Although AI has only existed for a few years, it has had a profound impact on businesses and industries across the globe, big or small, facilitating internal operations and increasing productivity levels in menial tasks. For example:
- AI-Powered Automation tools are being used by companies such as IBM and SAP to cut down invoice handling time by 75%, while cutting down on errors and improving compliance with financial policies, a stark contrast to manually sending thousands of invoices and causing delays and errors within the system.
- AI Chatbots are being deployed by NVIDA and ServiceNow to handle simple IT issues or escalate them intelligently, reducing ticket resolution times by 40%, improving employee satisfaction, and lowering IT workload.
- In order to save time from auditing and consulting processes, as well as culling inconsistencies in the system, PwC is utilizing AI-powered bots to automate these tasks and analyze financial reports, saving up to 100,000 hours annually and shifting employee focus to higher-value tasks.
From what can be seen here, it is clear that major companies across the globe are benefitting from using AI in order to streamline their internal operations, shifting focus from menial, low-level, repetitive tasks to higher-level critical tasks that require human attention and focus. However, we do not wish to focus too largely on the major corporations of this world, but rather small, local insurance companies. How do they benefit from utilizing AI?
Claims Processing
It can be easy to feel overwhelmed with claims as an insurance company, whether that is estimating the damage cost of a car, verifying treatment details to provide insurance for a hospital patient, or even having to put up with blatantly false claims that serve only to waste precious time and deplete a company’s efficiency and morale. With the usage of AI, these problems can be relieved and made significantly less time-consuming than ever before. For instance:
- AI can very easily scan and extract data from medical bills, police reports, receipts, and claim forms, and at a much faster rate than any human manually entering all of the info manually. This allows for insurance companies to shift focus away from having to read through complex, wordy documents that swallow up precious time, while mitigating potential errors during reading that could end up creating faulty claims that only serve to waste the customer’s time.
- Along with that, AI can also speed up claims processing in general by analyzing and linking up claims with coverage rules, ensuring that any potential claims that violate coverage rules could be flagged and reviewed without having to spend time meticulously analyzing the coverage rules to ensure the claim doesn’t violate anything. The AI can also check for any missing information and route the claims to the correct departments, ensuring a more productive workflow and less human error overall.
- AI can also be trained to recognize any unusual patterns or purposeful violations in claim data, whether that is attempting to put the same type of claim, such as an injury or accident claim under different names, or attempting to send twelve different claims for something like windshield repairs, but the company only supports up to eight sessions per year. The AI, once having detected the fraudulent claim, can then flag the claim for human review, which allows for much easier fraud detection and subsequent removal, which can not only save the insurance company time but also precious money.
Automated Customer Support
However, claims are not the only thing that can completely flood an insurance company; insurance companies also have to put up with customer questions, complaints, requests, et cetera, which typically require workers to diverge time from handling other factors of their company to spend time addressing these specific questions. However, AI can put these questions to rest, and much more easily than a human possibly could. For instance, AI can handle conversations 24/7, whether it is on weekends, holidays, or that random query at midnight, easily answering common questions that customers may have, as well as helping them to fill out claim forms simply by chatting with the bot, lowering frustration, and reducing errors in the forms themselves. AI also has the ability to send claim status updates and reminders to their clients without having to develop a large support team to solve these simple issues, allowing insurance companies to focus their time away from answering the common and repetitive question and instead, on the critical issues plaguing the company itself.
Risk Assessments
In addition to automated customer support and claims processing, AI can also be used for more dire scenarios; more specifically, they can be use to not only assess, but also potentially calculate risks in order to take action far more quickly and also at a much greater scale than what was previously possible, whether that is lifestyle data, telematics, weather patterns, health indicators, or medical histories, which can allow for the AI to detect potential increased risks far before a human could even consider that there is a risk in the first place. Along with that, the AI can also group people together based on these specific patterns, which can allow insurance companies to market more personalized plans for their customers, allowing them to reach out and connect with a larger, more diverse customer base.
Also, based on social patterns and behaviors, as well as additional data on their customers, AI can also forecast what kinds of claims will be easier to resolve, and which ones are likely to either be delayed or escalate into disputes, allowing insurance companies to take action rather quickly while allowing them to plan and dedicate resources before the claims even come to pass, which can save a lot of frustration and time, especially when a company knows exactly what is going to happen and how exactly to approach the issue at hand.
Conclusion
AI has an extremely bright future in the insurance industry, but it is up to the companies themselves to apply AI ethically and responsibly into their industries, especially when other companies across the globe are already applying this technology and reaping it’s benefits. Not only is it necessary for companies to constantly keep up with modern technology to stay in business against their competitors, but AI as a whole can prove to be an essential and revolutionary tool that can massively improve and streamline the internal operations of any company across the globe.
