industry to achieve digital transformation and thrive both now and in the future.
Christopher McLaughlin is chief product & marketing officer at Nuxeo where he leads the long-term product and go-to-market strategy for the company’s modern Content Services Platform (CSP). He has over 20 years of experience in the enterprise content management (ECM) space across multiple industries, including financial services, insurance, and product marketing and manufacturing. Christopher specializes in advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning, with a focus on automating workflows and other digital business processes.
These opinions are the author’s own.
Related: