How Generative AI is Bridging the Gap in a Traditionally Human-Centric Insurance Industry
By Harish Rama Rao, Senior Vice President – Product Engineering, ACKO
Generative AI has captured massive attention and popularity worldwide by transforming business landscapes. As the primarily traditional insurance industry marches towards a transformative era, Gen AI is acting as a game-changer to make the businesses more customer-centric.
With a multi faceted advantage for all involved participants in the insurance industry, Gen AI aims to bring in better organizational efficiency by simulating natural conversations, automating services, better explainability, aiding decision-making and building trust, all similar to human interactions. To understand its transformative power, let’s delve into how Gen AI is reshaping the insurance landscape, from enhancing customer interactions to streamlining complex processes.
Demystifying Insurance with AI-Powered Clarity
In the traditional human-centric agent driven process, the agent can better explain the product, answer questions, go deep into areas of concerns from the customer, understand the current condition in the words and vocabulary of the customer, and help them make the right purchase decisions. Gen AI enables newer and better decision-making, for instance, policy benefit comparison across products. The AI system is capable of reading, analyzing, and comparing policy terms written in different formats and languages, even when those terms are organized with different information architectures. It can further create a meaningful semantic comparison and present structured outputs which insurance systems can then process and explain the benefits and challenges of different products hyper-personalized to the customer.
Guided Decision Making for Confident Choices
In the D2C world where the app and website are the front face to the customer, Gen AI agents have taken over the consulting role and are able to do this job well. This is because they have access to hundreds and thousands of data sources and can answer to the queries using the entire context. The purchase co-pilots with the Gen AI capabilities are able to move the purchase decisions from a set of pre-selected screen flows to a more natural conversation format, both with text and voice. With the recent capabilities of multimodal and multilingual voice and text, this conversational experience is deeply tailored to the comfort of the consumer.
Effortless Customer Service through AI Automation
The post-policy-purchase experience is the most critical part of the insurance experience. It could be policy servicing, renewals or claims to name some. The Gen AI agent systems are designed to understand complex servicing requirements, both in a conversational manner and also as a series of conditions that the customer expresses. The AI systems can then analyze the situation and generate solutions, and deliver steps to follow in different formats personalized to the user. For instance, a customer trying to add her aged parents to her existing policy will find the relevant set of documents to submit, examples of how they look, guide her into a health evaluation process, present the right set of benefit options explained in customized video generated by the AI systems ,and assist the servicing process.
Claims processing is the biggest beneficiary of the Gen AI systems with extreme automation possibilities on the entire document management process. All the steps of the claims, right from claim request authorization can be supported realtime, even when the system is handling hand written notes from the doctors.
Proactive Well-being with AI-Driven Preventive Care
Mature and forward looking insurance companies are focusing on preventive care that mutually benefits both the consumer, the organization, and the overall industry. Gen AI is creating new possibilities here with highly customized and curated nudging paths with generated multimodal content. Personalized video content, exercise routines, vehicle maintenance guides, gadget maintenance guides etc., generated under a large context that inputs personalized data, environment data, industry practices, best practices and using the common knowledge built across different social platforms and groups can be generated and pushed to the consumer at personalized lifecycle stages.
In conclusion, the adoption of generative AI is transforming the insurance industry by enhancing personalization, streamlining processes, and strengthening compliance and fraud detection. This technology empowers insurers to better understand customer needs, providing tailored solutions that improve overall experiences. By automating complex tasks and analyzing vast datasets, generative AI not only boosts operational efficiency but also proactively mitigates risks, ensuring a secure and reliable environment for customers.
As organizations increasingly adopt generative AI, many find themselves stalled in “pilot purgatory,” focusing more on technological experimentation than on tangible business outcomes. The deep understanding of building the right systems is not well established across the talent pool. There are few reference architectures and the landscape is constantly changing. There are few clear leaders in the public LLMs and multimodal is just starting to evolve, leaving the organizations to build in a slightly nebulous environment. Customer trust in Gen AI systems, especially in conversation systems, is slowly evolving and organizations still strive to reach the level of omni-channel support with the new tools.
Further, the industry would benefit from a larger movement to automation by reducing costs, increasing trust in systems across various vendors, and overall uplifting the consumer experience. As generative AI continues to evolve, it holds the potential to redefine the insurance landscape, creating a more responsive and ready customer-centric industry to meet the challenges of the future.
