Page 19 - Insurance Times March 2021

technology has supported it further. It has made it possible their marketing or sales campaign or simple claims handling
to deploy AI applications without high upfront cost. The tasks. In India, AI is yet to be explored in many aspects of
second important factor is the advances in the AI insurance like customer service, pricing, risk assessment,
techniques, such as deep neural networks, etc. Though the fraud, and customer demand. To get the right insight from
concepts such as machine learning, neural networks, etc, AI, we need a larger set of quality of data that can be used
have been there since the sixties, the sophistication of efficiently. Some of the most common usage of AI in India is
algorithms has increased substantially after several decades usage of chat boxes that helps in faster claim processes,
of research. The progress in machine learning has made providing policy informations, documentations and others.
significant impact in the practical applications of AI. AI in India has a lot of potential. Greater adoption of AI in
the sector will help streamline the customer acquisition
Another area of AI where significant progress has been process as well as servicing process. Insurers will be forced
made, is natural languages processing used in machine to redefine age old processes while customers would find
translation, user-interface, etc. Using these advances in the things much easier - like faster underwriting or claims
technology, a number of applications were developed to settlement. The advent of technology and growing
assist people in natural language. These were called adaptation of digital usage will lead to a lot of online
chatbots and were used for the tasks such as answering the interactions and claims and AI seems to be the right answer
questions of customers. Some companies such as Google, for insurers to provide the best customer service.
Microsoft developed chatbots to perform several other tasks
on behalf of the users. These are known as virtual assistants. AI can be divided into two high level
AI has also been playing a major role in helping the insurers categories:
tackle its two biggest challenges - penetration and
simplifying the customer servicing at various touch points. Recently there was a tweet from Mat Velloso - "If it is
written in Python, it's probably
machine learning. If it is written in
PowerPoint, it's probably AI." This
quote is probably the most accurate
summarization of what has happened
in AI over the past couple of years.
Even Vladimir Putin said: "The nation
that leads in AI 'will be the ruler of the
world." Beyond all this hype, there is
a lot of real technology that is being
built. AI is coming to the enterprise
world - where the rubber meets the
road Image recognition, speech
recognition, language translation and
sentiment analysis have already been
deployed in the consumer world by
Google, Facebook, Amazon, and
IMAGE 1- Insurance Sector Changes others. These technologies will move
into the insurance world to solve sharp,
The insurance continuum starting with marketing to lead
generation to quotes to underwriting and the various focused problem areas such as:
Y Knowing the sentiment of the customer
aspects of servicing a customer has many touch points and
this where AI can simplify and address routine tasks thus Y Identifying fraudulent claims
taking the insurer's reach deeper in the market. The industry
Y Identifying risk profiles to drive positive selection bias
is using AI to rationalize its operations and connect with the
Y Predicting customer behavior
audience in an effective manner. Yet these are still early days
for AI in insurance industry in India. Insurers have just Y Reducing customer churn
started experimenting.
While some of these have already been deployed or piloted
Several insurance companies are using AI/Big Data only for by some carriers, the technology will now be available "at

The Insurance Times, March 2021 19