Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to be “hugely transformative” for the protection sector helping claims assessors to spend more of their time on more complex cases.
This is according to Alastair Gerrard head of sales at Gen Re (pictured), speaking at the Protection Review conference yesterday.
Gerrard told delegates as with with advisers, AI would not replace claims assessors but enable them to “do it better”.
“We spend vast amounts of times and resource manually underwriting claims and rightly so. This is the moment of truth,” Gerrard said. “This is the point where we as an insurance industry are able to show what our value is.
“But we want to make it right so we don’t want to have a situation where ‘computer says no’. But we can do it better.”
He added that what the sector does not want to do is to spend too long dealing with small cases.
“We want to be able to put our risk into different buckets and spend more time and use our very qualified claims assessors – who are all nurses, occupational therapists, doctors – people with real medical qualifications,” he continued.
“We want them to be looking at the more complex cases.
“The idea is that the first case sits in bucket one. Bucket two will add a little bit more complexity, a bit more automation, maybe AI – but humans will be checking the final decisions that will still be made by you.
“And then for the ones that we want our people to spend more time on, we would let them focus on the more complex ones but we wouldn’t leave them on their own. There would be AI assistance to that and they would be able to focus more.”