LAS VEGAS – The insurance industry has been quietly deploying artificial intelligence, in some cases for years, and its use is increasing as the technology matures rapidly.
AI has been used nearly everywhere, from enhancing efficiency in routine processes to refining customer interactions and experiences, sources said in interviews at the 2024 InsureTech Connect conference in Las Vegas last week.
AI has been central to CoreLogic Inc.’s operations for a long time, said Jesse Herrera, San Diego-based executive vice president, global products and operations, insurance solutions, for the data analytics and catastrophe modeling company.
“It didn’t start with Chat GPT for us,” he said.
Among the “compelling and interesting use cases” for which AI has been deployed is in structuring and sifting large amounts of raw data and analyzing imagery from various sources, Mr. Herrera said.
San Francisco-based CyberCube Inc., which builds models to help quantify cyber exposures for brokers, insurers, reinsurers and others, has used AI since the company’s inception and employed Open AI models and application program interfaces since 2021, said CEO Pascal Millaire.
CyberCube began as a division of leading cyber security firm Symantec nine years ago as a resource for the insurance industry. The company was the lead modeler on three of the four cyber catastrophe bonds issued in 2023 as capital markets were tapped for the first time for commercial cyber insurance capacity.
“AI is very, very relevant to insurance because insurance is an extremely data-oriented industry. It runs on data,” said Prashanth Kulkarni, Boston-based senior vice president for NTT Data, the technology and consulting arm of Japanese telecom giant NTT Corp. He added that the company is restructuring to target growth in North America over the next several years.
Artificial intelligence is a “powerful framework and technology to harness data very efficiently and then give incremental benefits,” Mr. Kulkarni said, including customer interactions. “It’s going to help in the customer experience.”
AI seamlessly combines customer contact channels from instant messaging to live conversations, said Atlanta-based Ken Tolson CEO of Turvi, Crawford & Co.’s digital solutions group, which launched Oct. 14 to provide SaaS products to insurance industry customers. Mr. Tolson had previously been CEO, digital solutions, at parent Crawford.
“You have to be able to meet the customer where they want to be met, whether they want to engage digitally or they want to engage via natural language,” he said
Using AI, “we can very easily weave between an SMS type of engagement or responsive web type of engagement. We can communicate with them through AI-based natural language processing, too,” Mr. Tolson said.
In addition, Turvi is testing its Cover AI SaaS offering with half a dozen insurance industry partners before the product goes to production launch next month, Mr. Tolson said. The technology will help “ingest” policy language and parameters to help determine if a claim is coverable, he said.
Each client, including insurers, will adopt and deploy the product in a slightly different way based on its use case and system architecture, Mr. Tolson said, but most will likely route it toward brokers through a web portal.
