Greater adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the protection industry may not necessarily lead to job losses, according to Equisoft.
While AI might phase out much of the day-to-day manual administrative tasks at insurers, the excess resource could be re-directed into other areas of the business, such as building better products, the company told Health & Protection.
Simon Richardson, vice president of EMEA and APAC at the software provider, said he had not witnessed mass job losses at clients who had implemented AI into their processes.
However, it also appears that employing such innovation does not lead to insurers embarking on recruitment drives either.
“What we have seen is that businesses want to expand or launch new products, but the cost of bringing in more people is something they have been mindful of,” Richardson said.
“With the introduction of AI, the scale that they can achieve with the same team of people is enticing them to explore these technologies,” he added.
This is not just about insurers using the spare resource to improve their bottom line, this could result in giving consumers better products and services, added Equisoft director of insurance solutions in the UK and the EU Will Watling.
“If you can operate more efficiently you can use those cost savings to reduce premium prices or give a higher benefit,” he said.
As for the future, actuarial calculations and some regulatory work could be the next tasks providers hand over to AI.
“It is an exciting world to be in but slightly frightening at the same time because you are never quite sure where it is going to go next,” Watling said.
Ready for trial
The Canadian company is launching its Amplify, AI-enabled policy administration system into the UK and Europe after building its business across the Americas, India, Australia and South Africa.
“We don’t have any clients in the UK yet,” Richardson admitted, but in the first year it is targeting between five and 10 qualified prospects who are eager to trial the software.
Following conversations with 30 to 40 protection providers, the firm said it was at the proposal stage with five of them.
“Those figures do not sound grandiose or significant, but in reality, the interest in AI has been more encouraging than I saw 10 years ago when we were talking about the cloud and digital enablement,” Richardson said.
“The interest has been greater around the AI tools,” he added. “The number of proposals we have given in a market that is traditionally slow moving to adopt new technologies is exciting.
“[AI] is still relatively in the early stages of its adoption, but the indicators we are seeing are solidifying for me that it is going to be here to stay.”
Despite such interest, Richardson admits that there is a lot of uncertainty around using such an innovation.
“Even though we have been discussing AI for a while, it is still, in the grand scheme of all the technologies available, in its infancy,” he added.