How will big data and AI optimise the insurance industry?

Whilst the insurance industry has been fairly slow at times to embrace all forms of technology, our sights are firmly set on realising the benefits of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise our industry. Ultimately, these new innovations can be used to assist our clients in making more informed decisions about their capital investments and their risk management strategies. To this end, we can all agree that one of the industry's biggest challenges is calculating risk factors and pricing insurance products, it's in this space that both AI and big data can make significant contributions.

In today's data driven world, it's all about big data, insurance companies need the very best data in order to optimise the risk perspective for both themselves and their clients. Turning data into knowledge however, is the limiting factor but it's here where AI can provide an elegant solution. The potential for AI is infinite, but for the insurance industry, AI can be used to not only collect the data we need, but also to analyse and interpret this data. For example, in the event of a total property loss, we can use drone technology, enhanced by AI, to overfly the site and provide the data needed to optimise a client's insurance claims. Taking this example one step further, the AI can be used to analyse this data, as well as other sources of relevant data, freeing up staff to work on other projects. Once analysed and presented to insurance specialists, these specialists will be able to make more informed risk perspective decisions. Another specific use of big data and AI technology for the insurance industry is preventing and identifying financial fraud. For example, we all recognise that online transactions have made credit card fraud much easier, however it's in this space that AI can instantaneously analyse massive amounts of customer and transactional data to quickly identify irregular credit card behaviours. This type of knowledge will help to optimise the industry's risk profile and optimise policies for our clients.

It's all about allocating the right people to the right jobs and giving them enough data to ask the right decisions, all of the legwork can be performed by drones and AI. This of course, begs the question about what to do about field workers who may be displaced because of drone technology? Whilst worker displacement is a critical issue that will need serious attention across all industries around the world, the use of big data and AI in the insurance industry will make our data driven processes much easier, faster and more accurate. To decide what type of insurance policies are suitable for your business talk to an insurance specialist today.