Exploring the buzz around generative AI for insurers
A look at the potential impact of generative AI on the P&C insurance industry.
Everyone wakes up today to the transformational potential of Generative AI (GenAI), the technology that underpins the talk of the town – ChatGPT – which gets 1.8 million visits per month. ChatGPT had 100 million active users just two months after its launch, making it the fastest-growing application. This jaw-dropping rate of growth is unrivaled. By comparison, it took Twitter more than two years to reach this number.
While the world is adapting to the adoption of GenAI, the insurance industry is yet to utilize the benefits and move from hype to practice. Is GenAI going to replace ChatBots in insurance? Or, will it live up to the transformational potential of re-inventing the insurance experience?
How can, and should, P&C insurers harness GenAI?
GenAI can be leveraged in various ways within the domain of Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance to enhance customer experiences and improve operational efficiency, leading to prudent insights. Let’s look at the value that GenAI can provide for each of these areas.
Customer experience
- Virtual assistance: Insurers have adopted ChatBots to do menial work that hardly requires any intelligence. GenAI can be conversational and intelligent, and can also process natural language questions. Customers will find GenAI more engaging.
- Product comparison:GenAI can assist in simplifying product information, generating quick quotes and comparing products for customers as per the factors that are crucial for them. GenAI can understand the user’s specific needs, contextualize the product comparison, and provide a detailed breakdown of the key features that will resonate with the customer.
- Real-time transcription & translation services:GenAI has vibrant language capabilities that allow it to transcribe conversations in multiple languages. This is a futuristic ability and is particularly valuable in geographies where people speak different languages and need assistance in understanding each other. Alongside transcription, it can provide real-time translation services which can augment a customer representative in catering to the customer.
- As emotional as a robot: Though GenAI’s emotion-sensing capabilities are in its nascent stage, it could potentially be trained in the future. By considering the emotional context, GenAI can provide appropriate and compassionate replies, acknowledging, and addressing the customer’s emotional state.
Operational efficiency
- Underwriting and risk assessment: GenAI can assist underwriters in assessing risks and making informed decisions. By analyzing customer data, policy details, and historical information, GenAI can provide insights and recommendations to underwriters, ensuring more accurate risk assessment and pricing. Imagine a day when the underwriter sits at their desk and everything that is needed to make a decision, including analysis of multiple data points enriched with external data, is presented in the easiest possible way, and all they need to do is click a button.
- Sales training:By integrating GenAI into sales training, organizations can equip their agents with enhanced product knowledge, sales strategies, and best practices. GenAI can potentially offer insights on areas where agents excel and identify areas that need improvement. This can translate into more informed, confident, and effective sales teams.
- Forms and documents: Insurers can use GenAI to streamline regulatory processes, automate forms generation, and improve document management and analysis, which will eventually lead to increased efficiency, accuracy and compliance. GenAI can also assist in error detection and correction by comparing data across multiple documents or even validating information against predefined rules. It can provide alerts or summaries of new regulations, ensuring that the necessary adjustments are made to documents and processes to maintain compliance.
- Workflow automation: Integrating GenAI with portals will help reduce manual processing time and make proposal submission more efficient.
- IT project contribution: With its advanced capabilities, GenAI can indeed be an asset in the realm of software testing. It can understand the context and generate code, write test scenarios and cases, augment the capabilities of project teams, enhance productivity, and streamline the entire testing value chain.
Insights
- Lead Generation: By offering helpful and relevant support, GenAI can generate interest and establish connections with potential leads, it could ask relevant questions to qualify leads and gather necessary information. Further, it can analyze factors like geographic location, industry, interests, or any other relevant parameters to group leads accordingly to help in targeting specific demographics and tailoring marketing or sales strategies. The cherry on the top here is that GenAI can potentially integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) systems to automatically capture and store lead information.
- Data at the core, and AI to analyze it: Organizations are striving to make more informed decisions — develop targeted sales strategies, identify gaps in offerings, and stay ahead of evolving customer needs. GenAI can analyze historical data, customer interactions, and other relevant information to identify patterns and make predictions about customer behavior. By understanding customer profiles and analyzing their preferences, GenAI can help identify potential sales opportunities and identify customer segments that are underserved or have unmet needs. This allows organizations to customize their offerings and develop targeted marketing campaigns to address those gaps, leading to enhanced products or services.
- Product recommendations and customization: Based on customer input and preferences, GenAI can generate tailored policy recommendations. It can analyze customer data, coverage needs, and risk profiles to suggest suitable policy options, making the insurance buying process more personalized and convenient.
- Fraud detection and prevention: GenAI can analyze patterns, customer behavior, and claim details, and flag suspicious claims or transactions, thereby assisting in fraud detection and prevention efforts.
- Education and knowledge sharing: By providing educational content and answering insurance-related questions, GenAI can offer guidance on coverage types, policy terms and claims procedures, empowering customers to make informed decisions and better understand their insurance policies.
Is there any trouble in paradise?
It is essential to note that the method used to collect data for training GenAI should comply with relevant data protection laws. To ensure compliance with data protection regulations, organizations should take appropriate measures to obtain necessary consent, handle data securely, and provide transparency to users regarding the purpose and usage of their data. Respecting privacy and adhering to legal requirements are essential considerations when deploying AI models.
The road ahead
By integrating GenAI into various aspects of P&C insurance, insurers can improve customer satisfaction, automate routine tasks, reduce costs and enhance overall operational efficiency. As with any transformation technology, GenAI also comes with its own set of challenges. However, the technology is here to stay, and the time to adopt is now. Insurers will do well to utilize the power that GenAI provides them and transform themselves into more efficient and effective organizations.
Ramanujam Venkatesan (Ramanujam.Venkatesan@cognizant.com) is Head of Insurance Consulting, India, at Cognizant.
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