Taking inspiration from groundbreaking technologies like IoT and Big Data, Artificial Intelligence is profoundly shifting the insurance industry, and investments are at a peak for insurtech companies around the globe. In a recent report by Willis Towers Watson, since 2016, 36 percent more investment, or the equivalent of 2.3 Billion Dollars has been invested across 450 start-ups during the course of last year alone.
AI solutions in the insurance sector are becoming increasingly popular – and as a start-up or developer, it’s one of the most dynamic and promising business-areas to be active in right now.Insurers are dealing with snowballing amounts of highly variable documents, including forms, emails and invoices, claims and policy comparisons that are all processed manually.
With predictions for 2018 showing that insurance data will grow by 94%, 84% of which will be in unstructured documentation, new technology from insurtech startups is digitally transforming the process of the management and administration of large amounts of documentation. For example, technology brought to market by omni:us allows insurers to extract, review and analyse data from arbitrary documents featuring structured and unstructured data to a much higher and accurate level.
For insurers, there continues to be a prerequisite for people power for analysis and decision making. A number of insurers are seeing massive benefits from working with AI to reduce the time and cost spent on administrative tasks considerably and diminishing the countable risk of human error. Our solutions can read vast variations in document formats (emails, incident reports, invoices, etc.) even down to low quality scanned documents, faxes, and handwritten forms.
Game-changing AI technology in the market is ‘trained’ using millions of pages and constantly increases its intelligence through an ongoing feedback loop, making it a fully scalable solution. Like the solutions we offer at omni:us, digitizing and automating these tasks frees up resources in the workforce, improving allocation of staff resources through automation, giving companies the chance to create new added value role in areas not previously considered and ultimately save money.
As the competition in AI innovation continues to grow fiercer, it all about boils down to the technology. We’re seeing a steady stream of successful AI companies beginning to make their mark in the European market. For us at omni:us, we’re continuing to have a number of open conversations with insurers about how AI solutions can alter processes, portfolios and workforces. We’ve also closed promising deals with several key players in the insurance and banking sectors over the last year, and finance is another industry that is ripe for change and disruption with this technology.
Consumer needs have also dramatically changed in recent times. To better connect with their customers and discover the products and services that are required, financial services firms are having to design and develop fresh new strategies. In times to come, there’s no doubt that AI will empower more workforces, providing banks with a next-level insight into consumer trends and allow them to react and deliver appropriately with precise intelligence.
So, what should we expect when considering the future of AI? Inherently, there’s a continuing trend of investment in services from a number of global players. Countries like China are investing in a governmental capacity and we’re also seeing overwhelming demand from corporates, like Google and Facebook.
Europe on the whole, including Germany, is financially a little behind the overall global development, however the market is a hot bed of development and it won’t be long before we see European and German initiatives beginning to shift focus more. Looking at the wider picture across Europe, funding, people, infrastructure and ecosystems are key factors that all play a vital role too. The region is a breeding ground for some incredible talent, and it’s vital to highlight these critical resources in numerous leading research and educational institutions for future generations.
We’re entering an age where insurance and innovation go hand in hand, one size certainly will not fit all with AI, and that will be the case for the foreseeable. Although, there is of course a question mark above the thought that jobs and humans could be succeeded by machines, and the digital revolution might not create enough new vacancies to compensate for the diminished ones.
Transformation provides opportunity, including the creation of undiscovered roles in various sectors and redeploying people to higher value work. New innovations also expose the potential to improve people’s quality of work/life balance, reducing the number of hours spent at our desks and making working hours much more flexible. Concepts like working remotely or working on a freelance basis are constantly increasing, and by many of us also preferred. Retail, marketing and education are also sectors that are ripe for change with new AI technology, some of which is being developed faster than it can be implemented.
To explore the potential of this ground-breaking technology, omni:us and some of the most brilliant minds in tech are hosting the annual Machine Intelligence Summit on the 21 June 2018 in Berlin. The agenda includes speakers from companies like Google, Microsoft and Dropbox, as well as leading thinkers and academics.
Secure your spot today and register here