The protection industry is set to face a hybrid future where advice is delivered alongside artificial intelligence (AI), according to panellists at Protection Review Conference 2025.
Asked by Health & Protection whether the protection conversation was too important to be automated, speakers were unequivocal that technology would take a role.
Itumeleng Kgafela, business development executive at Gen Re, (pictured centre left) told delegates: “It has to be a combination. It has to be digital with the human touch.”
Karan Mehta, founder of Blueberry Life (pictured centre right), agreed, adding the future will be hybrid.
“We see from our data and we deal with people that have chronic illnesses that once they start the journey online, if they do need to speak to a human, there’s an 80% drop off. These individuals want to share their medical data either with medical professionals or automatically enter the journey.
“And I think the journey is where every individual will have their patient data in an app and if you can build a product or journey that can automatically pull that data via an API and use that data for automated underwriting with the support of a human, that’s the future.”
Mark Townsend, CEO of Reassured (pictured far left), maintained that for a lot of customers the process is really quite simple and this is where digital would be best.
“Automation for customers with straightforward needs enables us to spend much more time on those more complicated cases, whether that’s mental health data, inheritance tax planning or related to an SME business.
“That’s going to be the big benefit for all customers is more time to spend on the more complex cases because the simple cases cease to touch the sides.”