Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not pose an immediate threat to advisers jobs – but underwriters may need to have confidence in their ability to evolve faster than the technology.
This was the warning from panellists participating at Protection Review’s first ProtectZ event at Eight Club in Moorgate, in London earlier today.
AI is not there yet
The event, which gave a platform to industry professionals aged 30 and under, saw Henry Wood, associate at SPF Private Clients, maintain that advisers are currently still needed because AI is unreliable and inaccurate at present and is unable to make clients and compliance departments aware of why it has made certain recommendations.
“That is impossible to do at the moment with these large language models,” Wood explained.
“It’s possible for it to demonstrate how it got from point A to point B. It doesn’t think like a human and you can’t really evidence that. That is going to be the biggest roadblock in bringing these AIs to protection and advisory in general, where there is a financial adviser role.
“There are some people who think it may be possible in the future. But I guess we just have to wait and see,” he said.
Wood added a further issue for AI is its models are trained on a huge amount of data and some of that data is not easily accessible in the protection industry.
“You need the insurers, the BDMs, to help you figure out certain things. And if that is important to the adviser, then that’s something the AI won’t be able to access and they won’t be able to use that…
“Maybe for some of the simpler cases where you’re looking at price as the only factor, a robo-adviser may be suitable. But ultimately, you will always need an adviser to step in and sense check everything, and evidence that decision.”
Generational gap in appetite to use AI
And it appears AI will become an increasingly ever present part of our lives, with younger people in particular likely to adopt the tech.
But fellow panellist Danielle Moore, senior digital marketing manager at LifeSearch, pointed out that older generations may be more reticent.
“You have younger generations where we were brought into a world where tech was very easily accessible. And for us, we’re probably in a place where we’re cautious – but we’re much more likely to adopt some of these technologies.
“If I think of my parents or my mum for example, they would be really, really cautious about looking at this technology because for them, there’s a massive trust element.”
Training AI to do your job
But Wood also told delegates that AI really thrives in areas that use a lot of data and so has the potential to speed up efficiencies in decision making across underwriting and claims processing.
And when asked by Health & Protection whether underwriters could be unwittingly making themselves redundant by training AI, Cristina Criddle, technology reporter at the Financial Times, said the issue is of huge concern and reflects a debate that is going on at the moment.
“It’s one that we did for a radio programme actually where we fed the AI a load of Mishal Husain interviews and we tried to train an AI to do an interview in the style of Mishal Husain – and it was pretty good.
“And it realised certain patterns, like it would only let the interviewee speak for a certain time before the AI went, ‘Can I just interrupt?’ very politely because Mishal is so polite and graceful. We know how AI can quickly turn quite rude. But it adopted her style and likeness.
“The other one that comes to mind is that I’ve seen lots of auditions for voice actors for films or adverts. But actually what they’re doing is they’re training AI, and so their voice and their likeness will be used to train an AI and that AI will be much cheaper to hire to voice your advertisements.”
According to Criddle, professionals signing up to training AI are giving away their knowledge and putting that into the technology.
“Maybe you decide that that’s for the better of your company and industry,” Criddle continued. “Maybe you get the AI named after you and your legacy lives on through the computer. But sure, it’s really concerning – but it depends on an underwriter in having confidence in your ability and your ability to evolve faster than a computer will with your assistance.”
